William Jennings Bryan Quotes

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat, When it's so lucrative to cheat.

Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.

A corrupt practice may be abolished, but a soiled imagination is not easily cleansed.

If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

The highest morality may prove also to be the highest wisdom when the half-told story comes to be finished.

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

Have you no morals, man?' 'Can't afford them,Governor.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions.

The price of dishonesty is self-destruction.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state.

I should not deal with things that aren't founded on ethical principles, because that's not who I am as a human being.

Very rarely do people make big compromises with their integrity. Almost every compromise is a small one that is easily justified. The downhill slide is usually a result of many little compromises.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

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.

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

Without Virtue there can be no liberty

There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

He that departs with his own honesty For Vulgar , doth it too dearly buy.