Luther Burbank Quotes

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.'

It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.

It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.

Knavery is supple, and can bend, but honesty is firm and upright and yields not.

I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian.

Few serve truth in truth because only few have the pure will to be just, and of those again very few have the strength to be just.

And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of your neighbor's pocket? No, it's not as easy as that. If that were all, I'd say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren't. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

He who indulges in falsehood will find the paths of paradise shut to him.

Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie: a fault which needs it most, grows two thereby.

In morals, truth is but little prized when it is a mere sentiment, and only attains its full value when realized in the world as fact.

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

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.

The poet nothing affirmeth and therefore never lieth.

I can't tell a lie - not even when I hear one.

One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.

When I saw corruption, I was forced to find truth on my own. I couldn't swallow the hypocrisy.

The just man walks in his integrity

Amongst all the accusations that have ever been made against me, no man ever before imputed to me a lack of candor or charged me with duplicity, and no man ever shall and escape my denunciation. When a man so accuses me, it matters not where I am or who he is, I will write "liar" across his forehead, so that in future years all men may know him and all honest men may shun him.

Nothing is more perilous than truth in a world that lies.

Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.

Of all faults the one she most despised in others was the want of bravery; the meanness of heart which leads to untruth.

That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

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

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.