Ethical Thinking Quotes

Guided by nothing but pop culture values, many children no longer learn how to think about morality and virtue, or to think of them at all. They grow up with no shared moral framework, believing that the highest values are diversity, tolerance and non-judgmentalism.

We do wrong willfully when we fail to think hard about whether what we're doing is right.

It is in the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions.

Man is clearly made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. And the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our Author and our end.

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of politicaldiscourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.... These were therequirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.

The Ten Commandments don't tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

Trying to get somebody excited about learning and trying to get somebody to think in a moral context have begun to have a lot more significance to me.

People know, or dimly feel, that if thinking is not kept pure and keen, and if respect for the world of mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer's slide rule and the computations of banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue.

The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.

The sin is in our thoughts.

I think, when people hear the word 'philosophy,' they think of Plato and a bunch of people sitting around in their robes pontificating about life and how it should be. But really, somebody who is an active philosopher should not only be thinking of these things but putting them into practice.

We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.

An honest man nearly always thinks justly.

To be moral involves taking a position towards that matrix, thinking critically about what is taken for granted.

Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.

It should be apparent that the belief in objectivity in journalism, as in other professions, is not just a claim about what kind of knowledge is reliable. It is also a moral philosophy, a declaration of what kind of thinking one should engage in, in making moral decisions. It is, moreover, a political commitment, for it provides a guide to what groups one should acknowledge as relevant audiences for judging one's own thoughts and acts.