Quotes About Integrity

Passivity may be the easy course, but it is hardly the honorable one.

Historical amnesia is a dangerous phenomenon not only because it undermines moral and intellectual integrity but also because it lays the groundwork for crimes that still lie ahead.

if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is right (or wrong) for others, it is right (or wrong) for us. Those who do not rise to the minimal moral level of applying to themselves the standards they apply to others -- more stringent ones, in fact -- plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of appropriateness of response; or of right and wrong, good and evil

To speak truth to power is not a particularly honorable vocation.

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another.

Il existe deux ensembles de principes. Les principes de pouvoir et de privilège et les principes de vérité et de justice. Si vous courez après le pouvoir et les privilèges, ce sera toujours au détriment de la vérité et de la justice.

If people cannot rise to the level of applying to ourselves the same standards we apply to others they have no right to talk about right and wrong.

Anybody who wants to be President, you should right away say, I don't want to hear that guy anymore. WOMAN: I'm sorry? You should say, I don't want to listen to that person anymore. Anybody who wants to become your leader, you should say, I don't want to follow. That's like a rule of thumb which almost never fails.

I don't say you're self-censoring - I'm sure you believe everything you're saying; but what I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting.

It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—no feeling, for example, that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort.

I would love to be a sellout if only someone would ask.

People who say not to speak ill of the dead are hypocrites, because you can take it ot the bank they're thinking ill.

Maybe you could casually mention to Zoe that I'm not now, nor have I ever been, an axe murderer. I'll see if I can work it into our next conversation, Flynn promised.

Give them your brains, girl, never your guts.

Told you not to tell her." "That's not how I work things. That's not how you build a relationship." "Build a relationship." Ryder snorted as he sent the drill whirling again. "You've been reading again." "Blow me.

You're excuses are so lame they're limping...

I won't consider getting horizontal with someone I can barely tolerate when we're vertical.

There is no disgrace in staying behind, not when it's the right thing.

Two of the top rules—Try Not to Hurt Anybody, and Have the Balls to Say What You Think—often clashed, but the results blended with her Be An Asshole When Necessary rule, so it worked for her.

In my world, the self-righteous are often the ones sneaking around getting blow jobs before they go home to the wives and kiddies.

Love is an empty word without respect.

Education's supposed to be more than learning--leastways that's how we were taught. It's supposed to help build your character and help teach you how to get on in the world. If it tells you that you get booted for doing what you had to do, for standing up for yourself, then something's wrong with the system.

Don't mix up who I am and what I am," she told him quietly. "You have to be honest with me, or the rest of it means nothing.

We are people of the land, we are artists and craftsmen, storytellers, but we are also a world of laws. Most are not unlike the laws you know. To take a life, to take what is not yours or not given freely, to force another to lie with you, to neglect a child or animal. All of these acts cause harm, and our first law is to cause no harm.