Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics. Each is indispensable to civilization. Without law, we should be at the mercy of the least scrupulous; without ethics, law could not exist.

In just about every area of society, there's nothing more important than ethics.

Good morals lead to good laws.

The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice.

The headquarters of good principles.

Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.

Win or lose, do it fairly.

Moral authority comes from following universal and timeless principles like honesty, integrity, treating people with respect.

So I think ethics is the broader thing that's less focused on prohibitions and is more perhaps looking at principles and questions and ideas about how to live your life.

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.

Nothing is politically right which is morally wrong.

To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.

Therefore the great mediator of any community is human morality.

All virtue is summed up by just dealing.

Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offence.

All Americans want our government to have a moral compass.

I am a just man.

I want to place morality, honesty and ethics at the center of my government's preoccupations, of its councilors or all the principality's decisions.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

It's obvious you shouldn't steal, kill or be cruel.

There is no real excellence in all of this world which can be separated from right living.

Observe decorum, and it will open a path to morality.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.