Virtue Ethics Quotes

“Life will question you in its vital moments. It's up to you in how you'll respond. You might have drifted from the principles that you once followed. You could've indulged in vices or fallen into unthinking habits. It's your choice to start your practice again. Remind yourself of what's valuable and then act. You still have a choice to be brave, temperate, and wise.”
― Bremer Acosta, Stoic Practice

“Treachery, disloyalty, cruelty, tyranny ... are our ordinary vices. - Montaigne, "Of Cannibals”
― Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices

“Perhaps the extent of divinely sanctioned cruelty made it impossible to think of human cruelty as a distinct and unmitigated evil. Certainly those Christians who came to doubt the literal accounts of physical torment in hell also worried about the cruelty and vindictiveness ascribed to God. By the eighteenth century these were very common concerns, especially in England, where secular humanitarianism had begun its extraordinary career. It was never to be without its enemies. Religious rigor, the theory of the survival of the fittest, revolutionary radicalism, military atavism, masculine athleticism, and other causes hostile to humanitarianism never abated. Nevertheless, taking cruelty seriously became and remained an important part of Europe's accepted morality, even in the midst of unlimited massacres. Putting cruelty first is, however, a matter very different from mere humanness. To hate cruelty more than any other evil involves a radical rejection of both religious and political conventions. It dooms one to a life of skepticism, indecision, disgust, and often misanthropy. Putting cruelty first has therefore been tried only rarely, and it is not often discussed. It is too deep a threat to reason for most philosophers to contemplate it at all.”
― Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices

“There is no practical rationality then without the virtues of character. The vicious argue unsoundly from false premises about the good, while the akratic ignores the sound arguments available to him. Only the virtuous are able to argue soundly to those conclusions which are their actions […]”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“Valor and virtue can’t be bound by no graveyard.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“To be a good speaker, you need to be a good thinker. To be a good thinker, you need to be a good human being. And to be a good human being, you need to love the truth and the world more than you love your sorry self.”
― Neel Burton, How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero