The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.
- Jane Addams

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
- Alfred Adler

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.
- Felix Adler

The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales.
- Aesop [Fables]

What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
- Hannah Arendt, political philosopher born in Hanover, Germany in 1906

No one is more dangerous than one who imagines himself pure in heart; for his purity by definition is unassailable.
- James Baldwin (1924-1987) [Notes of a native son, 1955]

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
- Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist, statesman, and author. [The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, 1850]

The problems of this world are so gigantic that some are paralysed by their own uncertainty. Courage and wisdom are needed to reach out above this sense of helplessness. Desire for vengeance against deeds of hatred offers no solution. An eye for an eye makes the world blind. If we wish to choose the other path, we will have to search for ways to break the spiral of animosity. To fight evil one must also recognize one's own responsibility. The values for which we stand must be expressed in the way we think of, and how we deal with, our fellow humans.
- HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands [2001 Christmas Message]

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.
- Georges Bernanos

The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes – would bring terrible retribution.
- Justice Louis D. Brandeis

We, as individuals, are fast losing our reputation for honest dealing. Our nation is losing its character. The loss of a firm national character, or the degredation of a nation's honour, is the inevitable prelude to her destruction.
- William Wells Brown

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.
- Edmund Burke (1729-1797) [Second Speech on Conciliation, 1775]

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
- Albert Camus

How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
- George Washington Carver

A man who has in mind an apparent advantage and promptly proceeds to dissociate this from the question of what is right shows himself to be mistaken and immoral. Such a standpoint is the parent of assassinations, poisonings, forged wills, thefts, malversations of public money, and the ruinous exploitation of provincials and Roman citizens alike. Another result is passionate desire – desire for excessive wealth, for unendurable tyranny, and ultimately for the despotic seizure of free states. These desires are the most horrible and repulsive things imaginable. The perverted intelligences of men who are animated by such feelings are competent to understand the material rewards, but not the penalties. I do not mean penalties established by law, for these they often escape. I mean the most terrible of all punishments: their own degradation.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC)

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.
- Paulo Coelho

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
- Frederick Douglass [Frederick Baily] (1818-1895), escaped slave, abolitionist, author, editor of the North Star and, later, the New National Era

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
- Albert Einstein

Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.
- Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), American 34th President

Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash, your picture in the paper nor money in the bank, neither. Just refuse to bear them.
- William Faulkner

He does not believe who does not live according to his belief.
- Thomas Fuller

Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.
- Spencer Johnson

It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honourably.
- Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), German philosopher

Going to church no more makes you a Christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car.
- Garrison Keiler

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- Helen Keller

A man does what he must – in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers – and this is the basis of all human morality.
- John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), 35th US President

Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of the colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
- Robert F. Kennedy

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), German Dramatist

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
- Abraham Lincoln

There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life – happiness, freedom, and peace of mind – are always attained by giving them to someone else.
- Peyton Conway March (1864-1955), US Army General, US Army Chief of Staff during the final year of WWI

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.
- Henry Miller (1891-1980), American writer

A man generally has two reasons for doing a thing. One that sounds good, and a real one.
- Pierpoint Morgan

Do not say, that if the people do good to us, we will do good to them; and if the people oppress us, we will oppress them; but determine that if people do you good, you will do good to them; and if they oppress you, you will not oppress them.
- Muhammad

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage – torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
- George Orwell

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to suscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe; he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
- Thomas Paine [The Age of Reason, 1793]

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
- Blaise Pascal

Setting a good example is a far better way to spread ideals than through force of arms.
- Congressman Ron Paul

Good men will never lack good laws nor allow bad ones.
- William Penn [America, Character Counts, 1681]

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
- Plato (427-347 B.C.E.)

It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong, or when we suffer evil to defend ourselves by doing evil in return.
- Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.)

We have enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Irish author and foremost prose satirist

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), US Transcendentalist author

To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian author

We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.'
- Desmond Tutu

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
- Mark Twain

A great nation is like a great man: When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. Having realized it, he admits it. Having admitted it, he corrects it. He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers. He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts. If a nation is centred in the Tao, if it nourishes its own people and doesn't meddle in the affairs of others, it will be a light to all nations in the world.
- Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 61)

The soul of our country needs to be awakened... When leaders act contrary to conscience, we must act contrary to leaders.
- Veterans Fast for Life

Fear follows crime, and is its punishment.
- Voltaire (1694-1778), French writer and philosopher

It is indeed probable that more harm and misery have been caused by men determined to use coercion to stamp out a moral evil than by men intent on doing evil.
- Fredrich August von Hayek (1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences (1974) [The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 146.]

You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
- Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), author

Don't ever let them pull you down so low as to hate them. (also cited as: I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.)
- Booker T. Washington

If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.
- Daniel Webster

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
- Simone Weil

Suffering and joy teach us, if we allow them, how to make the leap of empathy, which transports us into the soul and heart of another person. ln those transparent moments we know other people's joys and sorrows, and we care about their concerns as if they were our own.
- Fritz Williams

An elder Cherokee Native American was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me... It is a terrible fight, and it is between two wolves. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, pride and superiority. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside of you and every other person too."

They thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The old Cherokee simply replied... "The one I feed."

Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.
[Mahabharata 5:1517]

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.
[Matthew 7:12]

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself.
- Sunnah

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.
[Udana Varga 5:18]

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.
[Talmud, Shabbat 31:a]

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.
[Analects 15:23]

Taoism: Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as your own loss.
- T'ai Shag Kan Ying P'ien

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself.
[Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5]