Quotes on the subject of Integrity

These quotes are here as invitations to peruse and muse. There is no need to agree with a quote.  The goal is to stimulate thinking and conversation.  
Please contribute by sending your thoughts to [email protected] 

Self-respect is the root of discipline: The sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself. 
  ― Abraham Joshua Heschel


The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
  -- Albert Einstein


Never say anything that, down inside, you think is wrong.
  -- George McGovern



The images we eat are as important as the food we eat. Think of that in terms of television, and a lot of the movies we watch.
  -- Marion Woodman



The most important time to be kind is precisely when it is assumed that it will have the least effect.
 -- C.H. Wilby



The truth is still the truth whether or not you believe it.  Can we say the same about lies?  No, lies only exist because we believe them.  If we don't believe in lies, they simply disappear.
 -- Don Miguel Ruiz



Be mindful of intention.  Intention is the seed that creates our future.
  -- Jack Kornfield


From the intention springs the deed, from the deed springs the habits.  From the habits grow the character, from character develops destiny.
 -- a Chinese Buddhist text



Integrity has its vulnerability, its Achilles' heel: it can break down in a person experiencing trauma or great pain of any kind.
  -- C. H. Wilby

The art of this life is not avoiding sufferings, but handling them.
  -- C.H. Wilby


If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.
  --M. Scott Peck


Virtue and integrity are necessary for genuine happiness.  Guard your integrity with care.
  -- Jack Kornfield


Perhaps the attraction of dictatorship is that it reminds people of their childhood.
  -- C.H. Wilby



A culture which places a premium on hurrying about, enduring discomforts at all costs and thereby "getting it done," is a culture which anesthetizes its inabitants. Not only have many physical ailments such as knee, back, neck and shoulder problems become the norm, but so have grim faces, forced smiles and perfunctory greetings.  We as a culture have become so accustumed to not feeling, not knowing and not being, that these abnormal ways of living are now regarded as normal.
  -- Edward Yu


You don't always have to know what to do.  You just have to know who you are.
 -- Doug Wilhelm, The Revealers 


War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians.
  -- Chris Hedges, "A Culture of Atrocity"


If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
  --Wordsworth


People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply: by the lives they lead.
 —James Baldwin



You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
  — Booker T. Washington


Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.
 -- Benjamin Franklin


Whether a person grows up honest seems to depend on how much truth the parents were able to bear and on what penalties they exacted from their child for being truthful.
 —Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware



Learning to feel, which leads to acknowledging and accepting the past, has the function of uncovering the truth. 
—Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware



In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
—from The Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy


To live in love is to be alive again.  It is to return to your integrity, to what you were before knowledge [i.e., social conditioning.]  When you recover your integrity, you always follow love.  You live your life as an eternal romance because when you love yourself, it is easy to love everybody else... 
       Love coming out of me makes me happy, and it's not important if you reject me, because I don't reject myself.        -- Don Miguel Ruiz



The truth is the only thing you'll ever run into that has no agenda.
— Adyashanti from Emptiness Dancing


War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
  — Thomas Mann


True innocence lies in an unwillingness to compromise one's integrity.
   — C.H. Wilby


A people that values its privileges over its principles soon loses both.
  — Dwight D. Eisenhower


Stress comes from knowing what is right and doing what is wrong.
  — Larry Winget 



Material progress does improve well-being up to a point; but beyond that point, instead of lifting us upward, it only leads us around in circles.
  -- Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness



Fundamentalism of any kind is mutually exclusive of integrity (which requires nuanced thinking) and kindness (which requires inclusiveness and open‐mindedness.)
  — C.H. Willby


Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do, and what is the right thing to do.
  — Potter Stewart 


Integrity is not so much a value in itself; it is rather the value that guarantees all the other values.
  — Anonymous 



You cannot … play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth…  
 — Dag Hammarskjold, Markings



Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets - and can be lost in a heartbeat.
 — Charlie Munger


The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity.
  — Zig Ziglar 


The time is always right to do what is right.
 — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 



Subtlety may deceive you; integrity never will.
 — Oliver Goldsmith



It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.
 — Adlai Stevenson 



Where is there dignity unless there is honesty?
 — Cicero



Never "for the sake of peace and quiet" deny your own experience or convictions.
  — Dag Hammarskjöld  


Be more concerned about what's right rather than who's right.
  — Brian Tracy 



If you let a beggar into your house, and welcome him and greet him, that is a gift.  If you let a beggar into your house, and feed him and help him, that is a blessing.  And if you let a beggar into your house, and love him and care for him, that is friendship.  And true integrity comes when he no longer needs you.  
 —  R. Kenny 



The function of freedom is to free someone else.  
 — Toni Morrison



In the last analysis, it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions that life puts to us.
  — Dag Hammarskjold 



He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.
 — William Congreve



There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity.
 — Tom Peters



It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy - from lack of character.
  — Dag Hammarskjold



Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.
  — H. Jackson Brown, Jr. 



In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self‐surrender is valued above self‐expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self‐esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions.
 — Nathaniel Branden



Self‐importance is man's greatest enemy. What weakens him is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of his fellow men. Self‐importance requires that one spend most of one's life offended by something or someone. 
 — Carlos Castaneda




What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear your words. 
 — Ralph Waldo Emerson



I've learned that people will forgot what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. 
 —Maya Angelou



The concept of loyalty is distorted when it is understood to mean blind acceptance. It is correctly interpreted when it is assumed to cover honest criticism.
 — Dag Hammarskjöld from a speech at the Johns Hopkins University, 14 June 1955 




Life without integrity 
is like loosely hanging threads,
easily fraying from the main cloth,
while in acts of piety we learn to understand that
every instant is like a thread
raveling out of eternity to form a delicate tassel.
We must not cast off the threads
but weave them into the deign of an eternal fabric.
 -- Jewish Reform Prayer Book, 2007

It's not the perfect, but the imperfect that is in need of our love.
  - Oscar Wilde


If you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with [the word] "Secondly..." 
-- Chimamanda Adichie, "The Danger of a Single 
           Story" (TED video)


Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
 -- C.G. Jung


Good doctors realize that compassion arises not from will but from goodness.  As such, compassion and other mysteries like it are less accessible to science than to art.  If we are to awaken this quality in our students and our colleagues, we must demonstrate it.
  -- David Watts, M.D., medical educator
       (New England Journal of Medicine 367;13)


The people you lie to, own you.  The things you lie about, own you.  
  -- Michael Ventura


Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.
  -- Jack Kornfield


Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. 
  -- Martin Luther King, Jr. 



The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word "unspeakable." 
  --  Judith Lewis Herman



The thing that makes you exceptional ... is inevitably that which makes you lonely.
  -- Lorraine Hansberry



The two most radical things you can do in America are to slow down, and to talk to each other.  If you do these things, you will improve your country.
  -- Mary Pipher




Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
  - - H. L. Mencken



The energy you use to get a drink of water comes from sunshine working its way up to you through the food chain -- in a real sense, light lifts the cup to your lips.  The apparent wall between your body and the world is more like a picket fence... And between your mind and the world, it's like a line painted on the sidewalk. 
     -- Rick Hanson



Every man has within himself the entire human condition.
  -- Michel de Montaigne



No one has ever found their way who has not felt lost.
  -- Noah benShea


Change how you see, not how you look.
  --Unknown



I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone… they will be forced to deal with pain.
 —James Baldwin



Children who are respected learn respect.  Children who are cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves.  Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance.  In an environment such as this they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grow out of the experience of love.
 —  Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware


Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
  — George Santayana



Lies are concocted from seeds of truth.
  — Czeslaw Milosz,  
        The Captive Mind (1951)



True adulthood would mean no longer denying the truth.
 — Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies



True communication is the path to a kinder universe. 
  — Julie Morgan


There's only one story in life for which you'll have every answer: the truth. If you live an exemplary life, and do what you're supposed to do, you walk down the block and you don't worry if someone is tapping you on the shoulder asking a question.
  — Bob Hurley 


But the very concept of original goodness can transform our lives... That is our real nature.  Everything else - all our habits, our conditioning, our past mistakes - is a mask.  A mask can hide a face completely; ... it can be excruciating to wear and nearly impossible to remove.  But the very nature of a mask is that it can be removed.
  -- Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness



It takes a lifetime to sound like yourself.   
 — Miles Davis


Let your life speak.       
 — Quaker saying


I cannot find language of sufficient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness of private integrity.
  — Ralph Waldo Emerson



I don't think telling the truth ever gets anyone in trouble in the long run. Maybe the day after, but not in the long run.
  — Steve Spurrier 


One problem, if not the primary problem, is that humans seem to have a drive to desacralize existence, even their own existence.  The compensations that follow are: power‐over (racism, sexism, classism, nationalism), self‐righteousness, and the elevation of irritation to a "right".
  —  C.H. Willby




I am persuaded there is among the mass of our people a fund of wisdom, integrity, and humanity which will preserve their happiness in a tolerable measure.
 — John Adams




Integrity can be neither lost nor concealed nor faked nor quenched nor artificially come by, nor outlived, nor, I believe, in the long run, denied.
  — Eudora Welty 


As you live your values, your sense of identity, integrity, control, and inner‐directedness will infuse you with both exhilaration and peace. You will define yourself from within, rather than by people's opinions or by comparisons to others. "Wrong" and "right" will have little to do with being found out.
  — Stephen Covey



There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity.
 — Samuel Johnson 




If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well‐nigh useless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.
 — Moliere 


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




As I have said, the first thing is to be honest with yourself. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself… Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, and humility.
 — Nelson Mandela



All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
— Thomas Jefferson



The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
 — Abigail Van Buren



I believe that a life of integrity is the most fundamental source of personal worth. I do not agree with the popular success literature that says that self‐esteem is primarily a matter of mind set, of attitude - that you can psych yourself into peace of mind. Peace of mind comes when your life is in harmony with true principles and values and in no other way.
 — Stephen Covey 



I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on Earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.
 — Abraham Lincoln 




Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that shall make thee break thy word or lose thy self‐respect.
 — Marcus Aurelius 




A single lie destroys a whole reputation of integrity.
 — Baltasar Gracian




The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.
 — Confucius 



To the illuminated mind, the whole world sparkles with light. 
 —Ralph Waldo Emerson




You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us. And the world will live as one.
 —  John Lennon


This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than before.    
— Leonard Bernstein


Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. 
 — Justice Learned Hand


A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.  To live is to be slowly born.
 — Antoine de Saint‐Exupery


Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. 
 — Arthur Roche



Confidence in others' honesty is no light testimony of one's own integrity.
 — Michel de Montaigne



Slander slays three persons: the speaker, the spoken to, and the spoken of.
  -- Hebrew proverb


All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us. 
 - - J.R.R. Tolkien