Decency Quotes - Page 15

• Canada is one of the few places left where the small decencies are observed. If, as a young man, I was scornful of the country because we always seemed so far behind style-setting New York, I now thank God for the cultural lag. Ours, after all, is the good neighbourhood. A society well worth preserving.

  Mordecai Richler

  Country, New York, Men

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• Poverty, many can endure with dignity. Success, how few can carry off, even with decency and without baring their innermost infirmities before the public gaze!

  Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham

  Poverty, Dignity, Endure

  Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham (1902). “Success”

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• The long history of mankind is studded with convergences, perhaps most notably in social systems and the use of artefacts and technology. But for human history, set in the arrow of time, there appears to be one intolerable stumbling-block. This is the catastrophic failure in human values and decency.

  Simon Conway Morris

  Block, Technology, Arrows

  "The Crucible of Creation". Book by Simon Conway Morris, 1998.

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• Humanity, morality, decency, might be forgotten, but codfish must still be had for the use of the faithful in Lent and on fast days.

  Francis Parkman

  Humanity, Faithful, Use

  Francis Parkman (1871). “Pioneers of France in the New World”, p.208

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• Liberty ... was a two-headed boon. There was first, the liberty of the people as a whole to determine the forms of their own government, to levy their own taxes, and to make their own laws.... There was second, the liberty of the individual man to live his own life, within the limits of decency and decorum, as he pleased -- freedom from the despotism of the majority.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Law, Two

  Lapham's Quarterly, Alexander Hamilton, Ezra Pound, Richard Hofstadter, Thomas Jefferson (2016). “Alexander Hamilton: Lapham's Quarterly - Special Issue”, p.124, Pronoun

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• What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Running, Mean, Opportunity

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.293

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• We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want more community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it.

  James Davison Hunter

  Strong, Character, Emotional

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• Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.

  Cornel West

  Kings, Live Life, Yellow

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I'm inspired by the people I meet in my travels--hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I'm inspired by the love people have for their children. And I'm inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.

  Barack Obama

  Family, Children, Heart

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• I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.

  Stephen Fry

  Writing, Paper, Would Be

  Stephen Fry‏ @stephenfry, twitter.com. October 16, 2009.

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• Men often treat others worse than they treat themselves, but they rarely treat anyone better. It is the height of folly to expect consideration and decency from a person who mistreats himself.

  Thomas Szasz

  Kindness, Men, People

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• I have found that the greatest help in meeting any problem with decency and self-respect and whatever courage is demanded, is to know where you yourself stand. That is, to have in words what you believe and are acting from.

  William Faulkner

  Courage, Integrity, Believe

  William Faulkner, Joseph Leo Blotner (1978). “Selected letters of William Faulkner”, Vintage

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• The first purpose of clothes... was not warmth or decency, but ornament.... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Country, Spiritual, Men

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Sartor Resartus”, p.23

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• What's wrong with death sir? What are we so mortally afraid of? Why can't we treat death with a certain amount of humanity and dignity, and decency, and God forbid, maybe even humor. Death is not the enemy gentlemen. If we're going to fight a disease, let's fight one of the most terrible diseases of all, indifference.

  Robin Williams

  Death, Fighting, Humanity

  "Fictional character: Hunter Patch Adams". "Patch Adams", www.imdb.com. 1998.

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• With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in men, than any other association of men.

  Clarence Darrow

  Honesty, Character, Men

  The Railroad Trainman, November 1909.

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• Presidents should do whatever possible and practical to encourage an environment of cooperation and bipartisanship. And they should maintain a certain level of decorum, diplomacy and decency. But, at the end of the day, presidents get elected to enact change.

  Mark McKinnon

  The End Of The Day, President, Levels

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• A great number of those working for liberal causes are not only shy but borderline collusive. They want change to happen nicely, and it won't. They want decency to come about without anybody suffering or being embarrassed, and it won't. And most of all they want to give many of the enemies of open government the benefit of the doubt, and I don't. It's not just a difference of approach, it's a complete schism in our respective philosophy. You can't go about disclosure in the hope that it won't spoil anybody's dinner.

  Julian Assange

  Philosophy, Government, Differences

  Julian Assange (2011). “Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography”, p.135, Canongate Books

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• It should be clear that the death penalty does just the opposite of promoting decency and respect for life. It dehumanizes people and promotes murder. It can never be applied fairly.

  John Morrison

  Opposites, People, Doe

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• Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present.

  Roger Lowenstein

  Home, Past, Common Sense

  Roger Lowenstein, (2010). “Buffett”, p.372, Gerald Duckworth & Co

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• The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.

  Aldous Huxley

  Worst Enemy, Common Decency, Literature

  Aldous Huxley (1956). “Adonis and the alphabet: and other essays”

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• The hand that gives is among the hand that takes. Money has no fatherland, financiers are without patriotism and without decency, their sole object is gain.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Hands, Giving, Gains

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• When I get on the internet and hide behind a false identity, and then allow that hiding to free me from the standards of decency, to begin to use language I would never use in front of my mother, all of a sudden, there's nothing between me and you, but worse than that, there's nothing between me and my worst self.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Mother, Identity, Language

  Source: sojo.net

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• No one's so old that he mayn't with decency hope for one more day.

  Seneca the Younger

  Age, One More Day, Old Age

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• Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. When it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child - an ostracism and obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father does not share.

  Suzanne La Follette

  Mother, Children, Father

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• It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Proportion, Blight, Centralization

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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