#decency

Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever. ↗

— Kevin Smith

#artists-life #creativity #decency #discouragement #encouragement

But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest. ↗

— George Orwell

#politics #motivational

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

I believe the death of Bobby Kennedy was in many ways the death of decency in America. I think it was the death of manners and formality, the death of poetry and the death of a dream. ↗

— Emilio Estevez

#believe #bobby #bobby kennedy #death #decency

If someone lacked decency or respect, I didn't allow that person to stay in my world. ↗

— Gabrielle Union

#decency #i #lacked #person #respect

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep. ↗

— Quentin Crisp

#decency #even #exhausting #maintain #more

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

— A. Bartlett Giamatti

#decency #lead #matters #race #should

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

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