Quotes About Integrity

You don't need a social scientist to tell you that people behave less ethically when they think nobody can see them.

People are trying harder to look right than to be right.

We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our moral thinking to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others.

Scientists became "moral exhibitionists" in the lecture hall as they demonized fellow scientists and urged their students to evaluate ideas not for their truth but for their consistency with progressive ideals such as racial and gender equality.14

There's more to morality than harm and fairness.

Cuando nadie responde ante nadie, cuando los vagos y los tramposos quedan impunes, todo se derrumba.

We're born to be righteous, but we have to learn what, exactly, people like us should be righteous about.

Passions often corrupt reason, but if we can learn to control those passions, our God-given rationality will shine forth and guide us to do the right thing, not the popular thing.

he still shouldn't do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe.

The Fairness/cheating foundation

But the rest of the time—which is almost all of the time—accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than to be right.

WE LIE, CHEAT, AND JUSTIFY SO WELL THAT WE HONESTLY BELIEVE WE ARE HONEST

Many psychologists have studied the effects of having "plausible deniability." In one such study, subjects performed a task and were then given a slip of paper and a verbal confirmation of how much they were to be paid. But when they took the slip to another room to get their money, the cashier misread one digit and handed them too much money. Only 20 percent spoke up and corrected the mistake.24

But the story changed when the cashier asked them if the payment was correct. In that case, 60 percent said no and returned the extra money. Being asked directly removes plausible deniability; it would take a direct lie to keep the money. As a result, people are three times more likely to be honest.

I'll praise Glaucon for the rest of the book as the guy who got it right—the guy who realized that the most important principle for designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences.

with all your heart and all your brains.

It's distasteful, I know... this business of running a nation. I pray that we never get used to it. That we never grow cold from it. That we never learn to love it.

Doc, God help me for saying it—if you repeat this I'll totally deny it—but some sperm deserve to be drowned before they get a chance to swim.

There's profit in law enforcement?" "I was thinking spiritually." —

To trust someone is to take the greatest risk of all. (180)

Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.

Never trust anyone who doesn't smoke pot or listen to Dylan. Never trust anyone who doesn't like the beach. And NEVER ever, EVER, EVER trust anyone who says they don't like dogs!

He that would keep a secret must keep it secret that he hath a secret to keep.

I have always been careful of people who say they are behind me because that's where you need to be if you are going to stab them in the back.