Klaus Kinski Quotes

I'm a firm believer that character is highly overrated. Character is a trick that we do with the audience's collusion.

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.

There is no real excellence in all of this world which can be separated from right living.

Sincerity is the norm of Heaven and the law of our nature. China and the West agree on this point, for without sincerity, no human prince could ever found a state, and no earthly teacher could ever establish a religion.

Actually, no one is born honest or corrupt.

The virtuous will be sure to speak uprightly; but those whose speech is upright may not be virtuous.

I wish I could be honest and true, but truth as I see it is not something abstract, a pious generality---It is justice at work, righteous, demanding, disciplined, sincere and unswerving; otherwise, it is not, it cannot be truth at all.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

I don't want to lie. I dislike dishonesty. And I work in Hollywood, a town and a business that relies on a lot of falsehoods with people hiding behind different facades. I don't want to be a part of that.

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.'

I do not believe in hypocrisy.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.

Sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite.

Sincerity is moral truth.

It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.

The just man walks in his integrity

I do not believe with the Rochefoucaults and the Montaignes that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues. I believe a great abatement from that proportion may be made in favor of general honesty.

Be sensible, that is, cease to be honest.

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever. But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.

My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.

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

Virtue and decency are so nearly related that it is difficult to separate them from each other but in our imagination.