Justice is truth in action.

Nonviolence is a good policy when the conditions permit.

A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger portion of the truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

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

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.

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.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

An unjust peace is better than a just war.

People who think too much before they act don’t act too much.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

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

If a person is successful, we imagine they are probably also ethical, conscientious and deserving of their good fortune. This obscures the fact that many people who get ahead have done so by doing less than moral actions, which they cleverly disguise from view.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

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

Trouble brews when we steal from the poor and give to the rich.

I know of only one duty, and that is to love.

No sooner said than done – so acts your man of worth.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.

We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

No public man can be just a little crooked.

In matters of truth the fact that you don’t want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.

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

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.

My religion is based on truth and non-violence. Truth is my God. Non-violence is the means of realising Him.

There’s just some magic in truth and honesty and openness.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

Without a moral framework, there is nothing left but immediate self-indulgence by some and the path of least resistance by others. Neither can sustain a free society.

Honor is the reward of virtue.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

The role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other.

I promised myself that I would write as well as I can, tell the truth, not to tell everything I know, but to make sure that everything I tell is true, as I understand it. And to use the eloquence which my language affords me.

People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.