“We’ve had a tsunami of excuses, now we need a tsunami of honest.” — William Cohan, author of House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, at a discussion with Duke students, faculty, and staff about the culture of greed and excess on Wall Street that contributed significantly to the financial crisis

“The ethical is in many ways about an engagement with the impossible. It is not about coming up with a set of rules or a set of values that we all agree upon.” — Ranjana Khanna, margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women’s Studies and Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University, discussing the globalization of higher education at the Institute’s 2009 Public Ethics Symposium

“As a school, we’ve done a lot of work with human rights. But you can’t have kids saving Darfur and isolating a peer in the lunchroom. It all has to go together.” — Scarsdale middle School Principle Michael McDermott, on a program within his school that teaches students empathy, part of a larger story in The New York Times on “grooming children to be better citizens and leaders”