ethical response Quotes

To be angry is very good. It burns out things and leaves nutrients in the soil. You should always be ready to be angry at injustice and cruelty.

So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. . . . When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own.

How shall Integrity face Oppression? What shall Honesty do in the face of Deception, Decency in the face of Insult, Self-Defense before Blows? How shall Desert and Accomplishment meet Despising, Detraction, and Lies? What shall Virtue do to meet Brute Force? There are so many answers and so contradictory; and such differences for those on the one hand who meet questions similar to this once a year or once a decade, and those who face them hourly and daily.

The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer.

The opponent strikes you on your cheek, and you strike him on the heart by your amazing spiritual audacity in turning the other cheek. You wrest the offensive from him by refusing to take his weapons, by keeping your own, and by striking him in his conscience from a higher level. He hits you physically, and you hit him spiritually.

Does everybody have their WWJD bracelets on? 'Cause I was wearing my bracelet recently, and I was in the movie theater, and this guy's cell phone went off - don't you just hate that? Then he picked it up, 'Hey, how's it going? I'm in a movie.' And I'm like, 'Hey! Get off the phone!' And he's like, 'Mind your own business.' And I almost went crazy, but then I looked at my bracelet: what would Jesus do? So I lit him on fire and sent him to Hell.

Human affairs inspire in noble hearts only two feelings-admiration or pity.

To answer brutality with brutality is to admit one's moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

I know there is moral outage in regard to Mr. Milosevic, and that is certainly justified. But what about our response?

Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love.

I think if I were dying and I heard of an act of injustice, it would start me up to a moment's life again.

The noblest kind of retribution is not to become like your enemy.

'Tis more noble to forgive, and more manly to despise, than to revenge an Injury.

You cannot be naïve about evil. You cannot be naïve to the reality that there are human beings and human situations which have totally identified with the dark side of reality. They are malicious. Realism teaches you to put up appropriate boundaries so that people can't do any more evil than possible. But that doesn't mean you do evil back to them.

I wanted to be the reasonable voice of revenge for what I'd seen [my father] life come to.

When struck on one cheek to turn the other, is really joining a conspiracy to secure the triumph of brutality. To agree not to resist evil is to become an accomplice of all injustice.

The right way to requite evil, according to Jesus, is not to resist it. This saying of Christ removes the Church from the sphere of politics and law.

There is within us a moral instinct which forbids us to rejoice at the death of even an enemy.

If someone does me injury I must desire that this injury shall not degrade me. I must desire this out of love for him who inflicts it, in order that he may not really have done evil.

To know the good is to react against the bad. Indifference is the mark of deprivation.

A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.