Quotes About Values

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

It is also a matter of greater consensus than ever that the high and equal status of human beings entitles them to some basic political freedoms, such as the rights to speak and to be free from torture. When it comes to what share people ought to get of the good things in life, however, consensus is much harder to achieve.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Again and again both Westerners and non-Westerners point to individualism as the central distinguishing mark of the West.

The attribution of value to a traditional religion," Ronald Dore noted, "is a claim to parity of respect asserted against 'dominant other' nations, and often, simultaneously and more proximately, against a local ruling class which has embraced the values and life-styles of those dominant other nations.

We Americans" face a substantive problem of national identity epitomized by the subject of this sentence. Are we a "we," one people or several? If we are a "we," what distinguishes us from the "thems" who are not us? Race, religion, ethnicity, values, culture, wealth, politics, or what?

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.

The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

I do find myself to become more and more thoughtful about getting of money than ever heretofore.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society's values, can force it to change.

But, learn that although all men are for sale, they don't sell themselves to all buyers.

Our own heart, and not other men's opinions, forms our true honor.

We pay a price when we deprive children of the exposure to the values, principles, and education they need to make them good citizens.

It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.

Give what you believe in and not what you have.

Le sobraba la plata para ser un vago y no le alcanzaba para ser respetable.

A handsome man is good to look at, but a good man will be handsome as well.

If for things good and noble thou wert yearning, If to speak baseness were thy tongue not burning, No load of shame would on thine eyelids weigh; What thou with honour wishest thou wouldst say.

To have beauty is to have only that, but to have goodness is to be beautiful too" As translated by Suzy Q. Groden in Sappho: Poems (1966)

We don't have the luxury of time. We spend more because of how we live, but it's important to be with our family and friends.

She confessed once in a television interview that she would rather "weep in a Rolls-Royce than be happy on a bicycle.

If you ever forgot that money did not buy what mattered in life, New York pizza would remind you.

I could hear her [Vic's Italian mother] saying, "Yes, Vic, you are pretty -- but pretty is no good. Any girl can be pretty -- but to take care of yourself you must have brains. And you must have a job, a profession. You must work.