Ethics Quotes - page 20
There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules. There is but one moral code that the absurd man can accept, the one that is not separated from God: the one that is dictated. But it so happens that he lives outside that God. As for the others (I mean also immoralism), the absurd man sees nothing in them but justifications and he has nothing to justify. I start out here from the principle of his innocence.
That innocence is to be feared. "Everything is permitted," exclaims Ivan Karamazov. That, too, smacks of the absurd. But on condition that it not be taken in a vulgar sense. I don't know whether or not it has been sufficiently pointed out that it is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgment of a fact.
Albert Camus
[16 October 18951: it is my fortune to have been born and to a large extent brought up among those whom white men call `heathen'; and while I recognise the paramount duty of every white man to follow the teachings of his creed and conscience as `a debtor to do the whole law,' it seems to me cruel that white men, whose governments are armed with the most murderous weapons known to science, should amaze and confound their fellow creatures with a doctrine of salvation imperfectly understood by themselves and a code of ethics foreign to the climate and instincts of those races whose most cherished customs they outrage and whose gods they insult.
Rudyard Kipling
More is given to us than to any people at any time before; and, therefore, more is required of us. We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Falling these, civilization must pass into destruction. It cannot be maintained on the ethics of savagery. For civilization knits men more and more closely together, and constantly tends to subordinate the individual to the whole, and to make more and more important social conditions.
Henry George
He [Spinoza] believes in authority. And, of course, he believed in freedom of thought and expression, whereas Hobbes does not. There is a book on Spinoza written by an American ex-Marxist, called Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism, on these lines. But Spinoza is not a theorist in whom I am particularly interested, because he is too rationalistic for me. But the Ethics is a wonderful book, and full of deep insights and noble feeling. It is totally unhistorical: the idea of timeless truths about human beings seems suspect to me.
Baruch Spinoza
He denied personal immortality, and worshiped reason alone. He appears to have had no sexual life, existed austerely, and sensibly allowed his most important writings, including the "Ethics," only a posthumous publication. As a teacher of reality, he practiced his own wisdom, and was surely one of the most exemplary human beings ever to have lived. He troubles me most by his extraordinary autonomy, all but unique in that Jewish history of which he did not desire to be a participant, in any way whatsoever.
Baruch Spinoza
...Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates. He is therefore the prince of philosophers. Perhaps he is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere. In the last book of the Ethics he produced the movement of the infinite and gave infinite speeds to thought in the third kind of knowledge. There he attains incredible speeds, with such lightning compressions that one can only speak of music, of tornadoes, of wind and strings. He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence. He fulfilled philosophy because he satisfied its prephilosophical presupposition. [...] Spinoza is the vertigo of immanence from which so many philosophers try in vain to escape. Will we ever be mature enough for a Spinozist inspiration?
Baruch Spinoza
...For the present it would be a vain undertaking to try to make all these people understand this frank principle of communist ethics, a principle which declares that gratitude and admiration should come as a spontaneous gift from our fellow-beings. Many of them would not care to reach out for progress, were they sure of being told, in the words of Baruch Spinoza, that virtue is its own reward.
Baruch Spinoza
He [Nicolas Malebranche] cannot give up the principles which the Catholic Church imposes on him. He carries forward that process of rationalisation in Christian ethics which Descartes began, and which, like the attempt to restore an older theology, finds its fulfilment in Spinoza. It is Spinoza who is the first to create a wholly metaphysical ethics, free from all trace of its theological origin. Spinoza thus completes for continental ethics the separation between morality and religion which English empiricism, in spite of many relapses, had effected under the leadership of Bacon.
Baruch Spinoza
As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term 'democracy', as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you dislike-it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.
T. S. Eliot
Max Beer, in his History of British Socialism, points out that Bacon looked for the happiness of mankind chiefly in the application of science and industry. But by now it is plain that if this alone were sufficient, we could all live in heaven tomorrow. Beer points out that More, on the other hand, looked to social reform and religious ethics to transform society; and it is equally plain that if the souls of men could be transformed without altering their material and institutional activities, Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Buddhism might have created an earthly paradise almost any time this last two thousand years. The truth is, as Beer sees, that these two conceptions are still at war with each other: idealism and science continue to function in separate compartments; and yet "the happiness of man on earth" depends upon their combination.
Lewis Mumford
It is sublime as night and a breathless ocean. It contains every religious sentiment, all the grand ethics, which visit in turn each noble poetic mind .... It is of no use to put away the book if! trust myself in the woods or in a boat upon the pond. Nature makes a Brahmin of me presently: eternal compensation, unfathomable power, unbroken silence .... This is her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and purity and absolute abandonment - these panaceas expiate all sin and bring you to the beatitude of the Eight Gods.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The restoration of our world-view can come only as a result of inexorably truth-loving and recklessly courageous thought. Such thinking alone is mature enough to learn by experience how the rational, when it thinks itself out to a conclusion, passes necessarily over into the non-rational. World- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational. They are not justified by any corresponding knowledge of the nature of the world, but are the disposition in which, through the inner compulsion of our will-to-live, we determine our relation to the world.
What the activity of this disposition of ours means in the evolution of the world, we do not know. Nor can we regulate this activity from outside; we must leave entirely to each individual its shaping and its extension. From every point of view, then, world- and life-affirmation and ethics are non-rational, and we must have the courage to admit it.
Albert Schweitzer
I hope that our discussion of meaning-making and ethics-making has made it clear why we must stand firm in disputing god-talk: god-talk is at once a betrayal of our common humanity and a barrier to both meaning and ethics. That is not to say that you rise up in arms when you are visiting your parents' home for dinner and grace is said or that you leap into the fray every time you hear some piety uttered. No one has the time or the energy for such vigilance, and no one wants to become a pariah. But you do need to pick some fights and then fight them. If you are upholding values such as justice, reason, fairness, equity, and decency-if these inform the meaning and the ethics that you make-then you are obliged to stand up to god-talk at least occasionally.
Eric Maisel
As a guide to engineering ethics, I should like to commend to you a liberal adaptation of the injunction contained in the oath of Hippocrates that the professional man do nothing that will harm his client. Since engineering is a profession which affects the material basis of everyone's life, there is almost always an unconsulted third party involved in any contact between the engineer and those who employ him - and that is the country, the people as a whole. These, too, are the engineer's clients, albeit involuntarily. Engineering ethics ought therefore to safeguard their interests most carefully. Knowing more about the public effects his work will have, the engineer ought to consider himself an "officer of the court” and keep the general interest always in mind.
Hyman G. Rickover
"My father was – well he had a work ethic and a half. Contrary to popular stereotypes, most Latinos I knew growing up had very strong work ethics. He was also a very kindly man, and...gentle, very soft-spoken. And I think to a certain extent, very shy. And I think I inherited that from him, which has made the fact that I have to get out every now and then, and actually be somebody in front of people without getting terrible stage fright, which I used to get all the time. You know it took me a long time to get over that hump.
Oscar Hijuelos
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in vain. Cowardice doesn't pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.
Simone de Beauvoir
Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes. ... All this talk about me standing aside, cutting myself off and so forth, has always amazed me... I've stated, firmly and clearly, that though as an artist I'm not politically involved, I obviously am an expression of the society I live in. Anything else would be grotesque. But I don't make propaganda for either one attitude or the other. No. As I told you, I vote for the Social Democrats. Their way of solving social problems comes closest to what I regard as decent. That I also find their actual solutions odd in many ways is another matter...
Ingmar Bergman
I believe that the Incarnation makes possible a surprising and entirely new flowering of love and knowledge. For Christians the Biblical God can now be loved in the flesh. Before I was limited by the people into which I was born and the family in which I was raised. Now I can choose whom I will love and where I will love. And this deeply threatens the traditional basis of ethics, which was always an ethnos, an historically given "we” which proceeds any pronunciation of the world "I”.
Ivan Illich
Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
Richard Nixon
