Zephyr Teachout Quotes

Integrity is hard work. I do think the Internet makes it harder because of the temptations of performance. You can perform and have integrity, but it's easier just to perform.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

It is not true that people of high principle are ill-suited for politics.

Our probity is not less at the mercy of fortune than our property.

There is no wrong time to do the right thing.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

We believe there should be a huge area between everything you should do and everything you can do without getting into legal trouble. I don't think you should come anywhere near that line. We don't deserve much credit for this. It helps us make more money. I'd like to believe that we'd behave well even if it didn't work. But more often, we've made extra money from doing the right thing. Ben Franklin said I'm not moral because of it's the right thing to do - but because it's the best policy.

It can never be necessary to do what is not honourable.

There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules

Plunder is morally wrong. It ruins your credibility.

Ethics is inescapable.

There were few who preferred honor to money.

Integrity, a standard of personal morality and ethics, is not relative to the situation you happen to find yourself in and doesn't sell out to expediency. Its short supply is getting shorter - but without it, leadership is a facade.

Integrity is the factor that determines which one will prevail. We struggle daily with situations that demand decisions between what we want to do and what we ought to do. Integrity establishes the ground rules for resolving these tensions. it determines who we are and how we will respond before the conflict even appears. Integrity welds what we say, think, and do, into a whole person so that permission is never granted for one of these to be out of sync.

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you.

I think I am a moral man.

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

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty.

I suppose that an honest man shines more in politics than he does elsewhere.

I have a pretty keen ethical compass.

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.