Quotes About Integrity

I follow someone's lead until they prove to me they aren't worth it and thin I don't.

I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy

We're the police, we don't thump people.

I wouldn't like to find out my GP was messing about with black magic. It would be like discovering that your bank manager was also a stand-up comic.

There is a special place in hell for people who bring children into this world solely for the sake of seeming better than they are.

Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. The grave will supply plenty of time for silence.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.

Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. How dare you intervene? As well ask, How dare you not?

Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: "If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you.

Hero­ism breaks its heart, and ide­al­ism its back, on the intran­si­gence of the cred­u­lous and the mediocre, manip­u­lated by the cyn­i­cal and the corrupt.

Don't swallow your moral code in tablet form.

You don't say 'they all do it' unless you know you've been doing it too.

To permit this gross new revelation to fade, or be forgiven, would be to devalue our most essential standard of what constitutes the unpardonable. And for what? For the reputation of a man who turns out to be not even a Holocaust denier but a Holocaust affirmer. There has to be a moral limit, and either this has to be it or we must cease pretending to ourselves that we observe one.

Stuck in my own trap of writing about a nonsubject, I think I can defend my own self-respect, and also the integrity of a lost girl, by saying two things. First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her. If this seems paradoxical, then very well.

I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty.

On page 607, alluding to the end of my first marriage (and carefully remembering to state that that's none of his business), he very sweetly says that I 'might leave a wife, but not a friend.' Nice try. Neat smear. But he shouldn't be so sure....

The Auden/Kallman relationship had this to be said for it: It affirmed that it's better to be blatant than latent.

Only servility requires the realm of illusion.

Actions and words are judged by reputations, and not the other way around.

because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—

Orwell was one of those upon whom nothing was lost. (This included, as Orwell himself said: "the power of facing unpleasant facts"). By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage..

Those who try to condemn or embarrass you by the company you keep will usually be found to be in very poor company themselves; in any case they are, as I was once taught to say, tackling the man and not the ball.

A high moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

while courage is not in itself one of the primary virtues, it is the quality that makes the exercise of the virtues possible.