David Brooks 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.

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

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

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.

People will not follow a leader with moral incongruities for long. Every time you compromise character you compromise leadership. The foundation of firm leadership is character.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

Some are able and humane men and some are low-grade individuals with the morals of a goat, the artistic integrity of a slot machine, and the manners of a floorwalker with delusions of grandeur.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.

Integrity is never painless.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

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

I have a pretty keen ethical compass.

It's better to die doing good than to live doing evil.

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

Is it important to be right or is it important to do what's right? That's one of the hardest lessons to learn.

It is difficult for me to regard anyone who obeys no moral principle in his conduct to be a religious man.

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.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

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

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

There is no wrong time to do the right thing.

Prefer punishment to disgraceful gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one's whole life.

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.

In business, everything starts with integrity. Otherwise it falls apart, though it does take time to find out who has integrity.