I do not believe in the immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern without any superhuman authority behind it.

Observe how many people evade, rationalize and drive their minds into a state of blind stupor, in dread of discovering that those they deal with- their “loved ones” or friends or business associates or political...

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

You’re trying to be tricky. What’s morality?””It’s the difference between what’s right and what you can rationalize.””Must be a human thing.””Exactly.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

There was very little that wasn’t on the table to get their vote, … It’s wrong. It’s called ethics. Votes were for sale… It muddies the name of the Olympics.

The difficulty was not that of following a moral principle at personal cost; the difficulty was that of knowing what to do when there is more than one principal, and when the principles clash.

This is the first time I have heard ‘ethics’ in the mouth of a man. You and I are the only men on this ship that know its meaning. At one time in my life,...

Perhaps, indeed, there are no truly universal ethics: or to put it more precisely, the ways in which ethical principles are interpreted will inevitably differ across cultures and eras. Yet, these differences arise chiefly at...

Leadership responsibility is multidimensional and cannot be described in one or two words. It is personal, interpersonal, environmental and societal.

No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when...

Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.

I cannot kill someone, he thought.

What was it about us, as humans, that drove us to make apologies for beautiful things?

…sa vie modeste est une maitrise et non une privation

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham....

I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as...

At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different,...

Ethics is nothing other than reverence for life because God is within every other human being you come in contact with either physically, or emotionally. Living with reverence for life is attuning goodliness, which is...

There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories....

Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

Power and influence: things that should be obtained not for means of greed, nor pride, nor ego, but rather to ensure that in the right moment, when your wisdom and benevolence are required to keep...

A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual. This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the...

Right and wrong applies to internet interaction. It’s #Netiquette.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

Right isn’t always legal.

The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics.

I did dream of it, chiefly because ‘all things are lawful.’ That was quite right what you taught me, for you talked a lot to me about that. For if there’s no everlasting God, there’s...

The day may come when the rest of animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have already discovered that the...

Science, as long as it limits itself to the descriptive study of the laws of nature, has no moral or ethical quality and this applies to the physical as well as the biological sciences.

We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is...

It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men’s badness, which is impossible.

By acquiescing in an act that causes such suffering to a living creature, who among us is not diminished?

My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal

What we do in every other area of our lives (other than religion), is, rather than respect somebody’s beliefs, we evaluate their reasons.

If you want to know where you would have stood on slavery before the Civil War, don’t look at where you stand on slavery today. Look at where you stand on animal rights.

The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes...

Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life...

What separates people who made their dreams come true is not setting goals to achieve a life the way they expect it to be, but how they expect to be, in order to achieve it.

Atheism is a way of humility. It’s to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human.

The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced...

Just because I do not accept the teachings of the devotaries does not mean I’ve discarded a belief in right and wrong.””But the Almighty determines what is right!””Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is...

By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a...

Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its...

… primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice – as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history –...

What’s the point of being the first to arrive? Nobody is there to witness your commitment.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

I should say that there ought to be no war except religious war. If war is irreligious, it is immoral. No man ought ever to fight at all unless he is prepared to put his...

An ethics of desire is good news for those of us who have become allergic to an ethics of law.

Disgust is so reassuring; it feels like a moral proof.