Quotes About Values

If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, then we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all.

We live in a culture that discourages empathy. A culture that too often tells us our principle goal in life is to be rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained.

One of the great strengths of the United States is... we have a very large Christian population - we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage. But when you start playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that's not what America's about. Usually, our constitutions expand liberties, they don't contract them.

I think there are a whole host of things that are civil rights, and then there are other things - such as traditional marriage - that, I think, express a community's concern and regard for a particular institution.

Tonight, we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation - not because of the height of our skyscrapers, or the power of our military, or the size of our economy. Our pride is based on a very simple premise, summed up in a declaration made over two hundred years ago.

We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.

have faith that you'll see there's nothing more important than family." But he didn't have a family. Not anymore. With

When my friend Matilda lay dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, she said that she had been prepared all of her life to choose between good and evil. What no one had prepared her for, she lamented, was to choose between the good, the better, and the best—and yet this capacity turned out to be the one she most needed as she watched the sands of her life run out.

According to a recent article in the New York Times, few parents expose their children to those works in the original these days, and some of their reasons make sense. Who wants children growing up with the idea that stepmothers are wicked, ugly people are evil, women can get by on their beauty, and princesses are all white? At the same time, I worry about children who grow up thinking that every story has a happy ending and no one gets permanently hurt along the way.

The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.

It was the dumbest thing I had ever seen, but it's a family thing, and I guess it's clean.

Family and friends and faith are the most important things in your life and you should be building friendships.

I have always tried to be obedient regarding important matters like not being scalded to death by burning oil, but when public opinion takes a route far from one's inner conviction, one cannot value disobedience too highly.

My mom used to argue that tombstones don't list jobs. They list relationships—daughter, wife, mother. Forget everything else right now; I need to recoup the wife part.

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

Our surroundings compose a portrait of who we are, what we value and what we think of ourselves

When it comes to my children, my ultimate goal for them is heaven, not Harvard. If they go to the latter on their way to heaven, that's great. But if I reverse that equation, I've failed them.

It's what you do that makes your soul.

Each generation chooses its own values as well as what is important for spiritual growth — individually, when you explore and expand your innate personal power, you flourish; when you abdicate it, you create tyranny.

No woman should have as her life's mate a man who has mated with half the females in England, who brings home diseases and litters the countryside with his butter stamps. It's wrong.

When was the last time you were so completely engaged and absorbed by your work that all of a sudden you looked up and said, "I can't believe it-five hours couldn't have passed!" This is what psychologists are calling "flow." When you achieve a state of flow, you feel a sensation of confidence, of being in control, of being engaged and focused. Flow is achieved when your work is performed in sync with your aptitudes and values.