Business Ethics Quotes

Business Ethics Quotes

Do you know the importance of ethics in business? A business without ethical standards won’t last for long. See these business ethics quotes to gain insight into what business ethics is all about.

These business ethics quotes are insightful and truly motivational.

You can use them to make yourself a better business owner.

Also, you can use them to make your business better.

Ethics is a set of moral values, principles, belief or standards that guide behavior and actions.

In business, your business ethics is what makes your business unique.

Business ethics are the principles, values or beliefs that guide your business practices.

Given this, you should have good business ethics.

This will determine how your business is viewed by both your customers and your employees.

Furthermore, good business ethics will foster trust in your products and services.

These business ethics quotes are examples of good ethics that you can incorporate into your business.

More so, these business ethics quotes can serve as a source of inspiration to you when trying to come up with your business ethics.

These 88 business ethics quotes are words of wisdom from successful people who have built their business on certain ethical standards.

Additionally, the principles in these business ethics quotes are what have shaped the businesses of these people into a successful business empire.

Now you know the importance of having good business ethics.

So, it’s left to you to build up a business based on good principles.

See these business ethics quotes for the right inspiration.

88 Amazing Business Ethics Quotes To Learn From

1A business is successful to the extent that it provides a product or service that contributes to happiness in all of its forms. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

2A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business. – Henry Ford

3A little integrity is better than any career. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

4A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures – and that is the basis of all human morality. – John F. Kennedy

5A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world. – Albert Camus

6A new model of heroic capitalism based on principle-driven, free-market entrepreneurship deserves a central place in business-ethics thought and action. – Robert L. Bradley, Jr.

7A person who is fundamentally honest doesn’t need a code of ethics. The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are all the ethical code anybody needs. – Harry S. Truman

8Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics. – Jane Addams

9As an anonymous participant in financial markets, I never had to weigh the social consequences of my actions I felt justified in ignoring them on the grounds that I was playing by the rules. – George Soros

10As an entrepreneur building a business, you need to respect yourself and surround yourself with people you can respect….Do not lie, steal, or cheat. Make your word your bond and always stand by your word. When you are wrong, own up to it and make good on the deal. Treat others as you’d want to be treated. – Jana Matthews

11Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. – Steve Jobs

12Because every exchange is always a relationship, to get the most while giving the least is unjust, unethical, antisocial, abusive, perhaps ‘evil.’ Yet predatory commerce (“the free market” as it is euphemistically called) operates regularly on the principle of ‘get the most and pay the least. – James Hillman

13Being good is good business. – Anita Roddick

14Business ethics has always had problems that are distinct from those of other professions, such as medicine, law, engineering, dentistry, or nursing. – Peter Singer

15Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies. – Vivek Wadhwa

16Doing the right thing doesn’t automatically bring success. But compromising ethics almost always lead to failure. – Anonymous

17Economics without ethics is a caricature. Ethics without economics is a fairy tale. – Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

18Ethical living is the indispensable condition of all that is most worthwhile in the world. – Ernest Caldecott

19Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. – Potter Stewart

20Ethics is not definable, is not implementable, because it is not conscious; it involves not only our thinking, but also our feeling. – Valdemar W. Setzer

21Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality. – Albert Schweitzer

22Ethics must begin at the top of an organization. It is a leadership issue and the chief executive must set the example. – Edward Hennessy

23Ethics or simple honesty is the building blocks upon which our whole society is based, and business is a part of our society, and it’s integral to the practice of being able to conduct business, that you have a set of honest standards. – Kerry Stokes

24Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil. – Albert Schweitzer

25Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics – a rational ethics – as a precondition of rebirth. – Ayn Rand

26Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. – Aldo Leopold

27Football, that’s just athletics. But in the business world – doing everything – people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town. – Herschel Walker

28Globalization means that business strategy and business ethics cannot be separated from each other. – Ofra Strauss

29Great people have great values and great ethics. – Jeffrey Gitomer

Inspiring Quotes On Business Ethics

30Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity. – W. Clement Stone

31How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top. – Yvon Chouinard

32I don’t trust a man who talks about ethics when he is picking my pocket. But if he is acting in his own self-interest and says so, I have usually been able to work out some way to do business with him. – Robert A. Heinlein

33If ethics are poor at the top, that behavior is copied down through the organization. – Robert Noyce

34If you build that foundation, both the moral and the ethical foundation, as well as the business foundation, and the experience foundation, then the building won’t crumble. – Henry Kravis

35If you don’t have integrity, you have nothing. You can’t buy it. You can have all the money in the world, but if you are not a moral and ethical person, you really have nothing. – Henry Kravis

36If your client has a problem with ethics, a signed contract may not be enough to protect you from expensive litigation. – Paul E. Casey

37In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so. – Immanuel Kant

38In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And, if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. – Warren Buffett

39Interest in business ethics courses has surged, and student activities at leading business schools are more focused than ever before on making business serve long-term social values. – Peter Singer

40It horrifies me that ethics is only an optional extra at Harvard Business School. – John Harvey-Jones

41It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune. – Mahatma Gandhi

42It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities. – Josiah Stamp

43It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently. – Warren Buffett

44It takes less time to do things right than to explain why you did it wrong. – Henry Wadsworth

45Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules. – Wayne Dyer

46Living up to your commitments is part of business ethics. My word is my bond. – Isadore Sharp

47Many business leaders are asking fundamental questions about what business they’re in, why they are doing it and how it can be used as a means of healing human and natural communities. – Amory Lovins

48Many business leaders today view their jobs as entailing responsibility for the welfare of the wider community. These individuals do not define themselves as profit-making machines whose only reason for existing is to satisfy escalating expectation for immediate gain. – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

49My biggest problem with modernity may lie in the growing separation of the ethical and the legal. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

50Never deceive others in business or in life. In 1995 I was deceived by four companies that are now closed. A company cannot go far by deceit. – Jack Ma

51Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right. – Isaac Asimow

52Never stop learning, learn something new everyday. – Marc Roche

53Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened, but people like to keep what’s theirs, even after their dead. It didn’t take long for ethics to be crushed by greed. Unwinding became big business, and people let it happen. – Neal Shusterman

54Our core values and business ethics will always be paramount in all that we do, and we are always looking to do the right thing and settle claims fairly and accurately. – Tricia Griffith

55Partnerships must have loyalty and integrity at their core. – Donald Trump

56Play fair, be prepared for others to play dirty, and don’t let them drag you into the mud. – Richard Branson

57Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not. – Oprah Winfrey

58Remember There’s No Such Thing As An Unrealistic Goal – Just Unrealistic Time Frames. – Donald Trump

59Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations. – Steve Jobs

More Business Ethics Quotes For You

60Success will come and go, but integrity is forever. – Forbes

61The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten. – Ben Franklin

62The ethics of journalism are one thing. Another thing is the ethics of business. – Adam Michnik

63The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings. – Albert Schweitzer

64The future has a way of arriving unannounced. – George Will

65The higher the building, the lower the morals. – Noel Coward

66The more moral the people are in their business dealings, the less paperwork you need, the more handshakes you can have, the more the wheels of capitalism work better because there’s trust in the marketplace. Business ethics is not a joke. And, in fact, I think most businesses that I’ve dealt with encourage exactly that type of behavior. – Rick Santorum

67The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity. – Zig Ziglar

68The real threat is from within, from poor ethical standards and lack of integrity that can do incalculable harm. – Azim Premji

69The time is always right to do what is right. – Martin Luther King

70The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don’t have much wiggle room here. – Seth Godin

71The very essence of leadership is that you have to have vision. You can’t blow an uncertain trumpet. – Theodore Hesburgh

72There are seven things that will destroy us: Wealth without work; Pleasure without conscience; Knowledge without character; Religion without sacrifice; Politics without principle; Science without humanity; Business without ethics. – Mahatma Gandhi

73There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees which are falsehoods on the other. – Michel De Montaigne

74There is no such thing as business ethics. There is only one kind — you have to adhere to the highest standards. – Marvin Bower

75There’s no such thing as business ethics; there’s just ethics. And ethics makes no concessions for the real or imagined necessities of making a profit. – Michael Josephson

76To run this business you need optimism, humanism, enthusiasm, intuition, curiosity, love, humour, magic and fun, and that secret ingredient euphoria. – Anita Roddick

77Unless today is well lived, tomorrow is not important. – Alan Sakowitz

78Using the phrase business ethics might imply that the ethical rules and expectations are somehow different in business than in other contexts. There really is no such thing as business ethics. There is just ethics and the challenge for people in business and every other walk in life to acknowledge and live up to basic moral principles like honesty, respect, responsibility, fairness and caring. – Michael Josephson

79Watch, listen, and learn. You can’t know it all yourself. Anyone who thinks they do is destined for mediocrity. – Donald Trump

80We must intertwine business and ethics in a very fundamental way. – Robert Bruner

81We need timeless principles to steer by in running our organizations and building our personal careers. We need high standards; the ethics of excellence. – Price Pritchett

82When ethical lapses occur, they rarely happen in situations when what is right versus what is wrong is clear. They more typically occur when what is morally right is less clear. – Anonymous

83While academic abilities remain integral, it is the work ethics that form the soul of the business. – Jamshyd Godrej

84Why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches every facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics. – Erik Qualman

85Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities. – John Berger

86You’d be a fool or a deluded idealist to think ethics would be prominent on Wall Street. That is not a statement against people in the money business, just a fact. – Steven Levitt

87Your money is just a condition to get my business, your professionalism is the price. – Amit Kalantri

88Your reputation is more important than your paycheck, and your integrity is worth more than your career. – Ryan Freitas

Conclusion On Business Ethics Quotes

Having good business ethics will do your business a lot of good as you have learned from these business ethics quotes.

Furthermore, building a business based on good ethical principles is one of the ways to achieve success in business.

So, you should read, re-read, reflect on and apply the principles from these business ethics quotes in your business.

Which of these business ethics quotes do you think will work best for your kind of business?

Please share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.