W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: a fault which needs it most, grows two thereby.

I don't think lying has any ultimate justification. I don't think it ever leads to anything positive. The good fight to have is not to lie. That's one of the challenges in a way.

Let none of us delude himself by supposing that honesty is always the best policy. It is not.

My dad once told me, he was like, 'The only time you should lie is when someone's holding a gun to your head and says 'Okay, lie or I'm going to shoot you.' And that really stuck with me.

The greatest want of the world is the want of men - men who will not be bought or sold; men who in their inmost souls are true and honest; men who do not fear to call sin by its right name; men whose conscience is as true to duty as the needle to the pole; men who will stand for the right though the heavens fall.

There are times when lying is the most sacred of duties.

Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

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

Without courage there cannot be truth, and without truth there can be no other virtue.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

When treating with liars, even an honest man must lie.

Only the difference between truth and lies, courage and cowardice.

God grant to all of us the power and strength to be people of integrity, and the insight and wisdom to avoid being led into the snares of the dishonest.

Alanna didn't approve of lying, but in a pinch a lie was sometimes better than the truth.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

When we tell little white lies, we become progressively color-blind. It is better to remain silent than to mislead.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.

Character is that quality of mind which makes truth-telling instinctive rather than strange.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

The superior man does not, even for the space of a single meal, act contrary to virtue. In moments of haste, he cleaves to it. In seasons of danger, he cleaves to it.

My pet peeve and my goal in life is to somehow get an adjective for 'integrity' in the dictionary. 'Truthful' doesn't really cover it, or 'genuine.' It should be like 'integritus.'

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.