Quotes About Values

I'm an old-fashioned English lit. man. Straight down the line - it's George Eliot, it's Dickens, it's Dr. Johnson, it's Jane Austen.

I'm a normal lad, and if that changes, my family and friends will kick me straight back down, so it definitely won't be changing.

I was honoured recently to accept the position of president of Mizrachi U.K. I did so because I believe our eternal challenge as Jews is both straightforward and also awash with complexity: How to sanctify the innovations of the modern world in accordance with our eternal Jewish values?

All literature has this moral strain, but in Russian literature, it's particularly sharp.

In all seriousness, it really should be difficult for me to be too strange. After all, a great family raised me.

What is sacred among one people may be ridiculous in another; and what is despised or rejected by one cultural group, may in a different environment become the cornerstone for a great edifice of strange grandeur and beauty.

We must make every effort to extend a hand to the stranger, and continue to fight to make sure we don't give up on our American values.

Indeed, Miss Manners has come to believe that the basic political division in this country is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe that they should have a say in the love lives of strangers and those who do not.

There's a generation of people I think without a strong connection to family, to religion, to civic duty. They have a real disassociation from the problems of the world.

The Holocaust also shows us how a combination of events and attitudes can erode a society's democratic values.

People are persuaded to spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to create impressions that won't last, on people we don't care about.

Schwartz suggests that our values are structured around these two distinct tensions (Figure 7.2) in our psychological make-up: between selfishness (self-enhancement, in Schwartz's scheme) and altruism (self-transcendence) on the one hand, and between novelty (or openness to change) and tradition (or conservation) on the other.39

It's as if the moment society started to break down, people lost their handle on right and wrong.

His objective was to achieve something which the dead, the living, and the children yet unborn would approve of

The people and the mindset that killed 3 000 of our fellow citizens on September 11 2001, would have killed not 3 0, but 300 000 if they could have or 3 million or 30 million. We need to do everything we can within our value systems and legal structures to make sure that doesn't happen.

Sometimes you have to choose between honesty and kindness, and I've always been a sucker for the kind side.

When I honor, I don't keep track of it. I don't save it for later as a leverage point to get the other person to honor me. I do it because the behavior is consistent with the person I want to be.

The whole thing, said the President, was a paradox … of trying to meet the threat to our values and institutions by methods which themselves endangered these institutions. Here was an existential dilemma of the cold war: using undemocratic methods to defend American democracy. But Eisenhower believed that the ends would justify the means when the issue was national survival.

The vices of these savages are very few when compared to ours... One does not see here greed for another man's wealth, because articles of prime necessity are very few and all are common. Hunger obliges no one to rob on the highways, or to resort to piracy. The natural bounty was so great that the natives actually fought some wars with food, trying to outdo one another with culinary gifts at their potlatches.

There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune," Roosevelt said just before he became president.

Don't do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself. You'll always know.

One of the most universal causes of self-doubt and depression: trying to impress people you don't like. Stressing to impress is fine, but do it for the right people - those you want to emulate.

the key to not feeling rushed is remembering that lack of time is actually lack of priorities. Take time to stop and smell the roses, or—in this case—to count the pea pods.

If you can't see yourself working with someone for life, don't work with them for a day.