Lin Yutang Quotes

We make a big mistake when we conclude that the law is the answer to bad behavior. In fact, the law alone stirs up more of such behavior. People get worse, not better, when you lay down the law. To be sure, the Spirit does use both God's law and God's gospel in our sanctification. But the law and the gospel do very different things.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

I personally think that most people, most of the time, do the right thing. I just believe this. Otherwise, the world would be chaos, and it's not.

To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

Everyone wants a better life: very few of us want to be better people.

In fact, because people are religious, they think they can do bad things.

Society develops a type of self-censorship, with the knowledge that surveillance exists - a self-censorship that is even expressed when people communicate with each other privately.

If people were not wicked I should not mind their being stupid; but, to our misfortune, they are both.

Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.

It is just as foolish to complain that people are selfish and treacherous as it is to complain that the magnetic field does not increase unless the electric field has a curl. Both are laws of nature.

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people.

Concepts of integrity and heroism and honor are still important to the world today. Some people behave well, and some people behave badly.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

So, on the whole, I'd have to say that no, people don't change, but they CAN learn to behave differently. I want to believe otherwise. If you have an argument that says I'm wrong, I'd be glad to hear it.

If thou desire to see thy child virtuous, let him not see his father's vices: thou canst not rebuke that in them, that they behold practised in thee; till reason be ripe, examples direct more than precepts: such as thy behaviour is before thy children's faces, such commonly is theirs behind their parents' backs.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves.

Must be yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please.

I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn't be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn't be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters - who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.

It would be a great thing if people could be brought to realize that they can never add to the sum of their happiness by doing wrong.

None are known to be good, till they have opportunity to be bad.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, That to the use of actions fair and good He likewise gives a frock or livery That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence; the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature.

Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to being good.

The grand delusion of contemporary liberals is that they have both the right and the ability to move their fellow creatures around like blocks of wood - and that the end results will be no different than if people had voluntarily chosen the same action