Robert K. Greenleaf Quotes

We need to create a society in which civility rules over cynicism and apathy.

Public opinion alone can keep a society pure and healthy.

For too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things

Civilization depends on morality.

Throughout the 1980s, we did hear too much about individual gain and the ethos of selfishness and greed. We did not hear enough about how to be a good member of a community, to define the common good and to repair the social contract. And we also found that while prosperity does not trickle down from the most powerful to the rest of us, all too often indifference and even intolerance do.

Alabama citizens, like the vast majority of Americans, respect and value the meaning of decency, and appreciate public institutions that reflect the common values of our society.

I hope that in my books there's an undertone of politics, basic tenets of how we should live.

There is an elementary level of trust that is necessary for community. You have to be able to trust that your neighbors aren't going to look into your mailbox.

You can't legislate good will - that comes through education.

Civilization is the making of civil persons.

It's clearly more important to treat one's fellow man well than to be always praying and fasting and touching one's head to a prayer mat.

Society is held together by trust.

We can't talk about community values without being prepared to invest in those very same communities.

the more our societies grow, the more important trust becomes and the harder it is to build. And that is a paradox of modern societies.

Moroccan boys never steal from Moroccans.

People are honest, that's the culture. East Coast, but specifically Boston. People are just good people.

When the norm is decency, other virtues can thrive: integrity, honesty, compassion, kindness, and trust.

Public sentiment should be respected.

Being attentive to the things that add meaning to our lives alongside politics will help us inform our politics with the values that really do make America great.

Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society, no matter how deficient the observance of other moral principles.

A person of “good character” was one who acted in accordance with the expectations of his community

Once let good faith be abandoned, and all social existence would perish.

Dangerous acts can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.

Man is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

I think it is important that people who are perceived as liberals not be afraid of talking about moral and community values.