Ethical Limits Quotes

Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?

A man may not transgress the bounds of major morals, but may make errors in minor morals.

My parents always told me that if you want something, you can do whatever you have to do to get it. As long as it's not against someone else.

Man has no right to claim the role of the creator of his likes or to choose their genetic prototypes, thus determining their personal characteristics .

I think it's a completely good thing to want to do business, to want to make money and be a success in the marketplace, to get the attention of customers. I'm not in the business of pointing fingers or blaming companies, but there is a limit to everything.

To be perfectly candid, we're better at stealing other people's secrets than anyone else in the world. But we self-limit. We steal secrets to keep our citizens free and safe.

A man who stops at nothing short of the law is very clever indeed!

Even for the world's only superpower, the ends don't always justify the means.

As a Christian, but also as a scientist responsible for overseeing the Human Genome Project, one of my concerns has been the limits on applications of our understanding of the genome. Should there be limits? I think there should. I think the public has expressed their concern about ways this information might be misused.

Your success stops where your character stops. You can never rise above the limitations of your character.

Essentially pursuit of happiness is saying, everything's allowed until we come down on it.

Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and to look upward to the celestial crown above them.... If they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing but muck their power of usefulness is gone.

When you're writing non-fiction, you go as far as you can go, and then ethically you have to stop. You can't go. You can't suppose. You can't imagine. And I think there's something in human nature that wants to finish the story.

People know there is a difference between what you do and what you accept. There is a difference between me knowing that people swear, me hearing people swear and me swearing, and everyone accepting that this is something you can do as much as you like.

The constant assumption runs throughout the law that the natural and spontaneous evolutions of habit fix the limits of right and wrong.

Virtue has needs of limits.

Sometimes there are actions that we are forced to take, but there need to be boundaries beyond which we are going to recognize that we're not going to go because we still are Americans, and we are supposed to be representing something to people in this country and overseas.

There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.

You have to help another person. But it's not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you're doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you're right and your motives are good isn't enough.

...ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and poverty of their lot.

Frustration filled his features. "Rose I've done a lot of bad things, most of which I can never fix or find redemption for. My only choice now, if I want to reclaim my life, is to go forward, stopping evil and doing what's right. And what is NOT right is taking a woman from another man, a man I like and respect. I'll steal cars. I'll break into houses. But there are lines I WILL not cross, no matter what I—

We must remember that judicial nominees are constrained in what they may discuss and how they may discuss it.

The power to destroy the world by the use of nuclear weapons is a power that cannot be used - we cannot accept the idea of such monstrous immorality.

There's some things that no amount of money can get me to do.

You follow what you think is right. There are lines that I won't cross.