Price Pritchett Quotes on Ethics (9 Quotes)

Live according to the ethics of excellence, and you can always stand proud. Pride not vanity, but dignity and self-respect should carry a lot of weight in helping you make decisions. Let pride help you decide.

When you hold out for high standards, people are impressedbut they don't always like you for it. Not everybody will be on your side in your struggle to do what's right and ethical. In fact, sometimes even you won't be on your side. You'll wrestle with inner conflict, torn between what you should do and what you want to do. You'll also aggravate other people. Seems when you walk the straight and narrow you always step on someone's toes. Don't count on the ethics of excellence to make you popular.

But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the 'M' disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure the ethics of excellence.

You can't put someone else in charge of your morals. Ethics is a personal discipline.

We all faced painful ethical challenges before we even knew how to spell our names. There were tough choices. Tradeoffs. Confusing signals regarding how to live one's life. And here we are now, today, still struggling. Still trying to sort things out. Still trying to work our way through life effectively. About the only thing that has changed is the scope of the problem. There's more at stake now. And we're in a position, as grownups, to do a lot moregood or badfor ourselves, our organization, our world. But we still must wrestle with our imperfect ethics.

You have to get beyond blaming others ... give up your excuses ... stand responsible for what you do ... ultimately, ethics ends up an individual exercise.

The only way we can develop muscle is through regular exercise. As soon as we stop stretching and working toward higher ethics, our standards start to sag. The muscle gets soft, and instead of excellence we have to settle for mediocrity. Maybe something even worse.

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

Notice that 'I' is at the center of the word 'ethical.' There is no 'they.' Achieving the ethics of excellence is our individual assignment.