John Dos Passos Quotes

It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual.

At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.

Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics - a rational ethics - as a precondition of rebirth.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

Both state and church have as their object actions as well as convictions, the former insofar as they are based on the relations between man and nature, the latter insofar as they are based on the relations between nature and God.

Most people, 95% of people, are good people. It's the 5% who get seduced by power.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

It didn't occur to me to go into something that didn't have an ethical return for me.

I think ethics is always there; it's not always a very thoughtful or reflective ethics.

If you deny that any principles of conduct at all are common to and admitted by all men who try to behave reasonably - well, I don't see how you can have any ethics or any ethical background for law.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

Conventionality is not morality.

There are people that really live by doing the right thing, but I don't know what that is, I'm really curious about that. I'm really curious about what people think they're doing when they're doing something evil, casually. I think it's really interesting, that we benefit from suffering so much, and we excuse ourselves from it.

Convinced as I am and as I am from my government that the world needs a new moral architecture over all I believe that this should be the first topic to debate in our world of today, ethics, moral.

I like to see the difference between good and evil as kind of like the foul line at a baseball game. It's very thin, it's made of something very flimsy like lime, and if you cross it, it really starts to blur where fair becomes foul and foul becomes fair.

The ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility are not opposites. They are complementary to one another.

You must legislate morality.

We are now facing a problem more of ethics than of physics.

It's easy to get into the grey zone [of ethics].

One cannot but regret the deliberate absence of every transcendental moral reference in governing the so-called developed society.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel.

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm tossed human vessel. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endangers its cargo.

One's concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one's personal interest in the issue ... Any effective means is automatically judged by the opposition as being unethical.