Quotes about Integrity

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

We should be men first, and subjects afterward.

There is no help for it; for he considers, not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.

Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

I will not through humility become the devil's attorney

I will not through humility become the devil's attorney

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

To have done anything just for money is to have been truly idle.

If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again.

How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seed-time of character?

I sometimes despair of getting anything quite simple and honest done in this world by the help of men. They would have to be passed through a powerful press first, to squeeze their old notions out of them, so that they would not soon get upon their legs again; and then there would be some one in the company with a maggot in his head, hatched from an egg deposited there nobody knows when, for not even fire kills these things, and you would have lost your labor.

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders.