Top 100 Greatest Good Quotes
#1. If someone asked you what the greatest good on this earth is, what would you say? An epic surf session? Financial security? Health? Meaningful, trusting friendships? Intimacy with your spouse? Knowing that you belong? The greatest good on this earth is God. Period. God's one goal for us is Himself.
Francis Chan
#2. Would that the majority could inflict the greatest evils, for they would then be capable of the greatest good, and that would be fine, but now they cannot do either. They cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly.
Socrates
#3. To be equitable, economic growth has to be sustainable. To be sustainable, economic growth has in turn to be all-inclusive. All-inclusive is no longer the greatest good of the greatest number. It is actually Sarvodaya or the rise of all. This Mahatma Gandhi saw as essential to Satyagraha itself.
Sonia Gandhi
#5. Historians, I think, should be keepers of truth. We must tell things as they are - honestly, and without subversion. That is the greatest good one can do.
Robert Jackson Bennett
#6. The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#7. The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
John Stuart Mill
#8. No one can take less pains than to hold his tongue. Hear much, and speak little; for the tongue is the instrument of the greatest good and greatest evil that is done in the world.
Walter Raleigh
#9. The United States, after all, was founded by men of liberal sentiment who were seeking to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, by creating a constitutional order for the creation and expansion of liberty.
Douglas Massey
#10. This is the greatest good to man, to discourse daily on virtue, and other things which you have heard me discussing, examining both myself and others,
Plato
#11. Remind yourself that all men assert that wisdom is the greatest good, but that there are few who strenuously seek out that greatest good.
Pythagoras
#12. A votary of ahimsa cannot subscribe to the utilitarian formula (of the greatest good of the greatest number). He will strive for the greatest good of all and die in the attempt to realize that ideal.
Mahatma Gandhi
#13. If God is truly the greatest good on this earth, would He be loving us if He didn't draw us toward what is best for us (even if that happens to be Himself)?
Francis Chan
#14. Thus to forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, that greatest good, communal harmony that enhances the humanity and personhood of all in the community.
Desmond Tutu
#15. At the core of love is a self-sacrificing pursuit of the beloved's greatest good. Love saves. Love rescues. Love helps. And it does so, if necessary, at cost to the lover.
Anonymous
#16. Not even the apparently enlightened principle of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' can excuse indifference to individual suffering. There is no test for progress other than its impact on the individual.
Aneurin Bevan
#17. The Christian man must aim at that complete obedience to God in which life finds its highest happiness, its greatest good, its perfect consummation, its peace.
William Barclay
#18. I wasn't a bad basketball player, but I was far from the world's greatest. Good defense, no offense - that was me.
Chuck Connors
#19. He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.
Machado De Assis
#20. The greatest good fortune of my return to Cambridge in 1946 was that there, in the spring, I met Elizabeth Fay Ringo. We were married a few months later.
James Tobin
#21. But the challenge is always the same whether each generation facing its own circumstances can summon the practical devotion to attain and retain that greatest good for the greatest number which this government of the people was created to ensure.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#22. The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.
Thomas Jefferson
#23. But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective.
Moby
#24. The greatest good we can do in helping others become what they can become will be to lead them to the Savior.
D. Todd Christofferson
#25. What is the elevation of the soul? A prompt, delicate, certain feeling for all that is beautiful, all that is grand; a quick resolution to do the greatest good by the smallest means; a great benevolence joined to a great strength and great humility.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#26. As a philosophy, utilitarianism is the argument you can objectively determine what is the greatest good for the greatest number of people and we need the state to achieve that end.
Stefan Molyneux
#27. Mistake to suppose that mere good will is, by itself, a sufficient guarantee that all our efforts will finally attain to a good result. Serious mistakes can be made, even with the greatest good will.
Thomas Merton
#28. The mathematical challenge of finding the greatest good can expand the heart. Empathy opens the mind to suffering, and math keeps it open.
Derek Thompson
#29. The cause of right is never lost, Leal. I've often thought the biggest damned fool in the world could to down in history as a great man if he would just consistently vote for the greatest good of the greatest number - Kilkenny
Louis L'Amour
#30. The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.
Denis Diderot
#31. The greatest good that can come to anyone is forming within them an absolute certainty of themselves, and of their relationship to the Universe, forever removing the sense of heaven as being outside of them.
Ernest Holmes
#32. God doesn't work on our timetable. He has a plan that He will execute perfectly and for the highest, greatest good of all, and for His ultimate glory.
Charles R. Swindoll
#33. Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good.
Alexander Pope
#34. He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world.
Socrates
#35. The greatest good we can do for anyone is not to share our wealth with them, but rather to reveal their own wealth to them. It's astonishing how much talent and ability rests inside a human being
Zig Ziglar
#36. A book is a private thing, citizen; it belongs to the one who writes it and to the one who reads it. Like the mind itself, a book is a private space. Within that space, anything is possible. The greatest evil and the greatest good.
Rikki Ducornet
#38. The apple which tempts my characters is the one that will remove the knowledge of good and evil. I suppose it's something of a reversal of the conventional Eden story: Freedom of thought is perhaps the greatest good, and needs to be fought for and sacrificed for.
John Christopher
#39. It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.
Jeremy Bentham
#40. Most people have some purpose or other in their lives. Aristotle says that the end of every being is its greatest good. We all act in view of some good.
James Joyce
#41. But what does the "greatest good" mean when it comes to medicine? Is it the number of lives saved? Years of life saved? Best "quality" years of life saved? Or something else?
Sheri Fink
#42. You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.
Terence McKenna
#43. Know one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
Plato
#44. A tragedy can turn out to be our greatest good if we approach it in ways which we can grow.
Louise Hay
#45. Tears and sorrows and losses are a part of what must be experienced in this present state of life: some for our manifest good, and ail, therefore, it is trusted, for our good concealed;
for our final and greatest good.
Leigh Hunt
#46. What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
Pedro Calderon De La Barca
#47. The greatest good suffering can do for me is to increase my capacity for God.
Joni Eareckson Tada
#48. Conservatism vests in and depends on the widespread, informed understanding of human nature, self-governance and the First Principle of Progress: free people interacting in free markets produce the greatest good for the greatest number always, but only, when tethered to virtue and morality.
Mary Matalin
#49. Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.
Plato
#50. A great man's greatest good luck is to die at the right time.
Eric Hoffer
#51. Authentic leadership is leading adaptively from your core, choosing who you're most inspired to be to serve the greatest good in this moment.
Henna Inam
#52. Music, the greatest good that mortals know and all of heaven we have hear below.
Joseph Addison
#53. Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
#54. I am for those means which will give the greatest good to the greatest number.
Abraham Lincoln
#55. The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.
Benjamin Disraeli
#56. I do not believe in the doctrine of the greatest good of the greatest number. The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. The best work we can all do is create the highest vision possible for our lives and be led by that vision to the greatest good.
Oprah Winfrey
#58. What is life? a tale that is told;
What is life? a frenzy extreme,
A shadow of things that seem;
And the greatest good is but small,
That all life is a dream to all,
And that dreams themselves are a dream.
-Segismundo
Pedro Calderon De La Barca
#59. We must stop concentrating on our differences and focus on what we have in common. Then we can realize our full potential and achieve the greatest good in the world.
Bonnie L. Oscarson
#60. The purpose of conservation: The greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time.
Gifford Pinchot
#61. The greatest good [a man] can do is to cultivate himself in order that he may be of greater use to humanity.
Marshall Field
#62. What is wanting to restore us to our station among our confederates? not more money from the people. enough has been raised by them, and appropriated to this very object. it is that it should be employed understandingly, and for their greatest good. that good requires that, while they are ...
Thomas Jefferson
#63. Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.
John Fowles
#64. Do only the greatest good, for the greatest number of people. They will do the rest.
Jessica O'Toole
#65. The greatest evils, are from within us; and from ourselves also we must look for the greatest good.
Jeremy Taylor
#66. Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class.
Virginia Woolf
#67. I do not care about the greatest good for the greatest number ... Most people are poop-heads I do not care about them at all.
James Alan Gardner
#68. The universe will never 'take away' something that is for our highest and greatest good so when we 'lose' something, or our lives shift, it is always for our benefit. It's unwrapping a surprise present from the universe.
Caroline A. Shearer
#69. The things ... are esteemed as the greatest good of all ... can be reduced to these three headings: to wit, Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.
Baruch Spinoza
#70. You shouldn't hate something you don't know, because it may turn out to be the bearer of your greatest good fortune.
Izzeldin Abuelaish
#71. It is a fact verified and recorded in many histories that soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil. Who is there more impious than backsliding priest? Who more carnal than a recent virgin? This, however, may be a matter of appearance.
John Steinbeck
#72. If understanding followed no rule at all, there would be no good in the understanding nor in the matter understood, and to remain in ignorance would be the greatest good.
Ramon Llull
#73. Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
John Maynard Keynes
#74. The ruling of men is the effort to direct the individual actions of many persons toward some end. This end theoretically should be the greatest good of all, but no human group has ever reached this ideal because of ignorance and selfishness.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#76. Our country in general assumes that "the pursuit of happiness" really means "the pursuit of pleasure" and that therefore pleasure is the greatest good.
Madeleine L'Engle
#77. For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.
Plato
#78. The greatest good to the greatest number will obviously be reached when each individual of the greatest number is doing the greatest good to himself.
Rose Wilder
#79. Who is the most favored of God? He from whom the greatest good comes to His creatures.
Muhammad
#80. Where conflicting interests must be reconciled, the question shall always be answered from the standpoint of the greatest good of the greatest number in the long run.
Gifford Pinchot
#81. I'm not suggesting anything. People get hurt every day. This matter must be cleared up, Joseph, for everybody. The greatest good of the greatest number, as you are so fond of quoting.
Robert A. Heinlein
#82. Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.
Diogenes Of Sinope
#83. To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, the greatest good.
Desmond Tutu
#84. Our greatest good, and what we least can spare,
Is hope: the last of all our evils, fear.
John Armstrong
#85. The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature.
Baruch Spinoza
#86. What is this life? A frenzy, an illusion,
A shadow, a delirium, a fiction.
The greatest good's but little, and this life
Is but a dream, and dreams are only dreams.
Pedro Calderon De La Barca
#87. My greatest good fortune in a life of brilliant experiences has been to find you, and to lead my life with you. I don't feel far away from you out here at all. I feel very near in my heart; and also I feel that the nearer I get to honour, the nearer I am to you.
Winston Churchill
#88. One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.
Michael Ignatieff
#89. He'd tried fishing, dancing, gambling and drink, allegedly four of life's greatest pleasures, and wasn't sure that he saw the point. Food he was happy with - Death liked a good meal as much as anyone else.
Anonymous
#91. A woman's greatest glory is to be little talked about by men, whether for good or ill.
Pericles
#92. All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.
David Nicholls
#93. The world is a beautiful place, travel has been my greatest teacher, my close friends and folks are the greatest givers. I even have a ring of support around my bed as I type ... Goodbye world. Spread good energy. Pay it forward!
Brittany Maynard
#94. Being funny is one of my greatest strengths. I can make girls smile when they're down, and when they're having a good time, I can carry on the joke.
John Krasinski
#95. I do think that books, good books, free you. They make you feel a citizen of the world and things like class, sex and age don't matter. They're the greatest leveler.
Sue Townsend
#96. [The greatest barriers to forming alliances] are not figuring out what would make others want to join with you. Assuming that what excites you excites others. Spend more time assuming people have good reasons for what they do or say and then figure out those good reasons.
John Daly
#97. What you believe about God has the greatest potential for good or harm in your life.
Edwin Louis Cole
#98. No-one will ever have golf under his thumb. No round ever will be so good it could not have been better. Perhaps this is why golf is the greatest of games. You are not playing a human adversary; you a playing a game. You are playing old man par.
Bobby Jones
#99. If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I've gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.
Tom Peters
#100. I will never be a stupid girl ... and neither should you. Today, charting your own course isn't just more necessary than ever before ... it's also much easier
and much more fun. A good education is one of the greatest gifts you could ever give yourself.
Pink
