Quotes About Integrity

You can act like a policeman or a soldier, but not both.

The only people Ryan needed to impress were those who knew him; he cared little for the rest.

The media could not be policed from without and had to be policed from within.

Yet another proof that the drafters of the Constitution had made one simple but far-reaching error. They'd assumed that the people selected by The People to manage the nation would be as honest and honorable as they'd been. One could almost hear the "Oops!" emanating from all those old graves.

It's going to be hard writing for you. I can't dip into the usual well. I have to learn to write the way I used to like to write, not the way I'm paid to write

Ideas are important. Principles are important. Words are important. Your word is the most important of all. Your word is who you are.

Your Highness, what do you call it when a high-ranking person lies right in your face?" the President asked with a wry smile. "Diplomacy.

Either people were trustworthy or they were not.

that one must know something of the truth in order to lie convincingly.

I'm tired of all this. What ever happened to honesty, Arnie? What ever happened to telling the goddamned truth? It's all a fucking game here, and the object of the game isn't to do the right thing, the object of the game is to stay here. It's not supposed to be that way!

Reporters called down every other profession—medicine, law, politics—for failing to meet a level of professional responsibility which they would allow no one to enforce on themselves, and which they themselves would too rarely enforce on their own. Do as I say, not as I do was something you couldn't say to a six-year-old, but it had become a ready cant for grown-ups. And if it got any worse, then what?

There was nothing like an appeal to honor. It was a virtue that all craved, even those who lacked it. Fundamentally, honor was itself a debt, a code of behavior, a promise, something inside yourself that you owed to the others who saw it in you.

Horner also, to quote John Paul Jones, has something a professional officer must have: "the nicest sense of personal honor." Right and wrong are identifiable in Chuck's universe, and separate. In a community where a man's word is his life, Chuck Horner's word is found in gold lettering on an adamantine wall of granite.

Things were going well. Work here was hard, but there was nothing in the way of Mickey Mouse bullshit.

You've got to dance with the one that brought you.

no one rose to exceptional greatness exclusively by being "a good soldier.

No, those few men and women who went against the establishment from time to time, only when necessary, were what ultimately made America great.

you respect a man who says what he believes, even if you disagree with it?

Cheating was a concept both foreign and integral to the fighting of wars.

Ryan was a tough, formidable son of a bitch who met things head-on when he had to. That's his weakness, Wellington told himself. He prefers to meet things head-on. He lacks subtlety. It was a common failing of the honest, and a grievous weakness in a political environment.

no man who could rationalize the death of a child could truly be called a man at all

we have a debt of honor to the people on those islands who decided that they wanted to be Americans. If we don't defend that principle, we don't defend anything. And nobody will trust us, and nobody will respect us, not even ourselves. If we turn our back on them, then we are not the people we say we are, and everything we've ever done is a lie.

Being good to people is the only insurance policy you need.

There comes a time when a man must stand up and do what he knows is Wrong.