Quotes About Integrity

We came from a punk perspective—we did not want to get sucked into a corporate culture where basically you're signing a contract because you don't trust the other person to live up to their word

We are perfectly satisfied with the number of people who like the band," Albini declared in 1987 at the peak of the band's popularity. "It wouldn't bother us at all if half that many did. I don't think it would change anything if ten times as many came to see us. It wouldn't change the way we do anything, it wouldn't change the number of people that give a shit, it wouldn't change the effect of the band—it would just be more bodies.

You will do what looks good to you on paper / We will do what we must.

they also went out of their way to play all-ages shows, often hurting their draw by playing two sets a night.

So they just made sure they weren't part of the problem and fought the good fight, knowing they'd never prevail.

Sometimes the Minutemen got grief for being their own road crew. "But I never thought that you should play up to 'the princeling,' " says Watt, referring to the prototypical pampered rock star. "So what if nobody sees you playing the fuckin' hero or the star. I never fancied myself like that.

I saw a lot of friends and acquaintances turn their bands which were previously something that they did out of passion into a shot at a small business," Steve Albini told the venerable zine Punk Planet. "In the course of doing it, they ended up hating their bands in a way that I used to hate my job, because it became something they had to do: it was an obligation.

I'm not a criminal," said Paddington, hotly. "I'm a bear!

He didn't want to be what he wasn't, he didn't know how to be what he was.

This is an essential element of the business of being a man: to flood everyone around you in a great radiant arc of bullshit

Always true to the code," she said.

Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist's urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world.

My grandfather went around to the back door. He did not care if his visit endangered the shopkeeper's life, but he wanted it to seem as though he did.

Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening prospect.

He knew there were two kinds of truth in this world. The truth that was the unalterable bedrock of one's life and mission. And the other, malleable truth of politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers, and their clients, bent and molded to serve whatever purpose was at hand.

Livingstone had said sympathy was no substitute for action. That was an essential brick in Bosch's wall. He had built himself as a man of action and, at the moment when the integrity of his life's work had been called into question by a man on death row, he had chosen to turn his sympathy for Elizabeth Clayton into action.

But too much going with the flow is heading us into the sewer...

If we can't be honest with ourselves, how can we ever tell the truth to the people out there?

All these years in the straight life and she still had a whore's pride.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you….

Aronson was getting at the fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client's favor. They weren't always the same thing.

But when Bosch opened the files as part of his cold-case review, he took a different approach. He had always operated according to the axiom that everybody counts in this world or nobody counts. This belief dictated that he must give each case and each victim his best effort.

Freeman was a damn good prosecutor but in my view she didn't play fair. A trial was supposed to be a spirited contesting of facts and evidence. Both sides with equal footing in the law and the rules of the game. But using the rules to hide or withhold facts and evidence was the routine with Freeman. She liked a tiled game. She didn't carry the light. She didn't even see the light.

Michael Connelly