Ethical Awareness Quotes

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.

He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.

The Superior Man is aware of Righteousness, the inferior man is aware of advantage.

… knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul

The larger picture is really to swing people's awareness of what really is moral.

I'd forgotten it's an important thing to give thought to your morality and how you intend to live your life.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

Under the discipline of unity, knowledge and morality come together. No longer can we have that paltry 'objective' knowledge so prized by the academic specialists. To know anything at all becomes a moral predicament. Aware that there is no such thing as a specialized effect, one becomes responsible for judgments as well as facts. Aware that as an agricultural scientist he had 'one great subject,' Sir Albert Howard could no longer ask, What can I do with what I know? without at the same time asking, How can I be responsible for what I know?

The media doesn't need a conscience; people need consciences.

You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. Good people know about both bad and evil; bad people do not know about either.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.

Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.

I feel like young people, more than anyone in the country, always have their moral compass on perfectly straight.

The quiet conscience is the invention of the devil. No one of us may permit any preventable pain to be inflicted even though the responsibility for that pain is not ours. No one may shut his eyes and think that the pain which is therefore not visible, is non-existent.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

In dictatorships you need courage to fight evil; in the free world you need courage to see evil.

We should not permit tolerance to degenerate into indifference.

Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.

You are not born corrupt. We want to change that mind-set of the people.

I am very far from practicing what I understand.

Cruelty to men and to the lower animals as well, which would have passed unnoticed a century ago, now shocks the sensibilities and is regarded as wicked and degrading.

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.

There are people who can look out for other human beings; there are people who can speak up when something is not right and say, 'This is wrong, and something should be done.'

One should stick by one's soul, and by nothing else. In one's soul, one knows the truth from the untruth, and life from death. And if one betrays one's own soul-knowledge one is the worst of traitors.

I certainly know the difference between right and wrong.