#decency

What have I always believed? That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#decency #honesty #morality #religion #religion

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#decency #humanism #religion #religion

Be not intimidated...nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice. ↗

— John Adams

#cowardice #decency #hypocrisy #politeness #cowardice

On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way. ↗

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

#decency #lead #matters #race #should

Is there decency left in American politics? ↗

— Byron Dorgan

#american politics #decency #left #politics

I have had some experiences with love, or think I have, anyway, although the ones I have liked best could easily be described as "common decency". I treated somebody well for a little while, or even for a tremendously long time, and that person treated me well in return. Love need not have anything to do with it. (...) Love is where you find it. I think it is foolosh to go looking for it, and I think it can often be poisonous. I wish that people who are conventionally supposed to love each other would say to each other, when they fight, "Please - a little less love, and a little more common decency". ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#love #lovers #experience

Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength. ↗

— Meir Kahane

#decency #east #gentleness #goodness #impresses

I see the great continuities in New Zealand history as being decency and common sense and up until now when we've confronted these things we've been able to talk them through, and I'm sure we will with this issue as well. ↗

— Michael King

#been #being #common #common sense #confronted

He wondered about the people in houses like those. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled the strings? You bet they didn’t. And if they did, what would they care? They were too busy being born, being married, begetting, working, dying. It mightn’t be a bad thing, if you could manage it, to feel yourself one of them, one of the ruck of men. Our civilization is founded on greed and fear, but in the lives of common men the greed and fear are mysteriously transmuted into something nobler. The lower-middle-class people in there, behind their lace curtains, with their children and their scraps of furniture and their aspidistras — they lived by the money-code, sure enough, and yet they contrived to keep their decency. The money-code as they interpreted it was not merely cynical and hoggish. They had their standards, their inviolable points of honour. They ‘kept themselves respectable’— kept the aspidistra flying. Besides, they were alive. They were bound up in the bundle of life. They begot children, which is what the saints and the soul-savers never by any chance do. The aspidistra is the tree of life, he thought suddenly. ↗

— George Orwell

#capitalism #decency #middle-class #money #business

That past is still within our living memory, a time when neighbour helped neighbour, sharing what little they had out of necessity, as well as decency. ↗

— Mary McAleese

#had #helped #little #living #memory