Quotes About Values

And yet I find myself returning again and again to my mother's simple principle—How would that make you feel?—as a guidepost for my politics.

Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.

We didn't just love each other and make each other laugh and share the same basic values—there was symmetry there, the way we complemented each other. We could have each other's back, guard each other's blind spots. We could be a team. Of course, that was another way of saying we were very different, in experience and in temperament.

A rejection of absolutism, in all its forms, may sometimes slip into moral relativism or even nihilism, an erosion of values that hold society together, but for most of our history it has encouraged the very process of information gathering, analysis, argument, and persuasion which allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices – not only about the means to our ends, but also the ends themselves.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.

That is the one thing that makes me a Democrat, I suppose - this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government.

Like any value, empathy must be acted upon.

This dual sense of individual advancement and collective decline that I thought accounted for some of the most troubling attitudes I heard in some conversations.

But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn't share our values, who didn't work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.

There are things more important," he told me, "than getting reelected.

I was discovering, the difficulty of competing in a game where there were no clearly defined rules, a game in which your opponents are not merely trying to put a ball through a basket or push it across your goal line, but are instead trying to convince the broad public—at least implicitly, more often explicitly—that in matters of judgment, intelligence, values, and character, they are more worthy than you.

It wasn't that people didn't know the difference between good and bad policy. It just didn't matter.

the substance of patriotism mattered far more than the symbol.

I saw the possibility of practicing the values my mother had taught me; how you could build power not by putting others down but by lifting them up. This was true democracy at work—democracy not as a gift from on high, or a division of spoils between interest groups, but rather democracy that was earned, the work of everybody.

The substance of patriotism matters more than the symbols.

Our individualism has always been bound by a set of communal values, the glue upon which every healthy society depends.

I've learned to place my faith in my fellow citizens, especially those of the next generation, whose conviction in the equal worth of all people seems to come as second nature, and who insist on making real those principles that their parents and teachers told them were true but perhaps never fully believed themselves.

But she and my grandfather had no firm ideological or partisan leanings to speak of, beyond what they considered to be common sense.

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time.

our actions often contradicted the ideals of democracy, self-determination, and human rights we professed to embody.

vi la posibilidad de llevar a la práctica los valores que mi madre me había inculcado: que cada uno puede reforzar su poder no a base de menoscabar a los demás, sino elevándolos

That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.