Best 82 quotes in «decency quotes» category

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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

... 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 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...

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

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

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

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

Immodest words admit of no defence, For want of decency is want of sense.

Decency renders all things tolerable.

I believe in an ultimate decency of things.

Decency is indecency's conspiracy of silence

Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private.

Honesty is nothin' compared to decency.

Morals are private. Decency is public.

Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country.

I surround myself with positive, productive people of good will and decency.

I value peace, too, when it is not bought at the price of fundamental decencies.

My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied.

silence is not weakness and decency is not pride

No one's so old that he mayn't with decency hope for one more day.

Nothing is more heart-breaking than the demise of decency.

There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!

There are those without decency who must be fought without hesitation, without pity.

Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, content to dwell in decencies for ever.

Because, if you stop to think of it, the three Rules of Robotics are the essential guiding principles of a good many of the world’s ethical systems. Of course, every human being is supposed to have the instinct of self-preservation. That’s Rule Three to a robot. Also every ‘good’ human being, with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility, is supposed to defer to proper authority; to listen to his doctor, his boss, his government, his psychiatrist, his fellow man; to obey laws, to follow rules, to conform to custom—even when they interfere with his comfort or his safety. That’s Rule Two to a robot. Also, every ‘good’ human being is supposed to love others as himself, protect his fellow man, risk his life to save another. That’s Rule One to a robot. To put it simply—if Byerley follows all the Rules of Robotics, he may be a robot, and may simply be a very good man.

All these years! All this time with us -- have you learned nothing?! You only live by the grace of our clan's tenet of forgiveness! Your judgement is shit! Rectitude is the bone that gives firmness and stature. Without decency, neither talent nor learning can make the human frame into a samurai.

Almost everything you think is sacred, good and decent, is a lie and an all-out assault against truth and decency.

But privately Reine-Marie wondered. Wondered whether what people did in a crisis was, in fact, their real selves. Stripped of artifice and social training. It was easy enough to be decent when all was going your way. It was another matter to be decent when all hell was breaking loose.

Being insulted offers you an opportunity to practice decency and having a non-response internally.

Being told you are wrong or insulted, gives you an opportunity to practice decency and having a non-response internally.

But I felt, for once, decent. Not telling-myself-I-am decent, but just decent.

But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.

Decency is such a rare thing in this world, and it can only be repaid with loyalty.

Civilized people must, I believe, satisfy the following criteria: 1) They respect human beings as individuals and are therefore always tolerant, gentle, courteous and amenable ... They do not create scenes over a hammer or a mislaid eraser; they do not make you feel they are conferring a great benefit on you when they live with you, and they don't make a scandal when they leave. (...) 2) They have compassion for other people besides beggars and cats. Their hearts suffer the pain of what is hidden to the naked eye. (...) 3) They respect other people's property, and therefore pay their debts. 4) They are not devious, and they fear lies as they fear fire. They don't tell lies even in the most trivial matters. To lie to someone is to insult them, and the liar is diminished in the eyes of the person he lies to. Civilized people don't put on airs; they behave in the street as they would at home, they don't show off to impress their juniors. (...) 5) They don't run themselves down in order to provoke the sympathy of others. They don't play on other people's heartstrings to be sighed over and cosseted ... that sort of thing is just cheap striving for effects, it's vulgar, old hat and false. (...) 6) They are not vain. They don't waste time with the fake jewellery of hobnobbing with celebrities, being permitted to shake the hand of a drunken [judicial orator], the exaggerated bonhomie of the first person they meet at the Salon, being the life and soul of the bar ... They regard prases like 'I am a representative of the Press!!' -- the sort of thing one only hears from [very minor journalists] -- as absurd. If they have done a brass farthing's work they don't pass it off as if it were 100 roubles' by swanking about with their portfolios, and they don't boast of being able to gain admission to places other people aren't allowed in (...) True talent always sits in the shade, mingles with the crowd, avoids the limelight ... As Krylov said, the empty barrel makes more noise than the full one. (...) 7) If they do possess talent, they value it ... They take pride in it ... they know they have a responsibility to exert a civilizing influence on [others] rather than aimlessly hanging out with them. And they are fastidious in their habits. (...) 8) They work at developing their aesthetic sensibility ... Civilized people don't simply obey their baser instincts ... they require mens sana in corpore sano. And so on. That's what civilized people are like ... Reading Pickwick and learning a speech from Faust by heart is not enough if your aim is to become a truly civilized person and not to sink below the level of your surroundings. [From a letter to Nikolay Chekhov, March 1886]

Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life

Curious," it said. "What you call your decent self doesn't dare look me in the eye! What a mistake people make who say that the man who won't look you in the eye is not to be trusted! As if mere brazenness were a sign of honesty; really, the theory of decency is the most amusing thing in the world.

Doubt makes a man decent.

Did freedom have to mean abolishing common decency?

Don't be afraid to go to your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency.

Do right simply because it is right.

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

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

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.