Quotes About Values

Except to the insane narrow-mindedness of industrial economics, selfishness does not pay.

There is no sense and no sanity in objecting to the desecration of the flag while tolerating and justifying and encouraging as a daily business the desecration of the country for which it stands.

That computers are expected to become as common as TV sets in "the future" does not impress me or matter to me. I do not own a TV set. I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work.

A number of people, by now, have told me that I could greatly improve things by buying a computer. My answer is that I am not going to do it. I have several reasons, and they are good ones.

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.

In every class of society, gratitude is the rarest of all human virtues.

We don't want genius in this country unless it is accompanied by respectability.

How inestimably important in its moral results—and therefore how praiseworthy in itself—is the act of eating and drinking! The social virtues center in the stomach. A man who is not a better husband, father, and brother after dinner than before is, digestively speaking, an incurably vicious man.

Mi devoto amor por la verdad se halla, gracias a Dios, muy por encima de mi respeto por las personas.

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

Society is founded not on the ideals but on the nature of man

Wherever philosophy arises, the moral health of the nation decays.

It would be better to abandon our overrapid development of the intellect, and to aim rather at training the heart and the affections

When mere creeds or ceremonies usurp priority over moral excellence as a test of religion, religion has disappeared

There are only three things worth while in this world—justice, beauty and truth; and perhaps none of them can be defined.

Science gives man ever greater powers but less significance. It gives him better tools with less purposes. It is silent on origins, values, and ultimate aims. It gives life and history no meaning or worth that is not canceled by time and death.

Frankl asserts that the potentialities of life are not indifferent possibilities, but must be seen in the light of meaning and values. Such meaning and values cannot be imposed; each individual must seek out for himself or herself the meaning of each situation and the implications the present moment may have for the future.

with a bias toward individualism that affects our conceptualization of the social. Smelser (1997: 29) says: "We live in the Western cultural tradition, which has exploited the cultural values of individualism. As children of that tradition, we are most comfortable taking the individual person as the starting point of analysis. Put another way, that cultural tradition 'tilts' us toward assuming that the natural unit for the behavioral and social sciences is the individual.

Those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them -- are ruinous!

It's very odd...that some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking. You never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate--all those values shrink abominably.

No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I've always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn't have a man marry for money,--that would be rather bad,--but I don't see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn't fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should

We find that in the absence of demonstrable truth, the best we can do is to exercise the greatest diligence, humility, insight, intelligence, and industry in trying to arrive at the nearest values to truth. I hope, of course, to argue convincingly that having done this, we have an inescapable duty to seek to inculcate others with these values.

Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.