Best 82 quotes in «decency quotes» category

[Fitzgerald's] latter work represents essentially best qualities of chivalry and decency now too often lacking in the English themselves.

He was an indecent man, I told myself - prayerfully - and then I prayed for him to become decent.

I am calling for uncommon decency. Respect that comes from awareness.

Highly esteemed dear Professor Franck, In these days in which by your magnanimous decision you show the world where the insane oppression of the Jews leads to, I as one of your students would not like to be missing among those who declare their sincere thanks and unlimited veneration to you, and who especially now are filled with the highest admiration by your present step and the reason given by you, and who at the same time are filled with horror that such a thing is necessary. I am at a loss for words to express what both my wife and I always and especially now feel for you. Please remember us to your wife and chidlren and accept our sincere greetings.

He wondered about the people in houses like those. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras — they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’— kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly.

Integrity is never given. It is a quality that can only be proven over time.

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as "common decency". I treated somebody well for a little while, or even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in return. Love need not have anything to do with it. (...) Love is where you find it. I think it is foolosh to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency".

Integrity is never a given. It is a quality that can only be proven over time.

If you lose your integrity, you will also lose your identity, your sensitivity and your dignity. Integrity is honesty, modesty and security in all kinds of weather. It should be our priority!

Ikke maa du heller slaa nabokvæget brun og blaa om de av vanvare gjorde paa din eng et trav, man faar udi nabolav ei saa streng fremfare.

I pretend not to be a champion of that same naked virtue called truth, to the very outrance. I can consent that her charms be hidden with a veil, were it but for decency's sake.

Men corrupted religion; and a man's religious choice didn't matter in the least if it was his path to decency and remembering his fellow man.

It had been on my mind ever since allowing myself to call President Trump a "draft-dodging chickenhawk" during on of the DNC forums. While true, that statement was not in keeping which how I publicly speak about political figures, or anyone else, and afterward I reflected that this president was inspiring a loss of decency not just in his supporters but also in those of us who opposed him. It was another way of looking at the moral stakes of politics as it filters through to millions of lives: that we might all be growing into harder and perhaps worse people, as a consequence of political leadership that has failed to call us to our highest values.

Maybe I owe you something too, human," she said, drawing her pistol. Butler almost reacted, but decided to give Holly the benefit of the doubt. Captain Short plucked a gold coin from her belt, flicking it fifty feet into the moonlit sky. With one fluid movement, she brought her weapon up and loosed a single blast. The coin rose another fifty feet, then spun earthward. Artemis somehow managed to snatch it from the air. The first cool movement of his young life. "Nice shot," he said. The previously solid disk now had a tiny hole in the center. Holly held out her hand, revealing the still raw scar on her finger. "If it wasn't for you, I would have missed altogether. No mech-digit can replicate that kind of accuracy. So, thank you too, I suppose." Artemis held out the coin. "No," said Holly. "You keep it, to remind you." "To remind me?" Holly stared at him frankly. "To remind you that deep beneath the layers of deviousness, you have a spark of decency. Perhaps you could blow on that spark occasionally." Artemis closed his fingers around the coin. It was warm against his palm. "Yes, perhaps.

Love will ALWAYS be a fleeting emotion. Short-lived. Finite. If PEOPLE will converse in a way… where they masked their DEMONS and THOUGHTS with what they BRAND — DECENCY. ©2019 JinQue RD POET | SPIRITUAL CATALYST | AUTHOR | I AM MOONDUST

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.

Most of all, there had been a time when honor meant something at the Colgan School, when school property was respected, when the faculty was revered—when the headmaster’s mint-condition 1958 Porsche Speedster would never have been placed on top of the fountain in the quad with water shooting out of its headlights on an unusually warm evening in November. There had been a time when the girl responsible—the very one who had lucked into that last-minute vacancy only a few months before—would have had the decency to admit what she’d done and quietly taken her leave of the school. But unfortunately, that era, much like the headmaster’s car, was finished.

Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that “decent drapery” which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers.

My decency is simply a pose and so is my generosity.

No decent person deliberately chooses to be violent or cruel. We must remove our blinkers and learn that in order to live according to our true values, we need to stop viewing animals as commodities to be used, abused and killed for our own selfish benefit.

Regardfulness is the minimum expression of decency.

That girl never did have the decency to be wrong an appropriate amount of the time.

Success from the financial and from the prestige point of view . . . is not enough; what matters even more is . . . adherence to high moral and aesthetic standards." — as quoted in "High Financier" by Niall Ferguson

Survival wasn't nearly as hard as he'd thought once he left decency behind.

REJECT THE LIES AND VIOLENCE. STAND FOR LOVE, TRUTH, DECENCY AND THE COMMON GOOD.

Thank you very much, once again, I bow, I kneel, I serve, C. van de Kerkhof, I appreciate very decent people.

The character of Moses, as stated in the Bible, is the most horrid that can be imagined. If those accounts be true, he was the wretch that first began and carried on wars on the score or on the pretence of religion; and under that mask, or that infatuation, committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation. Of which I will state only one instance: When the Jewish army returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions, the account goes on as follows (Numbers xxxi. 13): 'And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp; and Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle; and Moses said unto them, 'Have ye saved all the women alive?' behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now therefore, 'kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women- children that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for Yourselves.' Among the detestable villains that in any period of the world have disgraced the name of man, it is impossible to find a greater than Moses, if this account be true. Here is an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers, and debauch the daughters. Let any mother put herself in the situation of those mothers, one child murdered, another destined to violation, and herself in the hands of an executioner: let any daughter put herself in the situation of those daughters, destined as a prey to the murderers of a mother and a brother, and what will be their feelings? In short, the matters contained in this chapter, as well as in many other parts of the Bible, are too horrid for humanity to read, or for decency to hear.

The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors.

The fact is that men who know nothing of decency in their own lives are only too ready to launch foul slanders against their betters and to offer them up as victims to the evil deity of popular envy.

The crux of my argument is this—we cannot truly understand what we should put on, say, or do, without looking at our behavior in relationship to Christ. In Christ, decency in behavior and dress is far larger than the particulars of modesty. By the world’s standards, modesty is a rule passed down from generation to generation which involves choosing a garment that submits to a certain standard set by a mother or community, one that constantly changes.” – Stacie Parlee-Johnson (Ch. 9, A Theology of Modesty)

The decent people are famous and known with their virtual decency, but not their shape or the dress.

The maid told him that a girl and a child had come looking for him, but since she didn't know them, she hadn't cared to ask them in, and had told them to go on to Mers. "Why didn't you let them in?" asked Germain angrily. "People must be very suspicious in this part of the world, if they won't open the front door to a neighbor." "Well, naturally!" replied the maid. "In a house as rich as this, you have to keep a close watch on things. While the master's away I'm responsible for everything, and I can't just open the door to anyone at all." "That's a mean way to live," said Germain; "I'd rather be poor than live in fear like that. Good-bye to you, miss, and good-bye to this horrible country of yours!

... [T]he other lesson history has taught us - that tyranny and oppression are no match for compassion ... that the fanatical shouts of the bullies of the world are invariably silenced by the unified voices of decency that rise up to meet them.

When we insult others, it says nothing about them but it shows how vulgar we are.

there’s no better system than our own morality, not law, not science, not religion… just decency.

There was also the Argument of Increasing Decency, which basically held that cruelty was linked to stupidity and that the link between intelligence, imagination, empathy and good-behaviour-as-it-was-generally-understood – i.e. not being cruel to others – was as profound as these matters ever got.

Traumatic events destroy the sustaining bonds between individual and community. Those who have survived learn that their sense of self, of worth, of humanity, depends upon a feeling of connection with others. The solidarity of a group provides the strongest protection against terror and despair, and the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. Trauma isolates; the group re-creates a sense of belonging. Trauma shames and stigmatizes; the group bears witness and affirms. Trauma degrades the victim; the group exalts her. Trauma dehumanizes the victim; the group restores her humanity. Repeatedly in the testimony of survivors there comes a moment when a sense of connection is restored by another person’s unaffected display of generosity. Something in herself that the victim believes to be irretrievably destroyed---faith, decency, courage---is reawakened by an example of common altruism. Mirrored in the actions of others, the survivor recognizes and reclaims a lost part of herself. At that moment, the survivor begins to rejoin the human commonality...

Virtue signaling' is a phrase the dim and bigoted use when they want to discount other people expressing the idea that it would be nice if we could all be essentially and fundamentally decent to each other.

When a political opponent resorts to the racist card, it's a sure sign of moral bankruptcy: there's no decent argument left in the armoury.

There’s nothing more poisonous to a community than rumors and gossips. They taint the good character of those who effortlessly stand out. They provide mediocre individuals with a means to become relevant. They set in like gangrene and eat away at the sense of decency that differentiates humans from animals.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

When approaching me in public, do not be rude. Say please. Introduce yourself. Have manners. Be considerate. Otherwise you'll be disappointed.

You asked me questions nobody ever asked me before. You knew that I was a murderer two times over, but you treated me like a man...

Yet decency nagged at their reluctant hearts; and they acknowledged that, too, in unconscious phrases -- 'I fail to understand...', 'I cannot bring myself to overlook...', 'Tolerance is all very well up to a point...' -- as if they had tried the ways of magnanimity but found them too exigent.

At least, the sun had the decency to stay the hell away from us.

... You can say what you want, whatever makes you feel better, but it's just noise. You are what you do." "It's not that simple." "It's exactly that simple. People like to believe it's complicated to feel better about what they do. Anybody who thinks it's complicated is just avoiding what that one simple principle tells them about themselves.

You may say, it was admiration. I do not think, it is all, about decency.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.

A woman without a degree of decency and delicacy is unsexed.

Honesty is nothin' compared to decency.