Charles William Eliot Quotes

Right and wrong as moral principles do not change. They are applicable and reliable determinants whether the situations with which we deal are simple or complicated. There is always a right and wrong to every question which requires our solution.

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

Hence the sterile, uninspiring futility of a great many theoretical discussions of ethics, and the resentment which many people feel towards such discussions: moral principles remain in their minds as floating abstractions, offering them a goal they cannot grasp and demanding that they reshape their souls in its image, thus leaving them with a burden of undefinable moral guilt.

Every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

You can't slice up morals.

What is morality, she asked. Judgement to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.

Right and truth are greater than any power, and all power is limited by right.

There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.

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

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

It's more important to do the right thing than to do things right.

I do not permit affection or lack thereof to influence my actions. There is good, and there is evil. The good must be protected, the evil eradicated. I have shown you the triumph of evil as a caution.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another's keeping.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

There can be no compromise on moral principles.

Freedom that ignores the transcendent difference between good and evil ends in the denial of freedom itself.

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

Right and wrong are not the product of census.