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.

States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.

Those who know me know I’m passionate about lists, and top of my list of priorities is my family. My wife Joan and I do not consider our legacy to our children to be wealth or fame but the opportunity to pursue happiness by following their own path.

Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.

This is the mark of a really admirable man: steadfastness in the face of trouble.

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

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

If a man’s character is to be abused there’s nobody like a relative to do the business.

You start to become successful, and everybody starts to drive your money train to the bank, and they’re not thinking anymore about what you want as an artist or if any of that even matters to you. It genuinely upsets people in my life that I don’t care about money, and that’s not my problem.

Lenience will operate with greater force, in some instances than rigor. It is therefore my first wish to have all of my conduct distinguished by it.

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

People who don’t know the true character of God – who don’t believe He is merciful, gracious and slow to anger – can never have a close, personal, intimate relationship with Him.

Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth to see it like it is, and tell it like it is, to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.

It’s okay to eat fish because they don’t have any feelings.

I’m Mickey Mouse. They don’t know who’s inside the suit.

My days, my years, my life has seen up and downs, lights and darknesses. If I wrote only and continually of the ‚light‘ and never mentioned the other, then as an artist, I would be a liar.

If one has a good disposition, what other virtue is needed? If a man has fame, what is the value of other ornamentation?

Injustice is censured because the censures are afraid of suffering, and not from any fear which they have of doing injustice.

I say what I want to say and do what I want to do. There’s no in between. People will either love you for it or hate you for it.

Every time I say something that’s extremely truthful out loud, it literally breaks the Internet.

Modesty is not only an ornament, but also a guard to virtue.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Let us not forget who we are. Drug abuse is a repudiation of everything America is.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.

If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.

The skin of my character in ‚The Man Who Fell to Earth‘ was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

People often think I’m a faker, but I’m usually honest, in a certain way – in such a way that often nobody believes me!

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expedience.

All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbor as yourself.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.

It is not fair to ask of others what you are not willing to do yourself.

There’s no political point worth my son’s life.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.

Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.

Rascals are always sociable, more’s the pity! and the chief sign that a man has any nobility in his character is the little pleasure he takes in others‘ company.

I am the son of a freedom fighter, and a son of a freedom fighter automatically imbibes the value of democracy.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able to do.

I’ve laid my friends bare.

Fear is the mother of morality.