Sunbeams

Those are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.

Groucho Marx

No matter how cynical you get, it’s almost impossible to keep up.

Lily Tomlin

. . . and down they forgot as up they grew.

e.e. cummings

My conscience aches, but it’s going to lose the fight.

Allanah Myles

If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.

Leo Tolstoy

You can really learn something about a person when he’s put into circumstances in which civilized values place his own identity, even his very being, in jeopardy. . . . I often think: How would a friend with whom you’ve drunk a lot of vodka and had a lot of fun respond when one morning you plant yourself on his doorstep and say, “Hide me. I’m being chased by the Nazis.”

Roman Polanski

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

May Sarton

God will not look you over for medals, degrees, or diplomas, but for scars.

Elbert Hubbard

A commentary on the times is that the word honesty is now preceded by old-fashioned.

Larry Wolters

I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.

Will Rogers

We may argue eloquently that “honesty is the best policy.” Unfortunately, the moment honesty is adopted for the sake of policy it mysteriously ceases to be honesty.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my best each and every day.

Abraham Lincoln

The naked truth is always better than the best-dressed lie.

Ann Landers

Excuse me, sir; I cannot consent to receive pay for services I do not render.

Robert E. Lee, explaining his rejection of a ten-thousand-dollar-a-year salary to act as titular head of an insurance company after the Civil War

There are few things more disturbing than to find, in somebody we detest, a moral quality which seems to us demonstrably superior to anything we ourselves possess. It augurs not merely an unfairness on the part of creation, but a lack of artistic judgment. Sainthood is acceptable only in saints.

Pamela Hansford Johnson

My goal in life is to be as good a person as my dog already thinks I am.

Source unknown

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and really being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Oscar Wilde

If we had done as the kings told us five hundred years ago, we should all have been slaves. If we had done as the priest told us, we should all have been idiots. If we had done as the doctors told us, we should all have been dead. We have been saved by disobedience. We have been saved by the splendid thing called independence, and I want to see more of it. I want to see children raised so that they will have it.

Robert Ingersoll

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi to come back, but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Marian Wright Edelman