Quotes About Integrity

Even individuals we admire can have skeletons in their closet.

We understand that honor, truth and hard work win in the end. We are Montana.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, an obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from The inhospitable board.

Jackson lead as he lived, sometimes with his heart, sometimes with his mind, sometimes with both.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible account with the ideal and the principled.

You have to appeal to people's best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.

A politician's task was to bring reality and policy into the greatest possible accord with the ideal and the principled.

no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

Conscience and character were not incidental to human affairs, but instrumental.

have apparent confidence in all, real confidence in none, until from actual experience it is found that the individual is worthy of it—from this rule I have never departed.… When I have found men mere politicians, bending to the popular breeze and changing with it, for the self-popularity, I have ever shunned them, believing that they were unworthy of my confidence—but still treat them with hospitality and politeness.

To seek vindication in the world but to suspect

Yet Lincoln could not rest. He could not stop. He ran the race. He could do no other.

You can make friends by being honest, and you can keep them by being steadfast. You must keep in mind that friends worth having will in the long run expect as much from you as they give to you.

This isn't fair, Dad," Jeb said. "This isn't fair to you." His father cut him off. "What are you talking about, fair?" Bush said. This was politics; this was real life. "Nobody owes us a damn thing. We're going to leave this city with our heads high and I don't want to hear that anymore." Bushes didn't whine. "Do your best and don't look back"—that was the code.

It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

Watergate is a shabby, tawdry business that demeans the Presidency. Am I failing to lead by not stating that?

Such was the Bush code: Strive for victory, but never seem self-involved

It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the Atmosphere." So long as the resistance was informed by fact and executed with integrity, Jefferson believed, all would be well.

There must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living; there must be shame at the thought of shirking the hard work of the world. —THEODORE ROOSEVELT, The Rough Riders and An Autobiography

Don't join the book burners," he said. "Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go into your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

The magnitude of the job dwarfs every man who aspires to it," Johnson recalled in his memoirs. "Every man who occupies the position has to strain to the utmost of his ability to fill it.

what mattered was what you did once in power, not what you said in order to get there.

He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest. If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and caliber.