Quotes About Integrity

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.

To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be…

When God says to me, "obey," then I humbly bow my head, without compromising in the least my personal dignity, as a man.

The people when rightly and fully trusted will return the trust

Having thus chosen our course, without guile and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in God, and go forward without fear and with manly hearts.

With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right

By general law life and limb must be protected; yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.

I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that "it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams."

When I do good, I feel good, when I do bad, I feel bad, and that's my religion.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel.

Politicians [are] a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.

We were proclaiming ourselves political hypocrites before the world, by thus fostering Human Slavery and proclaiming ourselves, at the same time, the sole friends of Human Freedom.

They have seen in his [Senator Stephen A. Douglas's] round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices, land offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands. . . . Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out.

If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. -Speech at Clinton, Illinois, September 8, 1854.

If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.

No man has a good enough memory to make a successful liar.

It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices, have very few virtues.

I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views…. I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men, everywhere, could be free.

It's not me who can't keep a secret. It's the people I tell that can't.

I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.

The love of property and consciousness of right and wrong have conflicting places in our organization, which often makes a man's course seem crooked, his conduct a riddle.

My old father used to have a saying: If you make a bad bargain, hug it all the tighter.

I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.