John G. Diefenbaker Quotes

Politicians may do as they please, so long as they violate no rule of right, no principle of justice, no law of God; but in no world, in no order, or condition, have men the right to do wrong.

What is done cannot be effaced. We have to act upon a moral field prepared for us ...

The more freedom you give people to do good, the more freedom they have to do bad as well.

My feeling is that the hero has now been defined by phrases like the odious one that we were all raised with - crimes does not pay. Of course it pays, you schmuck. That's not why we don't do it. We don't do it because it is wrong.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

If you tie a man's hands there is nothing moral about his not committing murder.

Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do.

With freedom comes responsibility

Use well thy freedom.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.

There are two freedoms - the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where he is free to do what he ought.

Justice is the sum of all moral duty.

There is no shame in black athletes not wanting to be role models, but there should be shame when they don't behave like one. It's a free country and people can do whatever they want. But just because we can doesn't mean we should.

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.

You will be judged in years to come by how you responded to genocide on your watch.

There is no truth without responsibility following in its wake.

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

Someone once asked, 'What is the difference between me and Saddam Hussein?' The answer is, 'I have a conscience and he doesn't.'

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Let us prize our freedom; but not use our liberty for a cloak of maliciousness.

Only when the voice of duty is silent, or when it has already spoken, may we allowably think of the consequences of a particular action.

I think if we wish to live in any kind of a moral universe, we must hold the perpetrators of violence responsible for the violence they perpetrate. It's very simple. The criminal is responsible for the crime.

'The Author' is a play about responsibility, how active we are as spectators and how responsible we are for what we choose to look at.

The power to do good is also the power to do harm.