Social Ethics Quotes

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies.

The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families.

The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage. That is a commonplace truth, but one to which my studies are always bringing me back. It is the central point in my conception. I see it at the end of all my reflections.

The moral test of a society is how that society treats those who are in the dawn of life: the children; ... the elderly.

Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.

Religion without morality is a superstition and a curse, and morality without religion is impossible.

The technologies that raise the fewest ethical problems are those that work on a human scale, brightening the lives of individual people.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.

We need to challenge the dominant culture: by ethics, principles and values.

American life is builded ... upon that fundamental philosophy announced by the Savior nineteen centuries ago ... [It] can not survive with the defense of Cain, "Am I my brother's keeper?

A people and their religion must be judged by social standards based on social ethics. No other standard would have any meaning if religion is held to be necessary good for the well-being of the people.

Instead of a bottom-line based on money and power, we need a new bottom-line that defines productivity and creativity as where corporations, governments, schools, public institutions, and social practices are judged as efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent they maximize money and power, but to the extent they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and our capacities to respond with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

The modern period adds social ethics to religions agenda, for we now realize that social structures are not like laws of nature. They are human creations, so we are responsible for them.

There is absolutely no single aspect of one's personality that is more important to develop than empathy, which is not a skill at which men typically are asked to excel. I believe empathy is not only the core of art, literature and music, but should also be at the core of society, from ethics to economics.

I think vegetarianism is a crucial ethical choice for an individual and a society.

One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality.

Humans, the supremely social mammals, are ethical and intellectual sponges. We unconsciously absorb, for good or ill, the influences that surround us.

The latter-day robber barons are discovering that better conditions and rewards for workers pay off in a world where consumers increasingly demand ethical standards.

Prior to the advent of the civilization of the Third Estate (mercantilism, capitalism), the social ethics that was religiously sanctioned in the West consisted in realizing one’s being and in achieving one’s own perfection within the fixed parameters that one’s individual nature and the group to which one belonged clearly defined. Economic activity, work, and profit were justified only in the measure in which they were necessary for sustenance and to ensure the dignity of an existence conformed to one’s own estate, without the lower instinct of self-interest or profit coming first.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Cruelty might be very human and very cultural, but it is not acceptable and it is not an option.

I care not for the theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic of your moral code, I care not for the hoary respectability and traditional mysticisms of your theological institutions, I care not for the beauty and solemnity of your rituals and religious ceremonies, I care not even for the reasonableness and unimpeachable fairness of your social ethics,--if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer, men and women,--if it does not add to the world's stock of valuable souls,--if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men--I will have none of it.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

We are learning that a standard of social ethics is not attained by travelling a sequestered byway, but by mixing on the thronged and common road where all must turn out for one another, and at least see the size of one another's burdens.