Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren’t easy questions.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

Reverence for life is the highest court of appeal.

When I was president, I announced and I still maintain that I can live with Roe v. Wade. I did everything I possibly could as president under that ruling, which I don’t think ought to be changed, to minimize the need for abortions. I think every abortion is a result of a horrible series of errors on the part of people involved.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, and love the offender, yet detest the offence?

You cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person.

Do FBI Agents and FBI directors have political beliefs? Sure they do. But they’re not supposed to act on them.

To terrify children with the image of hell… to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

Morality is of the highest importance – but for us, not for God.

It’s that wonderful old-fashioned idea that others come first and you come second. This was the whole ethic by which I was brought up. Others matter more than you do, so ‚don’t fuss, dear; get on with it.‘

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.

Well, I thought the deal was, when you went to work for the government you weren’t supposed to make money!

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Abortion isn’t a lesser evil, it’s a crime. Taking one life to save another, that’s what the Mafia does. It’s a crime. It’s an absolute evil.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Is science of any value? I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

There is a need for aloneness, which I don’t think most people realise for an actor. It’s almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you’ll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you’re acting. But everybody is always tugging at you. They’d all like sort of a chunk of you.

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

Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.

So far as I am concerned, I could not be accused of having set eyes, or having wished to set eyes, upon Darius‘ wife: on the contrary, I have refused even to listen to those who spoke to me of her beauty.

Charity creates a multitude of sins.

The highest reach of injustice is to be deemed just when you are not.

On the Internet, you think everything is going to be public.

Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.

Integrity has no need of rules.

If I’d written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people – including me – would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

I let people fill in the blanks on their own. If they want to think about their ex, that’s fine. If they want to think about maybe who one of my exes is, then that’s fine. And it might not be right, because I’m the only one who knows what these songs are really about. It’s the one shred of privacy I have in the matter.

A few years ago, the city council of Monza, Italy, barred pet owners from keeping goldfish in curved bowls… saying that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because, gazing out, the fish would have a distorted view of reality. But how do we know we have the true, undistorted picture of reality?

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

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

I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!

I’m always pushing for human responsibility. Given that chimpanzees and many other animals are sentient and sapient, then we should treat them with respect.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

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.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

A President’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.

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

Lawless are they that make their wills their law.

When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.

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

If what you have done is unjust, you have not succeeded.

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.

Ninety-nine percent of the men and women of the FBI… are just professionals. I don’t want Americans, if an FBI agent knocks on their door, to have to be worried about well, is he a Democrat or a Republican? He’s an FBI agent.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

You have to be careful about how much you reveal to people that look up to you so much.

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

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

There’s no difference between one’s killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing, or even worse.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

Doing well is the result of doing good. That’s what capitalism is all about.

I don’t have people following me around, like bodyguards. I don’t know how people live like that. Maybe the young movie stars have to live like that, I don’t know. But it seems a little crazy to me. I don’t think you need all that stuff.