No public man can be just a little crooked.

Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.

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.

I do not recognize the right of the public to break in the front door of a man’s private life in order to satisfy the gaze of the curious… I do not think it right to dissect living men even for the advancement of science. So far as I am concerned, I prefer a post mortem examination to vivisection without anaesthetics.

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

Live one day at a time emphasizing ethics rather than rules.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

I would be loath to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.

No one ever doubts that I mean what I say. The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean.

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.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

I don’t like people going behind my back.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

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

My brother Bob doesn’t want to be in government – he promised Dad he’d go straight.

I love to go to the zoo. But not on Sunday. I don’t like to see the people making fun of the animals, when it should be the other way around.

I don’t mind telling a dark side.

Tricks and treachery are the practice of fools, that don’t have brains enough to be honest.

By a lie, a man… annihilates his dignity as a man.

I’m skeptical of any mission that has advertisers at its centerpiece.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

Ken Lay, the disgraced former chairman of Enron, found a way to escape his legal problems: He died after being convicted of fraud and conspiracy charges.

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.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

You have to listen very carefully and tell the truth if you are going to get a paranoid person to open up to you.

We must distinguish between speaking to deceive and being silent to be reserved.

When you stand for something, you’ve got to stand for it all the way, not half way.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

I want to be a man who is truthful and who won’t let pride get in the way of my ripping myself open to my partner and saying, ‚Here I am. This is me.‘ I feel there’s something powerful when a man reaches a point in his life when he can be completely vulnerable.

Let’s be honest – tracking down, rounding up, and deporting millions of people isn’t realistic. Anyone who suggests otherwise isn’t being straight with you. It’s also not who we are as Americans.

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty as his own nature reveals it, never sins.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

A letter does not blush.

All of us knows, not what is expedient, not what is going to make us popular, not what the policy is, or the company policy – but in truth each of us knows what is the right thing to do. And that’s how I am guided.

I love being in a courtroom.

I do not know how to teach philosophy without becoming a disturber of established religion.

I’m not trying to get myself up a notch on the ladder by shoving somebody else down on the ladder, whether it’s a candidate or the president of the United States or anybody else. I just don’t believe that’s the way one oughta campaign, I’ve never done that.

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Ingratitude is the essence of vileness.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

You’re morally tainted if you don’t treat both the accuser and the accused with fairness and with respect, and with due process.

Morality which depends upon the helplessness of a man or woman has not much to recommend it. Morality is rooted in the purity of our hearts.

The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action.

The only objects of practical reason are therefore those of good and evil. For by the former is meant an object necessarily desired according to a principle of reason; by the latter one necessarily shunned, also according to a principle of reason.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

Of two evils, choose neither.

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.

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.

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

I meant what I said and I said what I meant.

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.

Abortion is clearly wrong.

Racism is real in this country.

A right delayed is a right denied.

There is still much debate about whether torture has been effective in eliciting information – the assumption being, apparently, that if it is effective, then it may be justified.

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

Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.