Quotes About Rectitude

The Hanlin named his granddaughter Lustrous Jade, for jade was the fairest of stones and possessed five virtues: charity, for its lustre; rectitude, for its translucence; wisdom, for its purity of sound when struck; equity, for its sharp edges that injure none; courage, for it can be broken but not bent.

Quidquid est enim quod deceat, id tum apparet cum antegressa est honestas.

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

A good man, I don´t think I´ve ever known one of those before

You must never, at any rate, lend yourself to the wrong, in any form, which you condemn.

A gentleman is someone who does not what he wants to do, but what he should do.

Summing up: Correctly interpreted, the simple economic model specifically predicts that people will be less selfish as voters than as consumers. Indeed, like diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we should expect voters to "stuff themselves" with moral rectitude. Once again, analogies between voting and shopping are deeply misleading.

Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It's not hard. Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking.

Ritual observance without moral rectitude is worse than empty; it is a counterfeit religious coin with which a worshipper wishes to procure divine and human approval for behavior that deserves censure (see Isa. 58:3–7).

It was time to pull my moral socks up and behave myself.

What's right week days is right Sundays

but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in that world. It is a vision of differential rectitude. It is not a vision of the tragedy of the human condition: Problems exist because others are not as wise or as virtuous as the anointed.

O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude...

Rectitude is the power of deciding upon a certain course of conduct in accordance with reason, without wavering—to die when it is right to die, to strike when to strike is right.

The only incorruptible thing about us.

Virtue is not something you advertise.

It's because I want you to remember that character counts. You can be the best there ever was at something, but if you have no character, what do you have? On the other hand, if you have very little as far as accomplishments but you have character, well, then you're all right in my book.

I grew up learning from a father who said, 'When you make a mistake or you make a bad decision, you man up and take responsibility.'

I've got a moral center.

If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.

I will answer injustice with justice.

Equity is often difficult to judge, and still more difficult to achieve,

Morality is not respectability.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.