Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

I’ve had big record label presidents look me in the face and say, ‚Your music sucks, you don’t know who you are, your music is all over the place, and we don’t know how to market this stuff. Pick a lane and come back to us.‘

The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods.

Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.

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

A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas.

The human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he’s no longer God… They’ll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

It is easier to be critical than correct.

May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

With regard to donations always expect the most from prudent people, who keep their own accounts.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

In whatever adulation you get, there’s truth and there’s not truth. And wherever they dog you, and they say it was horrible – there’s truth and there’s not truth. It’s human nature to like to read the adulation more.

There will be no whitewash in the White House.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Give a critic an inch, he’ll write a play.

I always say, decisions I make, I live with them. There’s always ways you can correct them or ways you can do them better. At the end of the day, I live with them.

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 rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

If we could just find out who’s in charge, we could kill him.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

I believe – we all pay taxes. I’m happy to pay it, but I hate to have it abused, money wasted, no accountability. That’s going to bother you.

It means, people who are in high and responsible positions, if they go against righteousness, righteousness itself will get transformed into a destroyer.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.

I brought myself down. I impeached myself by resigning.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

Especially when you’re at a high level in an organization, criticism can be devastating to an employee. I prefer to praise employees for what they’re doing right, and it tends to lead to them doing more of the same. Not always, but it’s the way I choose to bet.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

Ethics and power are separate.

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency.

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Plato was a bore.

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done.

Yes, sir, no, sir, clock in, clock out. Why were you late? Why are you not in today? That’s not how humans are supposed to live.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

People who don’t like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that’s how life is.

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.

Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will, much more a man who hath any honesty in him.

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

As we know, while our species remains alive, everybody has the sacred duty to be optimistic. Ethically, any other behaviour wouldn’t be admissible.

I don’t care if people I admire criticize me because their opinion is valuable to me.

In the game of cricket, a hero is a person who respects the game and does not corrupt the game. The one who doesn’t or corrupts the game, they are the villain. They should be punished, and they have been punished in the past.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.

I tend not to like an awful lot of what is going out under my name now because it is just all product. Who needs it?

I’ll never tell a lie. I’ll never make a misleading statement. I’ll never betray the confidence that any of you had in me. And I’ll never avoid a controversial issue.

Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.

There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

After the first International Days of Protest in October, 1965, Senator Mansfield criticized the ‚sense of utter irresponsibility‘ shown by the demonstrators.

There is a blessed necessity by which the interest of men is always driving them to the right; and, again, making all crime mean and ugly.

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

With Benghazi, I don’t see anyone saying, ‚Hey look, I am overall responsible for this and therefore, I take responsibility for what happened. It’s my fault.‘ I haven’t heard that yet. Meanwhile, the other side of the coin, the Osama bin Laden raid, it seems everyone made that decision, and that’s just unbelievable to me.

Suppose I criticise Iran. What impact does that have? The only impact it has is in fortifying those who want to carry out policies I don’t agree with, like bombing.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.