Quotes About Decency

You could allow a gentleman the privacy of his piss.

quoting Díaz: "Only in her home, like a butterfly in a glass jar, can woman progress to her highest level of decency.

is the case, I think, that it's what is decent, brilliant, and wise in a people that now we most need to know more about, and need to share with each other, not the banal evidence of their miscalculations or the supposed absence in them of the kind of sophistication we imagine ourselves to be in exclusive possession of.

in situations of conflict: the "enemy" is portrayed as massive and unstoppable, an inherent threat to decency and truth.

Just as junk food and lack of exercise can ruin an athlete's condition, those things that are obscene, crude, or pornographic can breed an inner darkness that numbs our higher sensibilities and substitutes the social conscience of "Will I be found out?" for the natural or divine conscience of "What is right and wrong?

Thinking like a Freak may sometimes sound like an exercise in using clever means to get exactly what you want, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if there is one thing we've learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency. Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.

Decency can push almost any interaction into the cooperative frame.

If there is one thing we've learned from a lifetime of designing and analyzing incentives, the best way to get what you want is to treat other people with decency.

the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

In this way of thinking, the fact that women show a lot of skin or that men curse in public is not a sign of cultural decay. On the contrary, it's a sign that they live in a society that is so civilized that they don't have to fear being harassed or assaulted in response.

In some eras, self-control defines the paragon of a decent person: a grown-up, a person of dignity, a lady or a gentleman, a mensch. In others it is jeered at as uptight, prudish, stuffy, straitlaced, puritanical. Certainly the crime-prone 1960s were the recent era that most glorified the relaxation of self-control: Do your own thing, Let it all hang out, If it feels good do it, Take a walk on the wild side.

Sensing the necessity to be wise and honest in order to succeed, he flees vice, or at least his demeanor exhibits decency and seriousness so as not to arouse any adverse judgment on the part of present and future acquaintances

When we create hope and opportunity in the lives of others, we allow love, decency and promise to triumph over cowardice and hate.

Custava-lhe esforço aquela decência tranqüila, aquela face calma — nervosa, no cansaço da noite maldormida, da luta inglória contra o desejo em brasa de seu ventre. Por fora água parada, por dentro uma fogueira acesa.

Una muchacha decente tiene que ver inmoralidades en el cine, porque hay cosas que es indispensable saber

High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.

I think most decent people would be horrified at what happens today, even in our enlightened country. There are still mean, self-righteous Pharisees, who have a sick need to punish others whose troubled lives they can never begin to understand, much less feel compassion for.

Sometimes the pagan spirit of Roman poetry arouses qualms. Guibert of Nogent confesses in his autobiography that early in his monastic life he took up verse making and even fell into "certain obscene words and composed brief writings, worthless and immodest, in fact bereft of all decency," before abandoning this shocking practice in favor of commentaries on the Scriptures.

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

I might be capable of making figures that have heart, conscience, passion, emotion and decency. But there's no call for that at all in the world. People are only interested in monsters and freaks, so I give them their monsters. Monsters are what they want!

The quality of your life ultimately depends on the quality of your relationships . . . which are basically a reflection of your sense of decency, your ability to think of others, your generosity.

Just tell him to keep his hands to himself and his python in his pants.

With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.

Good breeding differs, if at all, from high breeding only as it gracefully remembers the rights of others, rather than gracefully insists on its own rights.