Emma Goldman Quotes

You can do whatever you want to do as long as it is correct according to your conscience and heart.

Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies.

I believe that I have been basically anarchistic, anti-religion and anti-industry and business. In other words, anti-bureaucracy. I would like to see people behave well without having to have priests stand by, politicians stand by, or people collecting bills.

Moral liberty is the power of following, in all circumstances, our sense of right and wrong, or of acting in conformity to our reflecting and moral principles, without being controlled by any contrary principles.

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

No man loses ever on a lower level by magnanimity on a higher.

If I am a pure product of genetic, cultural, or class determination, I have no responsibility for my action in the world and, therefore, it is not possible for me to speak of ethics. Of course, this assumption of responsibility does not mean that we are not conditioned genetically, culturally, and socially. It means that we know ourselves to be conditioned but not determined.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.

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

All my growth and development led me to believe that if you really do the right thing, and if you play by the rules, and if you?ve got good enough, solid judgment and common sense, that you?re going to be able to do whatever you want to do with your life.

Convictions are a matter of choice, not force.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

Refraining from stealing: care with material goods. Undertake for one week to act on every single thought of generosity that arises spontaneously in your heart.

As is well know, I, ah..regard myself as a religious man, yet I belong to no church. I'm an able soldier yet I abhor armies. I can even add that I've been introduced to hundreds of women but never married. in other words no one's ever talked me into anything.

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.

If we can't get back to principles and integrity and it's reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble.

Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

If you are doing something for reward or punishment, you do not have morality.

Values are tapes we play on the Walkman of the mind: any tune we choose so long as it does not disturb others.

There can be no justification for choosing any part of that which one knows to be evil.

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

You have to just do your thing. As long as you don't hurt anybody along the way.

I am speaking to those among you who have retained some sovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: '- to the order of others'. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made you listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational desire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man whom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one owes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who are making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to fail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine.