QUOTATIONS ON ETHICS
MORALS AND INTEGRITY
Compiled by Justin Tyme*

Business ethics means more than deciding to take home the paperclips or not. Ethics and integrity run deeper. Doing the right thing isn't as easy as it should be. The quotations on this page give us all targets to shoot for.

If you are looking for ethics training materials for business, please visit Ideas and Training for training videos, audio tapes, books and software in over forty different categories.

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QUOTATIONS ON ETHICS, MORALS, AND INTEGRITY

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.
-- General H. Norman Schwarzkopf

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
-- Helen Keller

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
-- Samuel Johnson

The genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.
-- Richard Rodriguez

A little integrity is better than any career.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be—both in their youth and in adulthood—intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience.
-- Alice Miller

To starve to death is a small thing, but to lose one’s integrity is a great one.
-- Chinese proverb.

Necessity may well be called the mother of invention—but calamity is the test of integrity.
-- Samuel Richardson

I am sure that in estimating every man’s value either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and that learning and talents are only the second.
-- Thomas Jefferson

The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the full light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny...it is the light that guides your way.
-- Heraclitus

Integrity needs no rules.
-- Albert Camus

On matters of style, swim with the current, on matters of principle, stand like a rock.
-- Thomas Jefferson

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.
-- George Eliot

Integrity is not a 90 percent thing, not a 95 percent thing; either you have it or you don't.
-- Peter Scotese

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

A "No" uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a "Yes" merely uttered to please, or what is worse, to avoid trouble.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.
-- Aristotle

No one can be happy who has been thrust outside the pale of truth. And there are two ways that one can be removed from this realm: by lying, or by being lied to.
-- Seneca

Don't measure your neighbor's honesty by your own.
-- American Proverb

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
-- Mark Twain

In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don't have the first, the other two will kill you.
-- Warren Buffet

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He is not wise to me who is wise in words only, but he who is wise in deeds.
-- St. Gregory

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

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
-- R. Buckminster Fuller

Integrity is not something that grownups have and adolescents can aspire to. Integrity is something that all of us, at all ages, are constantly striving for.
-- Harold Kushner

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

Don't worry so much about your self-esteem. Worry more about your character. Integrity is its own reward.
-- Laura Schlessinger

Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching.
-- Jim Stovall

Both wit and understanding are trifles without integrity.
-- Oliver Goldsmith

If you believe in unlimited quality and act in all your business dealings with total integrity, the rest will take care of itself.
-- Frank Perdue

Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.
-- Dr. William Menninger

Let unswerving integrity be your watchword.
-- Benedict De Spinoza

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
-- Samuel Johnson

A business is seldom if ever built up except on lines of strictest integrity.
-- Andrew Carnegie

There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the make the first move -- and he, in turn, waits for you.
-- Marian Anderson

Every lie, every wrong we commit clogs the heart's arteries. Sometimes it takes a heart attack before we warm our hearts and clear our arteries with compassion, courage and virtue.
-- Kall

So live that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.
-- Will Rogers

The time is always right to do what is right.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.
-- Confucious

Losers make promises they often break. Winners make commitments they always keep.
-- Denis Waitley

Where there are no men, strive to be a man.
-- The Jewish Haggaddah,

It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe.
-- Thomas Paine

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These quotations were collected by writer and www.com reporter, Justin Tyme.

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