Decency Quotes - Page 6

• Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?

  Dennis Prager

  Taken, Order, Things In Life

  Dennis Prager (2009). “Happiness Is a Serious Problem: A Human Nature Repair Manual”, p.9, Harper Collins

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• Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?

  Thomas Sowell

  Running, Common Decency, Barbarians

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• Compassion is not a dirty word. Compassion is not a sign of weakness. In my view, compassion in politics and in public policy is in fact a hallmark of great strength. It is a hallmark of a society which has about it a decency which speaks for itself.

  Kevin Rudd

  Dirty, Compassion, Views

  Rudd's first speech as Labor leader, The Australian, December 5, 2006.

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• The fact that some governments, churches and numerous corrupted individuals have tried to reduce such behavior from criminal offence to personal privilege dose not change the nature nor the seriousness of the practice. This woe is pronounced upon those who would pervert standards of mortality and decency. They seek man’s approval of that which God had condemned. They have been successful in getting legislation passed to make such perversion legal and acceptable by society.

  Spencer W. Kimball

  Successful, Men, Practice

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• It was the old New York way...the way people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes", except those who gave rise to them.

  Edith Wharton

  New York, People, Disease

  The Age of Innocence ch. 33 (1920)

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• Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency.

  Frank Portman

  Kindness, Compassion, Understanding

  Frank Portman (2008). “King Dork”, p.341, Delacorte Books for Young Readers

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• To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

  Oscar Wilde

  Hands, Ordinary, Bags

  Oscar Wilde (1899). “The Importance of Being Earnest”, p.38

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• When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.

  Mary Doria Russell

  Kindness, War, Generosity

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• Remember this? You gave it to me for ensuring your trigger finger got reattached to your hand. You said it would remind me of that spark of decency inside me. I'm trying to do something decent now, Captain.

  Eoin Colfer

  Hands, Trying, Sparks

  Eoin Colfer (2005). “Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code - Book #3”, Miramax

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• People were standing up everywhere shouting, "This is me! This is me!" Every time you looked at them they stood up and told you who they were, and the truth of it was that they had no more idea who or what they were than he had. They believed their flashing signs, too. They ought to be standing up and shouting, "This isn't me! This isn't me!" They would if they had any decency. "This isn't me!" Then you might know how to proceed through the flashing bullshit of this world.

  Philip Roth

  Ideas, People, Bullshit

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• I saw the end of his life right there in that single moment. His pride, his decency, his secrets, his death.

  Alice Hoffman

  Pride, Secret, Saws

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• I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Father, Missing, Fundamentals

  F. Scott Fitzgerald (2015). “The Echoes of the Jazz Age Collection: The Beautiful and Damned, Winter Dreams, The Great Gatsby, Babylon Revisited, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and many more”, p.480, e-artnow

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• To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dirty, Thinking, People

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• I was like you once, long time ago. I believed in the dignity of man. Decency. Humanity. But I was lucky. I found out the truth early, boy. And what is the truth, Stark? It's all very simple. There's no such thing as the dignity of man. Man is a base, pathetic and vulgar animal.

  Charles Grandison Finney

  Men, Animal, Boys

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• I believe that this hairless embryo with the aching, oversize brain case and the opposable thumb, this animal barely up from the apes, will endure --will endure longer than his home planet, will spread out to the other planets, to the stars, and beyond, carrying with him his honesty, his insatiable curiosity, his unlimited courage --and his noble essential decency. This I believe with all my heart.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Stars, Honesty, Believe

  "This I Believe", 1952.

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• If you must commit suicide ... always contrive to do it as decorously as possible; the decencies, whether of life or of death, should never be lost sight of.

  George Henry Borrow

  Suicide, Suicidal, Sight

  Lavengro Ch. XXIII

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• The only difference between the women I've dated and Charles Manson is that Manson has the decency to look like a nut case when you first meet him.

  Richard Jeni

  Nuts, Differences, Looks

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• Spending comes just as natural to liberals in Minnesota and the Minnesota legislature as bashing decency comes to the editorial board of our major metropolitan newspapers.

  Michele Bachmann

  Boards, Minnesota, Natural

  Edwatch Conference, October 10-11, 2003.

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• You do not want a war. You have known violence, you have suffered loss, but you have seen nothing of war. War is not just the business of death; it is the anti-thesis of life. Hope, tortured and flayed, reason, dismembered, grinning at its limbs in its lap. Decency, raped to death... You will be a murderer and more.

  Joss Whedon

  War, Loss, Lap

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• I just -- I know my own heart and I love you, Turner. And if you have even the tiniest shred of decency, you'll say something because I've said everything I possibly can, and I can't bear the silence, and -- oh for heaven's sake! Will you at least blink?" He couldn't even manage that.

  Julia Quinn

  Love You, Heart, Silence

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• You're a great brother. You give us a heart attack worrying about your heart attack, which you didn't even have the decency to have!

  Groucho Marx

  Funny, Witty, Brother

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• I watched as Humphrey Bogart’s character used beans as a metaphor for the relative unimportance in the wider world of his relationship with Ingrid Bergman’s character, and chose logic and decency ahead of his selfish emotional desires. The quandary and resulting decision made for an engrossing film. But this was not what people cried about. They were in love and could not be together. I repeated this statement to myself, trying to force an emotional reaction. I couldn’t. I didn’t care. I had enough problems of my own.

  Graeme Simsion

  Selfish, Character, Emotional

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• The eyes are witnesses that the heavens revolve in the space of twenty- four hours. But certain men, either from the love of novelty, or to make a display of ingenuity, have concluded that the earth moves; and they maintain that neither the eighth sphere nor the sun revolves....Now, it is a want of honesty and decency to assert such notions publicly, and the example is pernicious. It is the part of a good mind to accept the truth as revealed by God and to acquiesce in it.

  Philipp Melanchthon

  Honesty, Moving, Eye

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• The death penalty exacts a terrible price in dollars, lives and human decency. Rather than tamping down the flames of violence, it fuels them while draining millions of dollars from more promising efforts to restore safety to our lives.

  Robert M. Morgenthau

  Flames, Safety, Effort

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• More and more clearly every day, out of biology, anthropology, sociology, history, economic analysis, psychological insight, plain human decency and common sense, the necessary mandate of survival that we shall love all our neighbors as we do ourselves, is being confirmed and reaffirmed.

  Ordway Tead

  Common Sense, Historical, Survival

  Attributed to Ordway Tead in "The Forbes scrapbook of Thoughts on the business of life", p. 66, 1950.

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