Bill Clinton Quotes

When honor and the Law no longer stand on the same side of the line, how do we choose[?]

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.

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

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.

If this isn’t good versus evil, what is?

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

I really tried, or so I thought, to avoid lying, but it seemed to me that they forced it on me by the difference in their vision of things, so that I was always transposing reality for them into something they could understand.

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Though I never scruple a lie to serve my Master, it hurts one's conscience to be found out!

It is great sin to swear unto a sin, But greater sin to keep a sinful oath.

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place.

I am doing the right thing, he told himself, so why do I feel so bad?

The pure and simple truth Is rarely pure and never simple. What's a boy to do When lies and truth are both sinful?

It is hard to tell truth, and hard not to.

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimmings when once the actions have become a lie.

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.

A satyagrahi may not ride two horses, truth and untruth, at the same time, nor, to change the metaphor, trim his sail to catch every breeze as you do in the name of communism.

But I would like to think for a moment about a man who in the morning teaches his students that a false attribution of a Watteau drawing or an inaccurate transcription of a fourteenth-century epigraph is a sin against the spirit and in the afternoon or evening transmits to the agents of Soviet intelligence classified, perhaps vital information given to him in sworn trust by his countrymen and intimate colleagues. What are the sources of such scission? How does the spirit mask itself?

Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.

The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity.

Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.

But there are times in this harum-scarum world when figuring out the right thing to do is quite simple, but doing the right thing is simply impossible.

when you're honest with yourself, often times you betray someone else!

Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.

No public man can be just a little crooked. There is no such thing as a no-man's land between honesty and dishonesty.