Billy Graham Quotes

The more you talk about - and live by - your principles, the harder it will be for others to treat you in a morally ambiguous manner.

Ethical is 'I'll wait and do what's right even in the hardest times and even if I have to give up gains to do it.'

The point never to lose sight of is to be guided by the correct thing, as you see it. It's the only way to approach such profound matters and retain your integrity.

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

We will not, on the altar of money, mortgage our conscience, mortgage our faith, mortgage our salvation.

Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman.

There’s nothing more important than people’s conscience and there’s nothing that needs more protection.

I have learned that a clear conscience, or a legal opinion, does not make you ethically bullet proof.

There is a minimum requirement of morality, of moral compass, of decency, of moral empathy. And if you are incapable of meeting that minimum requirement, you can't even talk to me about policy.

Occasionally the conflict between 'what we stand for' and 'what we do' has been forthrightly addressed.

I have a clean conscience and ideals that I am willing to defend.

To yield to the threat or actual use of violence is a surrender of one's self respect and religious conviction.

Always stand on principle even if you stand alone.

The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate or encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.

Integrity is never painless.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

Conscience, that vicegerent of God in the human heart, whose "still small voice" the loudest revelry cannot drown.

Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.

The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.

Ethics is inescapable.

If, on a full and final review, my life and practice shall be found unworthy of my principles, let due infamy be heaped on my memory; but let none be led thereby to distrust the principles to which I proved recreant, nor yet the ability of some to adorn them by a suitable life and conversation. To unerring time be all this committed.

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

Truth and right are above utility in all realms of thought and action.