He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

If you’re not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you’re going to be punished for them, then what’s your motivation to continue?

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.

At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn’t collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.

Although I don’t have a prescription for what others should do, I know I have been very fortunate and feel a responsibility to give back to society in a very significant way.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?

Of course, animals have to be killed for food or to prevent their doing injury to others or to property. But such killing is too often carried out without regard to the pain inflicted.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

To be famous, in fact, one has only to kill one’s landlady.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature – opposition to it is his love of justice. These principles are an eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely, as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell.

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what’s evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We’re less sure about what is good. There’s sort of good, good enough, could be better – but absolute good is a little harder to define.

Don’t blame the marketing department. The buck stops with the chief executive.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Frankly, I think that the news industry is critically important because it points out things and surfaces truths that can often be uncomfortable. I think that that’s working, and the spotlight has been pointed on things that we have a responsibility to do better, and I accept that.

Justice… is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.

Justice is the set and constant purpose which gives every man his due.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Nonviolence is a good policy when the conditions permit.

If you want to cut your own throat, don’t come to me for a bandage.

Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.

Initiative is doing the right things without being told.

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Who will take responsibility for raising the next generation?

An individual’s refusal to carry out the criminal acts of his government sets the stage, in the most effective way possible, for the attempt to demonstrate the criminal nature of these acts.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

We need someone with superb judgement in their own right because, yes, a president can hire the best advisors on Earth, but I guarantee you this: Five advisors will give five different opinions. And it is the president – and the president alone – who always makes the final call.

What’s important for my daughter to know is that… if you are fortunate to have opportunity, it is your duty to make sure other people have those opportunities as well.

Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end.

Sin, also for those who don’t have faith, exists when one goes against one’s conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.

My husband and I had to raise five of my younger brothers and sisters. They lived with us. We sent them to school.

Every President wants to do right.

The real danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like action is happening when in fact nothing is being done.

Many religious confessions share common values. They teach that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

It’s that wonderful old-fashioned idea that others come first and you come second. This was the whole ethic by which I was brought up. Others matter more than you do, so ‚don’t fuss, dear; get on with it.‘

If you want to deal with an epidemic – crime or health – the smartest and most effective and cheapest way to deal with it is prevention first.

Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.

A president has an inescapable responsibility to provide direction: What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to prevent? Why? To do that, he has to both analyze and reflect.

Politics have no relation to morals.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.