Quotes About Integrity

O]ne can become whole only by the responsible acceptance of one's partiality.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it?

The ability to be good is not the ability to do nothing. It is not negative or passive. It is the ability to do something well--to do good work for good reasons. In order to be good you have to know how--and this knowing is vast, complex, humble and humbling; it is of the mind and of the hands, of neither alone.

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

Grandpa's farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa's father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed money and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn't have it at all.

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

Why should anybody wait to do what is right until everybody does it? It is not 'significant' to love your own children or to eat your own dinner, either. But normal humans will not wait to love or eat until it is mandated by an act of Congress.

To owe what you had not yet earned, to have to work to earn what you had already spent, was a personal diminishment, an insult to nature and common sense.

If you talk a good line without being changed by what you say, then you are not just hypocritical and doomed; you have become an agent of the disease.

But the safe competence of human work extends no further, ever, than our ability to think and love at the same time.

It is well established among us that you may hold up your head in polite society with a public lie in your mouth or other people's money in your pocket or innocent blood on your hands, but not with dishwater on your hands or mud on your shoes.

Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you. Only then will you have true courage. Hayden Carruth

I don't want to deny myself the pleasure of bodily involvement in my work, for that pleasure seems to me to be the sign of an indispensable integrity.

Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.

When he "stood up against this southern way of life," he had to stand alone; the other members of the union fled. He knew the exultation of his stand: "That made me merry in a way. I done what was right . . . "But he also knew its tragedy: "When they shot me it didn't shake me, when they arrested me it didn't shake me. But it shook me to see my friends was but few.

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

Wheeler served them as their defender against the law itself, before which they were ciphers, and so felt themselves—and he could do this only as their friend.

They would not have been easy in their minds if there was something they could have got away with if they had not got away with it.

If he held me in true regard he would not believe such insinuations in my disfavour. A worthy lover should assume one has unanswerable motives for all one does!" "Certainly—

A police force is like a lake. When you get out, you don't leave a hole.

Funnily enough, Paul was in his work because he liked people. He'd seen the CIA take such incredible shit over the years and save so many damn lives. The Company could not defend herself, not without giving away secrets she was bound to keep. So she just took it. He'd seen the effects of all the Company bashing in his own life.

men must act on what they believe right, not on what they believe probable.

You have a responsibility to act for others when you're the only person in a position to do so. It's how you handle it that separates the great from the mediocre.

ford.' He turned to Saul. 'I'm going to take