Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Honor is simply the morality of superior men.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.

Justice is a temporary thing that must at last come to an end; but the conscience is eternal and will never die.

The fact is, I was never too bright in school. I ain’t ashamed of it, though. I mean, how much do school principals make a month?

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

Honor is the reward of virtue.

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.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

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

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.

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.

I don’t eat with beautiful women alone.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

When I first went to places where people were suffering from war and persecution, I felt ashamed of my feelings of sadness. I could see more possibilities in my life.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn’t matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, And soundest casuists doubt, like you and me?

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

I don’t like it when people who are young act like they’re 40. That’s taking too much on. Putting up a shield and trying to act like you’re so mature or whatever – I don’t try to act mature. Some people might say I’m mature for my age, but it’s not something I’m trying to do, you know? I’m just me.

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.

Actions are visible, though motives are secret.

A leader who doesn’t hesitate before he sends his nation into battle is not fit to be a leader.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?

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

Men weren’t always happy for me. It was very challenging to watch a woman be so successful.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

One of the things I did when I discovered this huge importance of being vulnerable is very happily moved away from the shame research, because that’s such a downer, and people hate that topic. It’s not that vulnerability is the upside, but it’s better than shame, I guess.

Conscience is a man’s compass.

A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

Ethics and power are separate.

Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‚within the limits of the law‘ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

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

For I can raise no money by vile means.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn’t betray it I’d be ashamed of myself.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

When I was a kid, I never did funny things to get attention. I was never a funny person. I was never, like, ‚Oh, wow. I could say this some day on stage.‘

There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

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

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.

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

The violence in the Bible is appalling.

My parents didn’t want to move to Florida, but they turned sixty and that’s the law.

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

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

The roaring thunder of the law and the fear of the terror of judgment are both used to bring us to Christ, but the final victory culminating in our salvation is won through God’s loving-kindness.

I can analyze people’s intentions. Immediately. That’s just a warning. To everyone.

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?

To compromise simply means that you go a tiny bit below what you know is right.