Quotes About Integrity

He took with him into private life his enemies and his wounds, the only profits that generally accrue to honest people who are guilty of having worked for their country rather than for themselves.

After the virtue of not making a mistake, the greatest virtue of a man is to accept his mistake.

Those who stand for nothing fall for everything.

I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Hard words are very rarely useful. Real firmness is good for every thing. Strut is good for nothing.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

It was curious how some people had a highly developed sense of guilt, she thought, while others had none. Some people would agonise over minor slips or mistakes on their part, while others would feel quite unmoved by their own gross acts of betrayal or dishonesty.

Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no.

What do the Texans say? All hat, no cattle.

It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour. They looked away

There are so many ways of falling off the high moral ground you've carefully built up for yourself. Moral ground is like that—slippery at the edges.

Mma Ramotswe did not like lying, but sometimes it was necessary, particularly when faced with people who were promoted beyond their talents.

Saying sorry does not make you look small—it makes you look big.

But please be careful—and never, never think that you are justified in doing something wrong just because you are trying to do something right.

Doctors are allowed to tell us things which they might not do themselves. They know what the right thing is, but they may not be able to do it themselves. That does not mean that their advice is bad advice.

Truth had a way of coming out on top—and it was just as well for everybody that it did. If there ever came a day when truth was so soundly defeated that it never emerged, but sank, instead, under the sheer volume of untruth that the world produced, then that would be a sad day for Botswana, and for the people who lived in Botswana. It would be a sad day for the whole world, that day.

Such men knew their worth, but did not flaunt it. Such men could look anybody in the eye without flinching; even a poor man, a man with nothing, could stand upright in the presence of those who had wealth or power. People did not know, Mma Ramotswe felt, just how much we had in those days—those days when we seemed to have so little, we had so much. She

There are lies you tell with your lips and lies you don't need your lips for. And once people start telling lies, then they become like spiders who weave their web about themselves. They become stuck-caught by the lies all about them. And then they can't get out of the web, no matter how hard they try.

The trouble with the world today, she thought, was that people were not prepared to stand up to bad behaviour.

It's just that I think people should be…well, a bit more honest. We don't like being told half-truths. Or being lied to…People can tell, you know. They know when they're being lied to. Politicians find that out – eventually.

She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do what they said they would do, then life could become utterly unpredictable. The fact that we could trust one another made it possible to undertake the simple tasks of life.

You did not squeeze hands when you lied; it could not be done.

It had always struck her as wrong that we should judge ourselves-or, more usually, others-by single acts, as if a single snapshot said anything about what a person had been like over the whole course of his life. It could say something, of course, but only if it was typical of how that person behaved; otherwise, no, all it said that at that moment, in those particular circumstances, temptation won a local victory.