Quotes About Integrity

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.

I have no wish to take life, not even human life

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolucionary act.

And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.

Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

Even if you are a minority of one it does not make you wrong

T]he more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God Save the King than stealing from a poor box

From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.

Much better hang wrong fellow than no fellow.

Vice is punished, but virtue is not rewarded

I have not betrayed Julia.

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite

even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.