Be Decent Quotes

#1. Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for.

Dalton Trumbo

#2. I have been invited to do something called 'Celebrity MasterChef' in England, which, of course, I can't do. It's complete nonsense. You have to be a decent cook to begin with. I'd be the joke one.

Lesley Nicol

#3. A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the lord in vain- then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?

Robert A. Heinlein

#4. it is hard to argue that housing is not a fundamental human need. Decent, affordable housing should be a basic right for everybody in this country. The reason is simple: without stable shelter, everything else falls apart.

Matthew Desmond

#5. I can remember when
delusions of grandeur
entailed wanting to
be a rock star, movie star,
a millionaire; to make it
as a writer
now it seems that it's
to want to earn a
decent living

Phil Volatile

#6. A decent and manly examination of the acts of government should not only be tolerated, but encouraged.

William Henry Harrison

#7. You're going to think I'm being corny, but this is how I really feel: I hope my family and my friends will be able to say that I was an honest, kind and fairly decent man.

John Wayne

#8. For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have the right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and tho' himself might deserve some decent degree of honours of his cotemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them.

Thomas Paine

#9. Men must be decent first and brilliant later, otherwise you're not helping people, just servicing the machine.

Claire North

#10. People ask me all the time what or who my influences are. To be honest, it would take a decent set of encyclopedias to get them all down. I am here today to let the world know my greatest influence, my secret ingredient, really. What inspires me? That's simple: COFFEE.

Corey Taylor

#11. I think the President himself is a remarkably intelligent, decent, ethical man. I think he did very well, but I think the job builds up over expectations which all candidates contribute to including this President that simply cannot be fulfilled.

Lloyd Cutler

#12. You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#13. It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#14. I'd been trying for a while to get parts that weren't just the English bad guy, so it was quite refreshing to be playing someone who was a compassionate, decent guy.

Sean Bean

#15. His eyes, I'd long since discovered, could be as eloquent and expressive as his pen. The messages they sent me now hardly seemed decent for a public setting.

Richelle Mead

#16. Be a part of all that is decent and be an ambassador for the kind of world that you want to live in,

Julie Andrews

#17. Make for the children an evening of happiness in a world of storm. Let the children have their night of fun and laughter ... resolved that by our daring, these same children shall not be denied their right to live in a free and decent world.

Winston Churchill

#18. I feel sorry sometimes for these sportsmen and women who put in just as much effort as the footballers. For example, athletes train at least as hard as footballers but have to be happy if they can earn enough to finance a decent education.

Angela Merkel

#19. Be kind, be decent, be generous, be tolerant, compassionate, and understanding. Be fast to praise, slow to judge. Remember, we're all human, and don't cast the first stone.

Allen Drury

#20. Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man? ... Does man have any responsibility for the preservation of a decent balance in nature, for the preservation of rare species, or even for the indefinite continuance of his race?

Kenneth E. Boulding

#21. The peace we seek, founded upon decent trust and cooperation among nations, can be fortified not by weapons of war but by wheat and cotton, by milk and wool, by meat and timber, and by rice. These are words that translate into every language.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#22. As long as you don't stop producing guns, you can't be a decent country!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#23. The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.

Gwendolyn Brooks

#24. I don't understand how you can be a decent writer and not know people.

Sloane Crosley

#25. I was always pretty organized in high school and my mother, she always pushed me to just overachieve, both my parents. (They) let me know education is key and without it nowadays, you probably wouldn't be able to get a good job or have a decent living.

Jeremih

#26. You are already way more of an adult than you think you are. Truly. Be good, be decent, be responsible, be kind. And don't forget to send thank-you notes.

Kelly Williams Brown

#27. You'd be surprised. Look, most Republicans are decent men who simply have a view of the world that is different from ours. But there is a hard core of fucking nutcases.

Ken Follett

#28. You cannot just be working in a vast, air-conditioned loft space and think you are going to make a decent painting. Francis Bacon had a special studio built, and he felt completely emasculated in there. I have to be somewhere comfortable.

Peter Doig

#29. Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized and excluded.

Christopher Hitchens

#30. It won't be long before we'll be writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there.

Frederic Loewe

#31. The one thing ... that is truly ugly is the climate of hate and intimidation, created by a noisy few, which makes the decent majority reluctant to air in public their views on anything controversial ... Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.

Edward Abbey

#32. Our only reliable source of strength is the goodness of our hearts. Our only foundation for coming to terms with the suffering of the times is our innate need to be decent human beings.

Sakyong Mipham

#33. I'm a decent table tennis player, but if you were to put me up against any of the guys you see on television at the Olympics, I'd be lucky to get a couple of points.

Matt Kuchar

#34. There are films that cost a lot of money that might be decent films. But if they don't perform in that first weekend or two, they're gone.

Grant Heslov

#35. There ain't no way I'm going to be droppin' nothing. If I was in my twenties, maybe. But now I try to keep it looking decent. I don't want to expose too much of my bare ass.

Sharon Jones

#36. I guess the only thing to do now is meet his parents. I'm sure they're decent people. I mean they gotta be if they named their son Gaylord Focker.

Robert De Niro

#37. There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them.

Marilynne Robinson

#38. There's room in the world for one historical folk-rock singer to make a decent living, and I happen to be it.

Al Stewart

#39. When you go to commercial, you want something to call the viewers back, and if you don't have a decent act out, the audience probably won't be there in the numbers you want when the show returns.

J.J. Abrams

#40. I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment. Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#41. I think people can be very nice and charming without being decent human beings.

Claire Hennessy

#42. But my family has always stuck to fabrication, with the idea that you can be decent at two high art forms or you can excel at one. We excel. Excellently.

Laini Taylor

#43. I would not have raised you to be a great man. There is no peace for great men. I would have had you be a decent one. I would have given you the quiet strength to grow old with the woman you love. Now all I can give you is a chance.

Pierce Brown

#44. Curious," it said. "What you call your decent self doesn't dare look me in the eye! What a mistake people make who say that the man who won't look you in the eye is not to be trusted! As if mere brazenness were a sign of honesty; really, the theory of decency is the most amusing thing in the world.

John Kendrick Bangs

#45. Reality may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it's still the only place where you can get a decent steak.

Woody Allen

#46. The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviours. In their humble struggle is true heroism.

Theodore Dalrymple

#47. Look there are going to be, there are already adjustment processes in place but the point is that you'll actually make them work and get satisfactory outcomes if there's decent burden sharing along the way. If there's, if you like a proper transitional assistance.

John Anderson

#48. For a moment, all I could think of was my cousin Peter. He was twice my age - and married. By the rules of decent, he would be the one to inherit the Rothford title if I died without children. Whenever he was in town, he'd stop by and ask how I was feeling

Richelle Mead

#49. Not until the creation and maintenance of decent conditions of life for all people are recognized and accepted as a common obligation of all people and all countries - not until then shall we, with a certain degree of justification, be able to speak of humankind as civilized.

Albert Einstein

#50. In my experience, there's not much that can't be fixed by a decent cup of tea.

Jojo Moyes

#51. When you live in a community where people know you, it makes you want to be good and decent. It's a strong influence.

Tawni O'Dell

#52. Let your children see you kiss. Let them see you embrace. Let them overhear your teasing, your gentle rebukes, even your well-intentioned jealousy. Domestic courtship reinforces the notion that people are together because they want to be together, not because it is the decent, practical thing to do.

Robin R. Meyers

#53. It was a struggle to not fall in love with a man who was determined to be decent to her when what she sought was indulgence of her wanton nature.
Her recently discovered, very frustrated wanton nature, damn him.

Grace Burrowes

#54. As in everything else, I must start with myself. That is: in all circumstances try to be decent, just, tolerant, and understanding, and at the same time try to resist corruption and deception. In other words, I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self.

Vaclav Havel

#55. If you blithely do what you do and you're good at what you do, and try to be a decent person, you can succeed.

Michael Patrick Jann

#56. A person who says "every person has a right to a decent education" may not actually mean "people should be robbed to support bad schools" or "all children should be forced into a prison-like building for 12 years.

Jeffrey Tucker

#57. The letter of application ... should be a masterpiece of fiction, papering over all the cracks. Get it properly typed on decent writing paper. Never let it run over the page, people get bored with reading.

Jilly Cooper

#58. Porter it was that fattened people in my own fami ly, and it would be a hard thing not to drink porter with every other decent man, and maybe stand fi l ling your pipe with your back to the counte r , and maybe talk of the time you were in j a i l in England

Anonymous

#59. There will be a quick rash of hairy American filth, but it shouldn't threaten the existence of decent, serious British filth.

John Osborne

#60. Maybe she'd remember him as a pain in the ass. Or maybe, he hoped most of all, that she'd remember what she told him: "You can be a real jerk sometimes, but you're decent."
As epitaphs went, it wasn't bad.

Dani Harper

#61. People think they have to be ambitious. But at a certain age, all you want is to be around nice, decent people.

Graydon Carter

#62. If there was some way of knowing which boys were likely to turn out to be decent men, boys that could love us back as passionately as we felt we could love them, then we could banish the likelihood of divorce and unhappiness to a statistically unlikely outcome.

Belinda Jeffrey

#63. The bottom line is: if you were a jerk in your original life, you're probably going to be a bigger undead jerk, If you were a decent person, say a juvenile-services librarian with a secret collection of unicorn figurines, you're probably going to be a kinder, gentler vampire.

Molly Harper

#64. Our government works should be treated fairly and appropriately; they should have a decent retirement, but not a gold-plated system where they can retire multimillionaires in their 50s.

Bruce Rauner

#65. The bad ones want you to work around them and their time and the decent ones want too much time. I just don't have it. I am in grind mode. I do not have time to be a mother, a student, a home health care worker and a girlfriend to someone. Now a fuck partner, yea I could get with that.

M.J. Sparks

#66. Wars may be fought by decent men, but they're not won by them.

P.D. James

#67. If a young fella has an option of having a decent career or joining the army to fight in Iraq, you can bet your life that he would not be in Iraq.

Charles Rangel

#68. The most valuable asset we have, actually, is our ability to understand, to do the right thing, to be kind, to be decent.

L. Ron Hubbard

#69. There's no reason not to be in television now. You get to live at home and you're not on the road all the time, they pay you decent money, and the writing's good. You're not compromising for it, you know.

Colm Meaney

#70. As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners; decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can.

Virginia Woolf

#71. Be respected as being new, and probably a decent change or a help for the human race or whatever, instead of keep carrying the same old burdens around with you.

Jimi Hendrix

#72. The beanball is one of the meanest things on Earth and no decent fellow would use it. The beanball is a potential murderer. If I were a batter and thought the pitcher really tried to bean me, I'd be inclined to wait for him outside the park with a baseball bat.

Walter Johnson

#73. Try to be forgotten. Go live in the country. Stay in mourning for two years, then remarry, but choose somebody decent.

Alexander Pushkin

#74. They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don't expect you to listen ... It's the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

Evelyn Waugh

#75. We tend to buy things - a lot of things - where we don't know exactly what will happen, but the outcome will be decent.

Charlie Munger

#76. Her chances of a decent marriage were about to be dashed-and all because of a ferret.

Lisa Kleypas

#77. Love, if you love me, lie next to me. Be for me, like rain, the getting out of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi- lust of intentional indifference. Be wet with a decent happiness.

Robert Creeley

#78. What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

A.A. Milne

#79. There were not so many physical threats that could not be countered with a decent hammer.

Stieg Larsson

#80. I guess if life were fair, people who led decent lives would be rewarded, and people who led indecent lives would not be rewarded.

Robert Boswell

#81. It's not like it's hard to be decent and respectful and well-behaved. I do wait in line, and I do take the subway, and I do do my own grocery shopping, and I do take the kids to school.

Sarah Jessica Parker

#82. What decent philosopher was ever an appeaser? The former is a rare catch among the multitudes of modern opinionists. His role is to be one who loves truth. That is a place where his love for humanity is more powerful than his love for hot air about empowering humanity.

Criss Jami

#83. President Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German now.

Roy Wilkins

#84. London used to be reasonably priced, clean, and a decent place to live. These days it's polluted and utterly unbearable

Munir Butt

#85. If you've been working since you were a teenager and working at a reasonably decent level, then you don't expect that you're going to be firmly in your 40s and start moving up in the world, if you like.

Ben Mendelsohn

#86. A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man ...

Margaret Halsey

#87. The door cracked open. "Decent?" Rafe asked.
"Yep"
"Damn." He pushed it open.
"If you're hoping to see something, the trick is to not knock first."
"That would be wrong," he said as he walked in. "The trick is to hope you say 'no, but come in anyway.'"
"Ah.

Kelley Armstrong

#88. I don't trust this [american] government to be regulating corporations. I trust big business to be regulated [by itself] and to be a party to a decent solution.

Ezra Klein

#89. But I also think when we embark on intimate relationships, we make a basic human promise to be decent, to hold a flattering mirror up to each other, to be respectful as we explore each other.

Lena Dunham

#90. If someone mistakes your kindness for weakness, that's their fault - not yours. And it's OK to be a decent human being in this life.

Jeremy Piven

#91. I wanted to do something decent at last, and I wanted to be rewarded for my decency.
p 284

Frank Huyler

#92. I never duck out of a fight; I don't care what the hell the odds are, and I'm rough at times, but I try to be a decent guy all the time. That's the way I've always lived.

Jack Kirby

#93. Most importantly, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

Daniel Kahneman

#94. If you ever want to be a decent player, you have to be able to use both feet without stopping to think about it.

Pele

#95. It would be a shame to go out with a hot girl you can't have a decent conversation with!

Justin Bieber

#96. It is time for thee to be gone, lest the age more decent in its wantonness should laugh at thee and drive thee of the stage.
[Lat., Tempus abire tibi est, ne ...
Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius aetas.]

Horace

#97. I had a very bad torn groin, my abdomen right through my legs. I was finding it really hard to get in the ring and run around and function at a decent rate. Then they had the idea that it might be better to do a retirement thing.

Owen Hart

#98. In the eighties, when she chiefly flourished, husbands were taken seriously, as the only real obstacles to sin. Beds too, if they had to be mentioned, were approached with caution; and a decent reserve prevented them and husbands ever being spoken of in the same breath.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

#99. One may have a right to be unconventional and even eccentric, so long as one is fully competent and a decent person; but one's ideal as a professor should be to conduct oneself as an admirable human being: just, kind, tolerant, competent, committed, and good-humored.

Robert Audi

#100. Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that.

Wallace Stegner