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. So the temptations of social media lead to some dissonance.

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

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

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.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

The black hole in democracy is integrity. The great unspoken is integrity. When integrity is not first and foremost, it's quite palpable but not visible. It's always there. Jazz highlights it because musicians and jazz always represented a high level of integrity.

I have yet to meet a man as fond of high moral conduct as he is of outward appearances.

If you are going to do something that you have to lie about, don't do it, it's very simple.

In all this world there is no substitute for personal integrity. It includes honor. It includes performance. It includes keeping one's word. It includes doing what is right regardless of the circumstances

So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.

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.

Never say anything that, down inside, you think is wrong.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

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

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.

There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

I have never obtained any ethical values from my scientific work.

There is no wrong time to do the right thing.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

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.

Cheating is only cheating when you get caught.

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.

All the gold upon the earth and all the gold beneath it, does not compensate for lack of virtue.