Quotes About Decency

There are two great powers," the man said, "and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other.

There is a need for a better American political class. But for now, there is little apparent demand. Those who care the most often hate the most, and one of their chief methods of discrediting ideological allies with whom they compete is by portraying them as too tolerant of the hated political enemy. Kindness is perceived as weakness. Decency is treated as if it's cowardice. Acts of grace are an unthinkable concession to evil.

Don't mistake evil for power. That's a bad mistake we all make. Thinking that it takes more strength to break the rules of human decency than to follow them, and therefore if we follow them, we have to be the weaker ones. Bullshit.

Unbelief is a burden, but the pretence of belief, hypocrisy, is death to all that is decent in you.

Just do the right thing." The simplicity is so removed from my own generation of helicopter parents.

the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival-the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty-first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will save us.

What everyone agreed was not very nice, was the way Clémence had carried on. Obviously, she wasn't the kind of girl you'd ask again: she'd ended up showing off everything she'd got, and she'd puked all down one of the muslin curtains and completely ruined it. At least the men did go into the street to do it; Lorilleux and Poisson, when they felt queer, managed to dash as far as the pork-butcher's shop. Breeding always tells.

While criticising, one must not abuse.

If it doesn't seem nice, appropriate, or right, don't do it.

Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved and wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it, any more than there is in the grosser sin.

I fear to see the consequences of the Court's practices of substituting its own conceptions of decency and fundamental justice for the language of the Bill of Rights as its point of departure in interpreting and enforcing that Bill of Rights.... To hold that this Court can determine what, if any, provisions of the Bill of Rights will be enforced, and if so to what degree, is to frustrate the great design of a written Constitution.

If one does not have these five things there is no good in him: intellect, religion, etiquette, shame and good manners.

Charity has been made into a great virtue only because of the low level of human decency.

La caridad ha sido convertida en una gran virtud sólo por el bajo nivel de decencia humana.

The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.

A gentleman considers what is right; The vulgar consider what will pay.

human society," as C. S. Lewis puts it, "inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection.

I respected him enormously for standing by me when he knew it might ruin his career, just as he was on the brink of success: he had a streak of fundamental decency that went far beyond simply observing the convention of the day and I loved him for it.

Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman.

I would never be so bourgeois as to sleep with my own husband.

A man wasn't entitled to lie or take advantage of others merely because he didn't respect them.

I've committed many despicable acts in my life—and if I enjoyed them enough, I would do them again—but I would never dream of spoiling the ending to a book.

It feels like people will poke a spear in anyplace they can draw blood these days. It wasn't that way when I was growing up. Even in politics, people had some…" I search for the word, and the best thing I can come up with is "decency.