Quotes about Values

In our cultural value system, we have divided up human traits between the sexes and consequently have denied each sex a part of its humanity.

There are some things to die for but none to kill for.

It's not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What's hard, she said, is figuring out what you're willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.

The problem of using your time well is not a problem of the mind but of the heart.

I always judge people who spend a lot of time in public office say they care about things, if the day after they leave, they no longer talk about them, then I don't think they cared much about them.

Chance planned to live in such a way that his son would grow up to be a strong, wise, honorable, faithful man. And the only way Chance knew to teach that was to be such a man himself.

Such was the code that the world had accepted and such was the key to the code: that it hooked man's love of existence to a circuit of torture, so that only the man who had nothing to offer would have nothing to fear, so that the virtues which made life possible and the values which gave it meaning became the agents of its destruction, so that one's best became the tool of one's agony, and man's life on earth became impractical.

It's as if they'd heard that there are values one is supposed to honor and this is what one does to honor them -- so they went through the motions, like ghosts pulled by some sort of distant echoes from a better age.

We lived by that which we held to be good and punished that which we held to be evil. You live by that which you denounce as evil and punish that which you know to be good.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not "selflessness" or "sacrifice," but integrity. Integrity is loyalty to one's convictions and values; it is the policy of acting in accordance with one's values, of expressing, upholding and translating them into practical reality. If a man professes to love a woman, yet his actions are indifferent, inimical or damaging to her, it is his lack of integrity that makes him immoral.

The integrated sum of a man's basic values is his sense of life.

What I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, had been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics--not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction ethics, the realm of values, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself.