Ethics Quotes

“Political action means taking on responsibility. This cannot happen without power. Power is to serve responsibility.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“What is worse than doing evil, is being evil” (Ethics, p.67). To lie is wrong, but what is worse than the lie is the liar, for the liar contaminates everything he says, because everything he says is meant to further a cause that is false. The liar as liar has endorsed a world of falsehood and deception, and to focus only on the truth or falsity of his particular statements is to miss the danger of being caught up in his twisted world. This is why, as Bonhoeffer says, that “(i)t is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie” (Ethics, p.67).”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The task of pastoral ministry, above all else, is to arrange contingencies for an encounter with the divine.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Do and dare what is right, not swayed by the whim of the moment. Bravely take hold of the real, not dallying now with what might be. Not in the flight of ideas but only in action is freedom. Make up your mind and come out into the tempest of living. God’s command is enough and your faith in him to sustain you. Then at last freedom will welcome your spirit amid great rejoicing.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Those who wish even to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand-from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: 'How can I be good?' and 'How can I do something good?' Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: 'What is the will of God?”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The figure of the crucified invalidates all thought which takes success for its standard.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“It is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“A father acts on behalf of his children by working, providing, intervening, struggling, and suffering for them. In so doing, he really stands in their place. He is not an isolated individual, but incorporates the selves of several people in his own self. Every attempt to live as if he were alone is a denial of the fact that he is actually responsible. He cannot escape the responsibility, which is his because he is a father. This reality refutes the fictitious notion that the isolated individual is the agent of all ethical behavior. It is not the isolated individual but the responsible person who is the proper agent to be considered in ethical reflection.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Just as God's love entered the world, thereby submitting to the misunderstanding and ambiguity that characterize everything worldly, so also Christian love does not exist anywhere but in the worldly, in an infinite variety of concrete worldly action, and subject to misunderstanding and condemnation. Every attempt to portray a Christianity of 'pure' love purged of worldly 'impurities' is a false purism and perfectionism that scorns God's becoming human and falls prey to the fate of all ideologies. God was not too pure to enter the world.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“This nothingness into which the West is sliding is not the natural end, the dying, the sinking of a flourishing community of peoples. Instead, it is again a specifically Western nothingness: a nothingness that is rebellious, violent, anti-God, and antihuman. Breaking away from all that is established, it is the utmost manifestation of all the forcesopposed to God. It is nothingness as God; no one knows its goal or its measure. Its rule is absolute. It is a creative nothingness[113] that blows its anti-God breath into all that exists, creates the illusion of waking it to new life, and at the same time sucks out its true essence[114] until it soon disintegrates into an empty husk and is discarded. Life, history, family, people, language, faith—the list could go on forever because nothingness spares nothing—all fall victim to nothingness.[115]”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Due to some dim but irresistible notion of the way things are, it is simply not possible, out of order, not apprpriate to the situation at hand, if, within the circle of those who are experienced and advanced in years, the young person declaims ethical generalities. Young people will again and again find themselves in a situation that is so irritating, astounding, and incomprehensible to them that their word falls on deaf ears, while the word of an older person is heard and has weight even though its content is no different at all. It will be a sign of maturity or immaturity whether this experience leads them to understand that what is at stake here is not the stubborn self-satisfaction of old age, or the anxious effort to keep youth in their place, but the pereservation or violation of an essential ethical law. Ethical discourse needs authorization, which youth are simply not able to bestow upon themselves, even if they speak out of the purest pathos of their ethical conviction. Ethical discourse does not merely depend on the correct content of what is said, but also on the speaker being authorized to say it. Its validity depends not only on what is said, but also on who says it.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The task is not to turn the world upside down but in a given place to do what, from the perspecive of reality, is necessary objectively and to really carry it out.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The world is not divided between Christ and the devil; it is completely the world of Christ, whether it recognizes this or not. As this reality in Christ it is to be addressed, and thus the false reality that it imagines itself to have, in itself or in the devil, is to be destroyed. The dark, evil world may not be surrendered to the devil, but must be claimed for the one who won it by coming in the flesh, by the death and resurrection of Christ.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“In the world God wills work, marriage, government, and church, and God wills all these, each in its own way, through Christ, toward Christ, and in Christ. God has placed human beings under all these mandates, not only each individual under one or the other, but all people under all four. There can be no retreat, therefore, from a “worldly” into a “spiritual” “realm.” The practice of the Christian life can be learned only under these four mandates of God.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The justification of my life before God is to live because of and toward the living, dying, and rising of Jesus Christ.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“When the ethical problem presents itself essentially as the question of my own being good and doing good, the decision has already been made that the self and the world are the ultimate realities. All ethical reflection then has the goal that I be good, and that the world—by my action—becomes good. If it turns out, however, that these realities, myself and the world, are themselves embedded in a wholly other ultimate reality, namely, the reality of God the Creator, Reconciler, and Redeemer,[5] then the ethical problem takes on a whole new aspect. Of ultimate importance, then, is not that I become good, or that the condition of the world be improved by my efforts, but that the reality of God show itself everywhere to be the ultimate reality.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The Christian life is participation in the encounter of Christ with the world.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The church can only defend its own space by fighting, not for space, but for the salvation of the world. Otherwise the church becomes a "religious society" that fights in its own interest and thus has ceased to be the church of God in the world.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Christ did not, like an ethicist, love a theory about the good; he loved real people. Christ was not interested, like a philosopher, in what is “generally valid,” but in that which serves real concrete human beings. Christ was not concerned about whether “the maxim of an action” could become “a principle of universal law,”[101.] but whether my action now helps my neighbor to be a human being before God. God did not become an idea, a principle, a program, a universally valid belief, or a law;[102.] God became human.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Their courage is called revolt, their discipline Pharisaism, theirindependence[41.] arbitrariness, and their masterfulness arrogance.[42.] For the tyrannical despiser of humanity, popularity is a sign of the greatest love for humanity. He hides his secret profound distrust of all people behind the stolen words of true community. While he declares himself before the masses to be one of them, he praises himself with repulsive vanity and despises the rights of every individual. He considers the people stupid, and they become stupid;[43.] he considers them weak, and they become weak; he considers them criminal, and they become criminal.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“In Christ we are invited to participate in the reality of God and the reality of the world at the same time, the one not without the other.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin in God, but the man who has become like God has forgotten how he was at his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“We break bread with the hungry[78] and share our home with them[79] for the sake of Christ’s love, which belongs to the hungry as much as it does to us. If the hungry do not come to faith, the guilt falls on those who denied them bread. To bring bread to the hungry is preparing the way for the coming of grace.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Radicalism hates time. Compromise hates eternity. Radicalism hates patience. Compromise hates decision. Radicalism hates wisdom. Compromise hates simplicity. Radicalism hates measure. Compromise hates the immeasurable.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Nationalism calls forth the countermovement of internationalism.[84] Both are revolutionary in the same way. Prussia set the state over against them both. It wanted to be neither national nor international. In this its thought was more Western than that of the revolution.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“Ratio became a working hypothesis, a heuristic principle, and thus led to the incomparable rise of technology. This was something fundamentally new in world history. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Greek temples, from the medieval cathedrals up to the eighteenth century, technology was a matter of handicraft. It served religion, royalty, culture, and people’s daily needs.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“The source of a Christian ethic is not the reality of one’s own self, not the reality of the world, nor is it the reality of norms and values. It is the reality of God that is revealed in Jesus Christ.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics

“God does not exercise an alien domination of the world but a liberating lordship that sets creation free; God’s rule lets family, culture, government, and church fulfill their created purposes, both distinct from and related to one another, and without any usurped heteronomy of one over the other.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics