James Baldwin Quotes

Ability without honor is useless.

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

I judge people based on their capability, honesty, and merit.

We all respect sincerity in our friends and acquaintances, but Hollywood is willing to pay for it.

The measure of your quality as a public person, as a citizen, is the gap between what you do and what you say.

Kids have what I call a built-in hypocrisy antenna that comes up and blocks out what you're saying when you're being a hypocrite.

There are so many different ways to lead. The most important thing is to be genuine. To have people around you trust you, trust in what you stand for and who you are. And I think that if people watch you day in and day out and believe in your motives and they believe that you set a high standard for yourself.

If we do what we think is right, not try to point-score, people will begin to trust us.

As long as I'm a good person and I do things from the heart, that's all that matters.

The young people I know judge leaders by their deeds and abhor hypocrisy. Inconsistency and point-scoring do not win respect. It's not easy to be engaged in political debate when it is reduced to performers trying to outdo each other. Actions from leaders must mirror the values they claim to espouse.

I think if you look at people, whether in business or government, who haven't had any moral compass, who've just changed to say whatever they thought the popular thing was, in the end they're losers.

I don't want people to think I'm a hypocrite.

I can sell anything that I totally believe in, but I'm a horrible salesman of something I don't believe in.

Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

Our aversion to lying is commonly a secret ambition to make what we say considerable, and have every word received with a religious respect.

I don't want people to think lm hypocritical.

I am honest in what I do and I think people respond to that honestly.

If there's one thing that I have in this business, it's respect.

If you don't have integrity, don't be in cinema.

Integrity matters. What our fans think matters.

We were raised with real values about the importance of work and respect for the people.

In the area of social righteousness we cannot be right on the inside and not do it. We cannot! Of course we have people who pretend that they can, but it simply isn't true.

You become uneasy with people in direct proportion to how many lies you have to keep track of in their presence.

You should not live one way in private, another in public.