Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

Money, not morality, is the principle commerce of civilized nations.

We will burn that bridge when we come to it.

It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.

One thing I have learned in my painful career as a gambler is that bragging when you get lucky and win a few games will plunge you into gloom and unacceptable beatings very soon. It happens every time.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

An overflow of good converts to bad.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Sometimes there are no good guys. There are no bad guys. It seems like everybody is in the middle.

States are not moral agents.

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

As a single withered tree, if set aflame, causes a whole forest to burn, so does a rascal son destroy a whole family.

Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Treat those who are good with goodness, and also treat those who are not good with goodness. Thus goodness is attained. Be honest to those who are honest, and be also honest to those who are not honest. Thus honesty is attained.

It’s that wonderful old-fashioned idea that others come first and you come second. This was the whole ethic by which I was brought up. Others matter more than you do, so ‚don’t fuss, dear; get on with it.‘

The difference is too nice – Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

It’s not that every single thing that happens on Facebook is gonna be good. This is humanity. People use tools for good and bad, but I think that we have a clear responsibility to make sure that the good is amplified and to do everything we can to mitigate the bad.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

The ‚morality of compromise‘ sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don’t compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it’s also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.

The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul.

Patience is a virtue, and I’m learning patience. It’s a tough lesson.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

How could man rejoice in victory and delight in the slaughter of men?

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. Yet his shadow still looms. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.

Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

In my view, the only thing worse than a rock star is a rock star with a conscience.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Younger scientists are extremely sensitive to the moral implications of all they do.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

Well, I’ll put it this way: you can certainly say belief in God makes people behave worse. That can be proved beyond a doubt.

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

The first step in a person’s salvation is knowledge of their sin.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Fear is the mother of morality.

He incurs a fearful amount of guilt who in the least promotes the aim of the Evil One by trampling upon a tender conscience in a child.

I suppose that’s one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

I always invest my own money in the companies that I create. I don’t believe in the whole thing of just using other people’s money. I don’t think that’s right. I’m not going to ask other people to invest in something if I’m not prepared to do so myself.

Many religious confessions share common values. They teach that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.