“Integrity is choosing your thoughts and actions based upon values rather than personal gain.” ——Author Unknown
“The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.” ——Daniel Berrigan
“These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.” ——Samuel Johnson
“The only vice that can not be forgiven is hypocrisy.” ——William Hazlitt
“We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, ‘We shouldn’t have done that.'” ——Desmond Tutu
“The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.” ——Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), Escaped slave, abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and later the New National Era
“Man’s character is his fate.” ——Heraclitus (c.540-480 BC), Greek philosopher
“As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.” ——Clarence Darrow
“The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.” ——Sophocles
“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” ——Edward R. Murrow
“Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.” ——Aristotle
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” ——Mark Twain
“It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.” ——Albert Einstein
“It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.” ——Samuel Johnson
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” ——Edmund Burke
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” ——Thomas Jefferson
“The true civilization is where every man gives to every other every right that he claims for himself.” ——Robert Ingersoll
“Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.” ——Ralph Waldo Emerson
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” ——James Baldwin (1924-1987), fiction writer, essayist, social critic
“Don’t ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them.” ——Booker T. Washington
“The soul of our country needs to be awakened… When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.” ——Veterans Fast for Life
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” ——Demosthenes
“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow them.” ——Louisa May Alcott
“When you do nothing, you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved, you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.” ——Pauline R. Kezer
“If you want to build a ship, don’t herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ——Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” ——Mohandas K. Gandhi
“So let us regard this as settled: what is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.” ——Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
“He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man.” ——Samuel Adams
“Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” ——Mark Twain
“The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.” ——Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear.” ——Marcus Tullius Cicero
“But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you’re fighting for.” ——Paulo Coelho
“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?” ——Eleanor Roosevelt
“The thorns that I have reaped are of the tree I planted.” ——Lord Byron (1788-1824)
“A man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.” ——Euripides (485-406 B.C.)
“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.” ——Barry Lopez
“Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” ——Helen Keller
“Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” ——Arundhati Roy
“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.” ——Will Durant
“Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.” ——Thomas Carlyle
“Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches.” ——Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), Dominican Tertiary
“Always stand on principle, even if you stand alone.” ——John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), 6th US President
“The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.” ——Benjamin Franklin
“The greatest of fault, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” ——Robert Carlyle (1795-1881)
“It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.” ——Alfred Adler
“A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.” ——Pierpoint Morgan
“No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance.” ——Henry Miller (1891-1980), The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941
“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” ——John Locke
“The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales.” ——Aesop, Fables
“He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.” ——Thomas Fuller
“Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic throng the coward and the meek who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak.” ——Ralph Chaplin
“Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.” ——George Washington
“I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.” ——William James
“Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man’s business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society. Yes, I am my brother’s keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.” ——Eugene V. Debs, 1908
“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.” ——Charles-Louis De Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1752
“Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about his religion. Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and of service to your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place. Show respect to all people, but grovel to none. When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.” ——Tecumseh (1768-1813), Shawnee Chief
“Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. In those transparent moments we know other people’s joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.” ——Fritz Williams
“A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.” ——Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” ——Dwight Eisenhower
“It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.” ——Socrates (469-399 BC)
“The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.” ——Jane Addams