What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. - Hannah Arendt, political philosopher born in Hanover, Germany in 1906 When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. - Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist, statesman, and author. [The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, 1850] The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means. - Georges Bernanos The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.To declare that the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes – would bring terrible retribution. - Justice Louis D. Brandeis A man who has in mind an apparent advantage and promptly proceeds to dissociate this from the question of what is right shows himself to be mistaken and immoral. Such a standpoint is the parent of assassinations, poisonings, forged wills, thefts, malversations of public money, and the ruinous exploitation of provincials and Roman citizens alike. Another result is passionate desire – desire for excessive wealth, for unendurable tyranny, and ultimately for the despotic seizure of free states. These desires are the most horrible and repulsive things imaginable. The perverted intelligences of men who are animated by such feelings are competent to understand the material rewards, but not the penalties. I do not mean penalties established by law, for these they often escape. I mean the most terrible of all punishments: their own degradation. - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC) Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it. - Albert Einstein The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business.If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage –torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral color when it is committed by our side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. - George Orwell Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. - Blaise Pascal Good men will never lack good laws nor allow bad ones. - William Penn [America, Character Counts, 1681] Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. - Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), US Transcendentalist author
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 07:44:16 +0000
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