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|  Lord Acton | Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. | |
| Lord Acton | Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end. | |
| Lord Acton | Freedom degenerates unless it has to struggle in its own
defence. | |
| Charles Francis Adams | Failure seems to be regarded as the one unpardonable crime, success as the all-redeeming virtue, the acquisition of wealth as the single worthy aim of life. Ten years ago such revelations as these of the Erie Railway would have sent a shudder through the community, and would have placed a stigma on every man who had had to do them. Now they merely incite others to surpass by yet bolder outrages and more corrupt combinations. | |
| John Adams | All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, so much as downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation. | |
| John Adams | The only foundation of a free Constitution, is pure Virtue, and if this cannot be inspired into our People, in a great Measure, than they have it now. They may change their Rulers, and the forms of Government, but they will not obtain a lasting Liberty. | |
| John Adams | It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. | |
| John Adams | The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Adams | Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour. The revenue creates pensioners, and the pensioners urge for more revenue. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality, become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society. | |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"… If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | |
| John Adams | Society's demands for moral authority and character increase
as the importance of the position increases. | |
| John Adams | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them. | |
| John Adams | Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark"... If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference? | |
| John Adams | We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other. | |
| John Adams | Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics. There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty: and this public passion must be superior to all private passions. | |
| John Adams | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates… to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them. | |
| John Adams | [D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few. | |
| John Adams | It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. | |
| John Quincy Adams | The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy. | |
| John Quincy Adams | Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost. | |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | |
| Samuel Adams | A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security. | |
| Samuel Adams | Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble
and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty! | |
| Samuel Adams | No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can
any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is
preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant,
and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own
weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. | |
| Samuel Adams | Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all? | |
| Joseph Addison | A day, an hour, of virtuous liberty Is worth a whole eternity in bondage. | |
| Aeschylus | It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered. | |
| Aesop | Vices are their own punishment. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | Moderation in all things. | |
| J. Tucker Alford | It is precisely this clinging to victimhood as a means of demonstrating one’s virtue and advancing one’s well-being that has led us into a society in which welfare and quotas are “civil rights,” government handouts are “entitlements,” and payment to girls having babies out of wedlock are “compassionate,” while hard-working, ambitious people are “greedy,” punishment of crime is “oppression,” and an independent thinker who stands for courage and self-reliance is dismissed as an “Uncle Tom.” | |
| American Library Association | The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack… These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do. | |
| Aristotle | It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done. | |
| Aristotle | A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. | |
| Aristotle | Dignity does not come in possessing honors, but in deserving them. | |
| Thurman Arnold | The spectacle of a judge pouring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests, and then attempting to write an opinion which explains the difference between that nude and some other nude has elements of low comedy. | |
| Assyrian Tablet | The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching. | |
| Saint Augustine | Near our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit that was not attractive in either flavor or form. One night, when I [at the age of sixteen] had played until dark on the sandlot with some other juvenile delinquents, we went to shake that tree and carry off its fruit. From it we carried off huge loads, not to feast on, but to throw to the pigs, although we did eat a few ourselves. We did it just because it was forbidden. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | I'm a foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them. | |
| Ezra Taft Benson | You cannot do wrong and feel right. It is impossible! | |
| Richard Bernstein | The whole point of the liberal revolution that gave rise to the 1960’s was to free us from somebody else’s dogma, but now the same people…are striving to impose on others a secularized religion…disguising it behind innocuous labels like ‘diversity training’ and ‘respect for difference.’ | |
| Tom Bethel | No Gulag, evidently, can deter the advocates of state power from believing in their own virtue and in the morality of the power they exercise. We are all Hobbesians now. Virtue is presumed to reside in the state. Its reliance on compulsion is seen as fulfilling, not undermining, morality. Our communicators, oddly employed in the private sector, work tirelessly to ensure that state control is maintained, our taxes stay high, the official message is promoted. The people know, and can only know, a tiny fraction of what Leviathan does, and what they know is what these partisans tell them. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | As records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind... Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value. | |
| William Blake | A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | I know men and I tell you that Jesus Christ is no mere man. Between him and every other person in the world there is no possible term of comparison. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of people would die for Him. | |
| James Bryce | Individualism, the love of enterprise, and the pride in personal freedom, have been deemed by Americans not only as their choicest, but their peculiar and exclusive possessions. | |
| Buddha | Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds. | |
| Buddha | Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good. | |
| Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton | If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues. | |
| Luther Burbank | It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while. | |
| Edmund Burke | Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. | |
| Edmund Burke | But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. | |
| Edmund Burke | When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. | |
| Edmund Burke | There never was a bad man that had ability for good service. | |
| Edmund Burke | Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue. | |
| Sir Richard Francis Burton | Do what thy manhood bids thee do, From none but self expect applause: He noblest lives and noblest dies Who makes and keeps his self-made laws. | |
| Sir Richard Francis Burton | The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own. | |
| Samuel Butler | The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary it is that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally. | |
| Samuel Butler | There should be some schools
called deformatories
to which people are sent
if they are too good
to be practical. | |
| Samuel Butler | I don't mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy. | |
| C. Arthur Campbell | When we regard a man as morally responsible for an act, we regard him as a legitimate object of moral praise or blame in respect of it. But it seems plain that a man cannot be a legitimate object of moral praise or blame for an act unless in willing the act he is in some important sense a ‘free’ agent. Evidently free will in some sense, therefore, is a precondition of moral responsibility. | |
| Albert Camus | Integrity has no need of rules. | |
| Justice Benjamin Cardozo | The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles. | |
| Andrew Carnegie | All honor's wounds are self-inflicted. | |
| William Ellery Channing | The only freedom worth possessing is that which gives enlargement to a people's energy, intellect, and virtues. | |
| Edwin Hubbel Chapin | No more duty can be urged upon those who are entering the great theater of life than simple loyalty to their best convictions. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions. | |
| Lydia M. Child | Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do. | |
| Chilon of Sparta | Prefer a loss to a dishonest gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one's whole life. | |
| Chinese Proverb | Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one. | |
| Chinese Proverb | If you stand straight, do not fear a crooked shadow. | |
| Noam Chomsky | Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed, if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not so costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance for survival. There may be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no chance of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said it is the quality which guarantees all others. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The inherent vice of capitalism is the uneven division of blessings, while the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal division of misery. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague. | |
| Georges Clemenceau | America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to denigration without the usual interval of civilization. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Our own heart, and not other men's opinions form our true honor. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still. | |
| Confucius | If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. | |
| Alistair Cooke | As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that `liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality. | |
| Marvin Cooley | We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty. | |
| Anthony Ashley Cooper | Reason and virtue alone can bestow liberty. | |
| James Fenimore Cooper | It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly-prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong. | |
| Pierre Corneille | Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven. | |
| Norman Cousins | I cannot affirm God if I fail to affirm man. Therefore, I affirm both. Without a belief in human unity I am hungry and incomplete. Human unity is the fulfillment of diversity. It is the harmony of opposites. It is a many-stranded texture, with color and depth. | |
| Patrick Cox | The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty. | |
| Tench Coxe | As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them. | |
| Benedetto Croce | Morality, and the ideal of freedom which is the political expression of morality, are not the property of a given party or group, but a value that is fundamentally and universally human... No people will be truly free till all are free. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Most of our faults are more pardonable than the means we use to conceal them. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue. | |
| Alphonse de Lamartine | Void of freedom, what would virtue be? | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | I know of no other country where love of money
has such a grip on men's hearts or
where stronger scorn is expressed for
the theory of permanent equality of property. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | Where are we then? The religionists are the enemies of liberty, and the friends of liberty attack religion; the high-minded and the noble advocate subjection, and the meanest and most servile minds preach independence; honest and enlightened citizens are opposed to all progress, whilst men without patriotism and without principles are the apostles of civilization and intelligence. Has such been the fate of the centuries which have preceded our own? and has man always inhabited a world like the present, where nothing is linked together, where virtue is without genius, and genius without honor; where the love of order is confounded with a taste for oppression, and the holy rites of freedom with a taste for law; where the light thrown by conscience on human actions is dim, and where nothing seems to be any longer forbidden or allowed, honorable or shameful, false or true? | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | ... liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | America is great because America is good. If America ever ceases to be good it will cease to be great. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. ... I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for it in the fertile fields, and boundless prairies, and it was not there. I sought it in her rich mines, and vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. | |
| John G. Diefenbaker | Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous. | |
| John Dryden | Ill habits gather by unseen degrees -- As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas. | |
| Will Durant | Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law. | |
| George Eliot | Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Good men must not obey the laws too well. | |
| Quintus Ennius | He hath freedom whoso beareth a clean and constant heart within. | |
| William Faulkner | Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. | |
| Geoffrey Fisher | In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes. | |
| Larry Flynt | If the human body's obscene, complain to the manufacturer, not me. | |
| Anne Frank | How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Moderation in all things -- including moderation. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Trusting too much to others' care is the ruin of many; for, as the almanac says, in the affairs of this world men are saved not by faith, but by the want of it; but a man's own care is profitable; for, saith Poor Dick, learning is to the studious, and riches to the careful, as well as power to the bold, and Heaven to the virtuous. | |
| Milton Friedman | Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned. | |
| James Anthony Froude | To deny freedom of the will is to make morality impossible. | |
| Don Galer | Integrity is what we do, what we say, and what we say we do. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Once one assumes an attitude of intolerance, there is no knowing where it will take one. Intolerance, someone has said, is violence to the intellect and hatred is violence to the heart. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble. | |
| William Lloyd Garrison | Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion? | |
| Henry George | It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve. | |
| Elbridge Gerry | The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots. | |
| Edward Gibbon | The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. | |
| Khalil Gibran | The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention. | |
| Andre Gide | It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. | |
| William Branch Giles | [It is not the purpose nor right of Congress] to attend to what generosity and humanity require, but to what the Constitution and their duty require. | |
| Jonah Goldberg | Extremism in pursuit of moderation is not necessarily a virtue. | |
| Barry Goldwater | Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Tolerance in the face of tyranny is no virtue. | |
| Barry Goldwater | I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. | |
| Baltasar Gracian | The sole advantage of power is that you can do more good. | |
| Nathan Hale | I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon law and upon courts. These are false hopes, believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no courts to save it. | |
| Sydney J. Harris | We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood until we move from the passive voice to the active voice -- that is, until we have stopped saying, "It got lost," and say, "I lost it. | |
| Elizabeth Harrison | Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize. | |
| Vaclav Havel | Lying can never save us from another lie. | |
| Nathaniel Hawthorne | No man, for any considerable period,
can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered as to which one is true. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. | |
| William Hazlitt | The only vice
that can not be forgiven
is hypocrisy. | |
| Patrick Henry | Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is impossible that a nation of infidels or idolaters should be a nation of freemen. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. | |
| Patrick Henry | It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here. | |
| Granville Hicks | The sooner we all learn to make a decision between disapproval and censorship, the better off society will be... Censorship cannot get at the real evil, and it is an evil in itself. | |
| George Jacob Holyoake | There can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth. | |
| Homer | I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another. | |
| Herbert Hoover | Honest difference of views and honest debate are not disunity.
They are the vital process of policy among free men. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart -- builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody -- for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods. | |
| Andrew Jackson | The Bible is the rock on which our Republic rests. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | There is no act, however virtuous, for which ingenuity may not find some bad motive. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | We shall have our follies without doubt. Some one or more of them will always be afloat. But ours will be the follies of enthusiasm, not of bigotry, not of Jesuitism. Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment & death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment ... inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is the great parent of science & of virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Tobacco is a culture
productive of
infinite wretchedness. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his Father, in the womb of a virgin will be classified with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated Reformer of human errors. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Dependence begets subservience and venality,
suffocates the germ of virtue, and
prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Courage is the first of all the virtues because if you haven't courage, you may not have the opportunity to use any of the others. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | The true measure of a man
is how he treats someone
who can do him absolutely no good. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. | |
| Ernest Jones | [Censors are] people with secret attractions to various temptations... They are defending themselves under the pretext of defending others, because at heart they fear their own weaknesses. | |
| David Starr Jordan | Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it. | |
| Chief Joseph | It does not require many words to speak the truth. | |
| Immanuel Kant | The bad thing of war is, that it makes more evil people than it can take away. | |
| Immanuel Kant | Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity. | |
| Immanuel Kant | It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably. | |
| Garrison Keillor | You taught me to be nice, so nice that now I am so full of niceness, I have no sense of right and wrong, no outrage, no passion. | |
| Helen Keller | I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble. | |
| L. Lionel Kendrick | Integrity is the core of our character. | |
| John F. Kennedy | A man does what he must -- in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers -- and this is the basis of all human morality. | |
| Alan Keyes | The act of voting is one opportunity for us to remember that our whole way of life is predicated on the capacity of ordinary people to judge carefully and well. | |
| Alan Keyes | ...[A] prohibition on moral judgments against various sexual behaviors is a violation of the freedom, even of the religious liberty, of those who view such behavior as wrong. If we don't have a right to act according to our religious belief by forming judgments according to those beliefs about human conduct and behavior, then, exactly what does the free exercise of religion mean? Can the free exercise of religion really mean simply that I have the right to believe that God has ordained certain things to be right or wrong but that I can't act accordingly? Surely free exercise means the freedom to act according to belief. And, yet, if we are not allowed to act according to belief when it comes to fundamental moral precepts, then what will be the moral implications of religion? None at all. But if we accept an understanding of religious liberty that doesn't permit us to discriminate the wheat from the chaff in our own actions and those of others, haven't we in fact permitted the government to dictate to us a uniform approach to religion? And, isn't that dictation of uniformity in religion exactly what the First Amendment intended to forbid? | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. | |
| Henry Kissinger | We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing. | |
| Paul Kurtz | Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom. | |
| Sir Roger L'Estrange | One stumble is enough to deface the character of an honorable life. | |
| Lao-Tzu | With virtue and quietness one may conquer the world. | |
| Lao-Tzu | The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. | |
| Harold J. Laski | Every State is known by the rights it maintains. | |
| Jerome Lawrence | I say that you cannot administer a wicked law impartially. You can only destroy. You can only punish. I warn you that a wicked law, like cholera, destroys everyone it touches — its upholders as well as its defiers. | |
| Alan Jay Lerner | Only the mediocre are always at their best. | |
| C. S. Lewis | To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Not to be, but to seem, virtuous -- it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. | |
| C. S. Lewis | It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
This expresses my idea of democracy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. | |
| Walter Lippmann | The unexamined life, said Socrates, is unfit to be lived by man. This is the virtue of liberty, and the ground on which we may justify our belief in it, that it tolerates error in order to serve truth. | |
| Walter Lippmann | A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. | |
| John Locke | To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. | |
| John Locke | Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it. | |
| Robert M. MacIver | The legal code can never be identified with the code of morals. It is no more the function of government to impose a moral code than to impose a religious code. And for the same reason. | |
| James Madison | But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. | |
| James Madison | The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust. | |
| James Madison | During almost fifteen centuries the legal establishment of Christianity has been upon trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution. | |
| James Madison | The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace. | |
| James Madison | In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. | |
| James Madison | As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust: So there are other qualities in human nature, which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us, faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. | |
| James Madison | There is no maxim, in my opinion, which is more liable to be misapplied, and which, therefore, more needs elucidation, than the current, that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong. | |
| Orison Swett Marden | To many a man, and sometimes to a youth,
there comes the opportunity to choose
between honorable competence and tainted wealth.
The young man who starts out to be poor and honorable,
holds in his hand one of the strongest elements of success. | |
| Everett Dean Martin | Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance. | |
| Groucho Marx | Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. | |
| George Mason | No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. | |
| Menander | Everything is destroyed by its own particular vice: the destructive power resides within. Rust destroys iron, moths destroy clothes, the worm eats away the wood; but greatest of all evils is envy, impious habitant of corrupt souls, which ever was, is, and shall be a consuming disease. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. | |
| Thomas Merton | May God prevent us from becoming 'right-thinking men' -- that is to say, men who agree perfectly with their own police. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. | |
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | Let us forget such words, and all they mean, as Hatred, Bitterness and Rancor, Greed, Intolerance, Bigotry. Let us renew our faith and pledge to Man, his right to be Himself, and free. | |
| John Milton | None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants. | |
| John Milton | The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose. | |
| John Milton | Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work. | |
| Charles Mingus | Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. | |
| Mohammed | The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. | |
| Molière | If everyone were clothed with integrity,
if every heart were just, frank, kindly,
the other virtues would be well-nigh useless,
since their chief purpose is
to make us bear with patience
the injustice of our fellows. | |
| Molière | Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue. | |
| Thomas S. Monson | Perhaps the surest test of an individual's integrity is his refusal to do or say anything that would damage his self-respect. | |
| John Viscount Morley | The means prepare the end, and the end is what the means have made of it. | |
| Archibald D. Murphey | It is important therefore that in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience formed. One of the greatest blessings which the State can confer upon her children is to instill into their minds at an early period moral and religious truths. ... Thousands of unfortunate children are growing up in perfect ignorance of their moral and religious duties. Their parents equally unfortunate know not how to instruct them, and have not the opportunity or ability of placing them under the care of those who could give them instruction. The State, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children and place them in schools where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts can be trained to virtue. | |
| Benito Mussolini | It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission, and welds them into unity. | |
| Benito Mussolini | People are tired of liberty. They have had a surfeit of it. Liberty is no longer a chaste and austere virgin…. Today’s youth are moved by other slogans…Order, Hierarchy, Discipline. | |
| Harriet Nelson | Forgive all who have offended you, not for them, but for yourself. | |
| Huey P. Newton | My fear was not of death itself, but a death without meaning. I wanted my death to be something the people could relate to, a basis for further mobilization of the community. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. | |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose. | |
| Richard M. Nixon | Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too. | |
| Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787 | Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | There’s a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any over-large concentration of like-minded individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | If you are young
and you drink a great deal
it will spoil your health,
slow your mind,
make you fat --
in other words,
turn you into an adult. | |
| Ovid | Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor. (I see the better way, and approve it; I follow the worse.) | |
| Thomas Paine | Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good. | |
| Thomas Paine | Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness. | |
| Thomas Paine | What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed, if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated. | |
| Thomas Paine | When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary. | |
| Isabel Paterson | Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends. | |
| Alan Paton | You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right. | |
| General George S. Patton, Jr. | I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom. | |
| Westbrook Pegler | Did I say "republic?" By God, yes, I said "republic!" Long live the glorious republic of the United States of America. Damn democracy. It is a fraudulent term used, often by ignorant persons but no less often by intellectual fakers, to describe an infamous mixture of socialism, graft, confiscation of property and denial of personal rights to individuals whose virtuous principles make them offensive. | |
| William Penn | To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals. | |
| William Penn | A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it. | |
| St. Peter | Therefore, rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind. | |
| Philo of Alexandria | Money, it has been said, is the cause of good things to a good man, of evil things to a bad man. | |
| Plato | Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws. | |
| General Colin Powell | So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration to others I think is clear.
And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and otherwise we have returned home ... to live our own lives in peace. | |
| Pythagoras | No one is free who is not master of himself. | |
| Ronald Reagan | There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car, but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | We cannot afford to differ on the question of honesty if we expect our republic permanently to endure. Honesty is not so much a credit as an absolute prerequisite to efficient service to the public. Unless a man is honest, we have no right to keep him in public life; it matters not how brilliant his capacity. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society. | |
| Murray N. Rothbard | There can be no truly moral choice unless that choice is made in freedom; similarly, there can be no really firmly grounded and consistent defense of freedom unless that defense is rooted in moral principle. In concentrating on the ends of choice, the conservative, by neglecting the conditions of choice, loses that very morality of conduct with which he is so concerned. And the libertarian, by concentrating only on the means, or conditions, of choice and ignoring the ends, throws away an essential moral defense of his own position. | |
| Murray N. Rothbard | It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The strongest is never strong enough to be always the master, unless he transforms his strength into right, and obedience into duty. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | The only foundation for... a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. | |
| John Ruskin | To make your children capable of honesty is the beginning of education. | |
| John Ruskin | Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons. | |
| Bertrand Russell | It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The earth becomes more crowded, and our dependence upon our neighbours becomes more intimate. In these circumstances life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standards different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him. Let us hope that a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardour of our too virtuous masters. | |
| Lord Herbert Louis Samuel | Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built. | |
| William Saroyan | Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. | |
| Eric Schaub | Among the mighty are those who recognize beauty as power, and power as beautiful. | |
| Eric Schaub | I am not free until I say so.
And there's a good chance
I am going to have to fight once I do.
Ever since I declared my Independence,
I have had to support and defend it. | |
| Felix E. Schelling | True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world. | |
| Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | Righteousness is easy in retrospect. | |
| Carl Schurz | From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own. | |
| Howard Scott | CRIMINAL: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Virtue alone affords everlasting and peace-giving joy; even if some obstacle arise, it is but like an intervening cloud, which floats beneath the sun but never prevails against it. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Virtue runs no risk of becoming contemptible by being exposed to view, and it is better to be despised for simplicity than to be tormented by continual hypocrisy. | |
| William Shakespeare | No legacy is so rich as honesty. | |
| William Shakespeare | With devotion's visage and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. | |
| Harry Shearer | If absolute power corrupts absolutely, does absolute powerlessness make you pure? | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | [A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Power, like a desolating pestilence,\\
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,\\
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,\\
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,\\
A mechanized automaton. | |
| Algernon Sidney | If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established. | |
| Lewis Smedes | To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. | |
| Adam Smith | Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. | |
| Adam Smith | It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. | |
| C. P. Snow | No one is fit to be trusted with power. ... No one. ... Any man who has lived at all knows the follies and wickedness he's capable of. ... And if he does know it, he knows also that neither he nor any man ought to be allowed to decide a single human fate. | |
| Joseph Sobran | All in all, the framers would probably agree that it's better to impeach too often than too seldom. If presidents can't be virtuous, they should at least be nervous. | |
| Solon | For often evil men are rich, and good men poor;
But we will not exchange with them
Our virtue for their wealth since one abides always,
While riches change their owners every day. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Hastiness and superficiality
are the psychic diseases
of the twentieth century,
and more than anywhere else
this disease is reflected in the press. | |
| Thomas Sowell | Neither your life nor my life, nor the future of this country, will be affected in the slightest by whether Linda Tripp is naughty or nice. But if any president is able to commit crimes with impunity by using the vast powers and perquisites of his office to cover up, then we will have a danger of corruption and abuse of power that can only grow with the passing years and generations. | |
| Herbert Spencer | The Republican form of government is the highest form of government; but because of this it requires the highest type of human nature -- a type nowhere at present existing. | |
| Baruch Spinoza | Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If, then, it became so difficult, so nearly impossible, in most cases, to determine what is, and what is not, vice; and especially if it be so difficult, in nearly all cases, to determine where virtue ends, and vice begins; and if these questions, which no one can really and truly determine for anybody but himself, are not to be left free and open for experiment by all, each person is deprived of the highest of all his rights as a human being, to wit: his right to inquire, investigate, reason, try experiments, judge, and ascertain for himself, what is, to him,virtue, and what is, to him, vice; in other words: what, on the whole, conduces to his happiness, and what, on the whole, tends to his unhappiness. If this great right is not to be left free and open to all, then each man’s whole right, as a reasoning human being, to "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," is denied him. | |
| Lysander Spooner | If those persons, who fancy themselves gifted with both the power and the right to define and punish other men’s vices, would but turn their thoughts inwardly, they would probably find that they have a great work to do at home; and that, when that shall have been completed, they will be little disposed to do more towards correcting the vices of others, than simply to give to others the results of their experience and observation. | |
| Lysander Spooner | Vices are not crimes. | |
| Josef Stalin | America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold:
its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life.
If we can undermine these three areas,
America will collapse from within. | |
| Leslie Stephen | Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh? We are a company of ignorant beings, feeling our way through mists and darkness, learning only by incessantly repeated blunders, obtaining a glimmering of truth by falling into every conceivable error, dimly discerning light enough for our daily needs, but hopelessly differing whenever we attempt to describe the ultimate origin or end of our paths; and yet, when one of us ventures to declare that we don't know the map of the universe as well as the map of our infintesimal parish, he is hooted, reviled, and perhaps told that he will be damned to all eternity for his faithlessness. | |
| Robert Louis Stevenson | To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. | |
| Jim Stovall | Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching. | |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | The literature of a people must so ring from the sense of its nationality; and nationality is impossible
without self-respect, and self-respect is impossible without liberty. | |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe | I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred -- that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. | |
| Allie Beth Stuckey | When you elevate victimhood as virtue, you will create a culture in which people are tripping over themselves to be oppressed. | |
| William Graham Sumner | | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation,
I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause -- nor any charter of immunities and rights. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | That government is best which governs least. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest. | |
| Mark Twain | Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest. | |
| Mark Twain | Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. | |
| Sir Alex Fraser Tytler | A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. | |
| Sun Tzu | Those who excel in war first cultivate their own humanity and justice and maintain their laws and institutions. By these means they make their governments invincible. | |
| Stewart L. Udall | We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. | |
| Unknown | Integrity is not a conditional word.
It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather.
It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there
and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. | |
| Bill Vaughan | A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works. | |
| Voltaire | The superfluous is very necessary. | |
| Voltaire | It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. | |
| Voltaire | It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color. | |
| Voltaire | The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. | |
| George Washington | All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity. | |
| George Washington | I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong. | |
| George Washington | I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man. | |
| George Washington | ...and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint committee requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November, next to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being Who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, or will be ...that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to there becoming a nation... And also that we then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions... to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a governmment of wise, just and Constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed...(and) to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among us...given under my hand at the City of New York, the 3rd day of October in the Year of Our Lord 1789. | |
| John Walter Wayland | The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. | |
| Henry Grady Weaver | Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind. | |
| Daniel Webster | If we abide by the principles taught in the Bible, our country will go on prospering. | |
| Noah Webster | In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate -- look at his character. It is alleged by men of loose principles, or defective views of the subject, that religion and morality are not necessary or important qualifications for political stations. But the scriptures teach a different doctrine. They direct that rulers should be men who rule in the fear of God, men of truth, hating covetousness. It is to the neglect of this rule that we must ascribe the multiplied frauds, breaches of trust, speculations and embezzlements of public property which astonish even ourselves; which tarnish the character of our country and which disgrace our government. When a citizen gives his vote to a man of known immorality, he abuses his civic responsibility; he not only sacrifices his own responsibility; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country. | |
| Noah Webster | When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, 'just men who will rule in the fear of God.' The preservation of [our] government depends on the faithful discharge of this Duty; if the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. If [our] government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the Divine Commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the Laws. | |
| Josiah C. Wedgwood | Men must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right. | |
| Oscar Wilde | He hasn't one redeeming vice. | |
| Frances Wright | An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth, or it is an error; it can never be a crime or a virtue. | |
| Frank Lloyd Wright | A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him. | |
| Dr. Ravi Zacharias | It is a mindless philosophy that assumes that one's private beliefs have nothing to do with public office. Does it make sense to entrust those who are immoral in private with the power to determine the nation's moral issues and, indeed, its destiny? .... The duplicitous soul of a leader can only make a nation more sophisticated in evil. | |
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