Hyman Rickover Quotes

The time has come to formulate guidelines for the ethical conduct of scientist, perhaps in the form of a voluntary Hippocratic Oath.

Ethics is not a job that anyone turns to naturally, but every public agency has to have it.

A profession is a body of men who voluntarily measure their work by a higher standard than their clients demand. To be professionally acceptable, a policy must be sound as well as salable. Wildlife administration, in this respect, is not yet a profession.

I don't want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living.

A license to practice law is not a license to violate it.

While some of them acknowledge the obligation of natural morality in their mode of conducting their cases, and preserve their individual character as gentlemen, there are others who acknowledge no law, human or divine, but the law of Scotland.

We're trying to make sure that financial advisers act like lawyers and doctors. When you go to a lawyer or doctor, they have an obligation to put your best interests first. Financial advisers don't.

There can be no compromise on moral principles.

Since when do grown men and women, who presume to hold high government office and exercise what they think of as "moral leadership," require ethics officers to tell them whether it is or isn't permissible to grab the secretary's behind or redirect public funds to their own personal advantage?

Ethics may be defined as the obligations of morality.

A man's got to have a code, a creed to live by, no matter his job.

Moral result can only be produced by moral restraints.

Tis certain that Morality is an indispensable Requisite of true Religion, and there can be none without it. But it would become the Pride and Ignorance of Pagans only, to magnify it, as the Whole of what is necessary.

Know that morality is a curb, not a spur.

The duty of man is not a wilderness of turnpike gates, through which he is to pass by tickets from one to the other. It is plain and simple, and consists but of two points--his duty God, which every man must feel; and, with respect to his neighbor, to do as he would be done by.

It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

We have our values from the church, the temple, the mosque. Do not rob, do not murder. But our behaviour changes the minute we go into the corporate place. Suddenly all of this is irrelevant.

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

Justice is the idea of God, the ideal of man, the rule of conduct writ in the nature of mankind.

In a profession, members are only partly guided by service to the public.

World hinges on moral foundations. God has made it so! God has made the universe to be based on a moral law. So long as man disobeys it he is revolting against God. That’s what we need in the world today - people who will stand for right and goodness.

It's because even a good man can't always be right, that we need ... rules.

A new danger now beset him [Grotius], the danger of becoming simply a venal pleader, a creature who grinds out arguments on this or that side, for this or that client: a mere legal beast of prey. Fortunately for himself and for the world he took a higher view of his life-work: his determination clearly was to make himself a thoroughly equipped jurist, and then, as he rose more and more in his profession, to use his powers for the good of his country and of mankind.

The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God fearing Christian men among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than 2 millions.

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade?