“To love life, is to love everything that lives.” ——Author Unknown
“To the wrongs that need resistance, to the right that needs assistance, to the future in the distance, give yourselves.” ——Carrie Chapman Catt
“Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.” ——Joseph Addison
“Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.” ——Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.” ——Rev. Martin Luther King, 4 April 1967
“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.” ——Albert Camus
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” ——Martin Luther King, Jr.
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” ——Albert Einstein
“A good conscience is a continual Christmas.” ——Benjamin Franklin
“While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader… If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security.” ——John Adams
“Individualism, as a definition of holding to personal ideals, is classed as obstinacy and anti-social. Inevitably we run point blank into the evils of compromise. When compromise enters our moral fiber, it spreads like a cancerous growth. We think we plan adequate safeguards around areas in which we contemplate yielding our standards, but once we lower the fence and break our strong will to do right, come what may, we expose ourselves to forces that spread beyond control. Compromise always starts on some rather insignificant principle. The dangers of yielding seem negligible and we usually risk those things first where observation and detection by others is difficult. We thus seek to avoid censure and discipline. In a short time we find ourselves trading our principles for false values and doing it in the black market of human relationships.” ——Ralph W. Hardy
“A man who has in mind an apparent advantage and promptly proceeds to dissociate this from the question of what is right shows himself to be mistaken and immoral. Such a standpoint is the parent of assassinations, poisonings, forged wills, thefts, malversations of public money, and the ruinous exploitation of provincials and Roman citizens alike. Another result is passionate desire — desire for excessive wealth, for unendurable tyranny, and ultimately for the despotic seizure of free states. These desires are the most horrible and repulsive things imaginable. The perverted intelligences of men who are animated by such feelings are competent to understand the material rewards, but not the penalties. I do not mean penalties established by law, for these they often escape. I mean the most terrible of all punishments: their own degradation.” ——Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
“In India when we meet and part we often say, ‘Namaste,’ which means: I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides; I honor the place in you of love, of light, of truth, of peace. I honor the place within you where if you are in that place in you and I am in that place in me, there is only one of us… ‘Namaste.'” ——Ram Dass
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” ——Plato
“What is it men cannot be made to believe!” ——Thomas Jefferson
“Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” ——Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.” ——Albert Einstein
“He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him anywhere.” ——Ali ibn-Abi-Talib (602 AD-661 AD)
“The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back.” ——Abigail Van Buren
“Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.” ——Alexander Hamilton
“It is easy to see the faults of others, but not so easy to see one’s own faults.” ——Gautama Buddha (563-483 BC)
“What we’re saying today is that you’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.” ——Eldridge Cleaver
“You see in others what you actually see in yourself.” ——The Guru Dronacharya in Mahabharata
“I went in search of a bad person; I found none as I, seeing myself, found me the worst.” ——Kabir, Saint Poet of North India
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.” ——Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Underlying the whole scheme of civilization is the confidence men have in each other, confidence in their integrity, confidence in their honesty, confidence in their future.” ——Bourke Cockran
“So long as we live among men, let us cherish humanity.” ——André Gide
“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
“It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.” ——Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher
“A man does what he must — in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers — and this is the basis of all human morality.” ——John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), 35th US President
“If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.” ——Molière (1622-1673), French playwright
“The bad man is the man who no matter how good he has been is beginning to deteriorate, to grow less good. The good man is the man who no matter how morally unworthy he has been is moving to become better. Such a conception makes one severe in judging himself and humane in judging others.” ——John Dewey (1859-1952)
“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” ——George Bernard Shaw
“He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.” ——Thomas Fuller
“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.)
“One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.” ——Mahatma Gandhi
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” ——Martin Luther King Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967
“The ultimate measure of a person is not where one stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where one stands in times of challenge and controversy.” ——Martin Luther King
“The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.” ——Voltaire
“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.” ——James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), British historian
“The coward wretch whose hand and heart can bear to torture aught below, is ever first to quail and start from the slightest pain or equal foe.” ——Bertrand Russell
“A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.” ——Albert Camus
“Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.” ——Thomas Alva Edison
“It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.” ——Samuel Adams
“Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.” ——Albert Einstein
“Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.” ——Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” ——John Kenneth Galbraith
“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion, to characterize our age.” ——Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“For every social wrong there must be a remedy. But the remedy can be nothing less than the abolition of the wrong.” ——Henry George (1839-1897)
“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” ——George Orwell
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” ——Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.” ——Lewis Carroll
“Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.” ——Thomas Carlyle
“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” ——Paulo Freire
“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” ——Hannah Arendt, political philosopher, born in Hanover, Germany, 1906
“When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe; he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.” ——Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1793
“By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy — indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.” ——William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)
“My generation’s apathy. I’m disgusted with it. I’m disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.” ——Kurt Cobain (1967-1994), American musician and singer of the grunge rock band Nirvana
“Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.” ——Bodie Thoene
“The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention.” ——Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), Lebanese-American philosophical essayist, novelist, mystical poet, and artist
“It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form.” ——Jean-Paul Sartre