Quotes About Conduct

Etiquette, or dog in the original Coptic, means behaving yourself a little better than is absolutely essential.

The principle of independent judgments (and decorrelated errors) has immediate applications for the conduct of meetings, an activity in which executives in organizations spend a great deal of their working days.

for the most part people prosper when they behave decently and honorably toward one another and live among others who conduct themselves similarly.

Similarly, in whatever enterprise you find yourself, practice predictability. Never impose your mood swings on your associates and customers. They should never be able to discover how your life is going. This is called being professional.

He who lives an immoral life dies an immoral death - Corsican proverb

I never let my politics supersede my manners.

There is no weapon like words, no armor against words, and with words the Master Philologist has conquered me. It is not at all equitable: but the man showed me a huge book wherein were the names of everything in the world, and justice was not among them. It develops that, instead, justice is merely a common noun, vaguely denoting an ethical idea of conduct proper to the circumstances, whether of individuals or communities. It is, you observe, just a grammarian's notion.

The beauty of behaviour consists in the manner more than the matter of your discourse.

What we think or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do. —John Ruskin

Rules of the House Character: Do the Right Thing Excellence: Do Your Very Best Respect: Do the Golden Rule

The Golden Rule finds no limit of application in business.

Piety Without Virtue

I come from a profession which has suffered greatly because of the lack of civility. Lawyers treat each other poorly and it has come home to haunt them. The public will not tolerate a lack of civility.

A man without conscience is but a poor creature...

God calls us to have strength in our character and conduct, not simply a stiff upper lip in sorrow or a stubborn persistence during hardship. Secondarily, because the word is "passive voice," we know that the strength God demands He also provides. The strength does not come from a place inside us but a source beyond ourselves, namely, the Lord.

The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice estate, ease, health, and applause, and even life, to the sacred calls of his country.

When sufficiently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players. It is they, quite as much as the players, who win or lose. For this reason the audience absorbs in itself the same politics of resentment that moves players to show they are not what they think others think they are. The audience is under the same constraint to disprove the judgment.

A psychological explanation of our feelings is not a moral explanation of our conduct.

When we decide what to do, we in effect proclaim our wish that our conduct be made into a "universal law." Therefore when a rational being decides to treat people in a certain way he decrees that in his judgement, this is the way people ought to be treated. Thus if we treat him the same way in return we are doing nothing more than treating him as he has decided people are to be treated.

Catholics who dominated both industry and labor on the waterfront counted on priests' minding their own business when it came to the conduct of their livelihoods.

The politician, Johnson's experience had taught him, could make promises without keeping them; words spoken in public had little relation to the practical conduct of daily life. But whatever justification a politician may claim for deceptions, the statesman must align his words with his action.

The people "placed me in an office of the highest dignity and charged me with the duty of maintaining that dignity and proper respect for the office on the part of my subordinates. . . . By your own conduct you have destroyed your usefulness as a helpful subordinate.

War...strengthened the position of the armament industries...to a point...that these industries dominated the economies and therefore the governments of all the participating nations...war barbarised and lowered the already very low level of accepted conduct.

I find it so helpful," continued Lymond, "when some of my gentlemen have well-defined codes of conduct. It makes them more predictable.