Top 100 Quotes About Decency
#2. I don't think most of my opinions, political or social, are so far outside of the mainstream that they'd cause massive outrage on a scale liable to provoke death threats or referrals to prosecutors for outraging public decency, so why worry?
Charles Stross
#3. Decency" is a very old-fashioned word that conjures up a standard of behavior that has largely disappeared from the world.
Amazon Digital Services
#4. 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
#5. Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
H.L. Mencken
#8. Tears spilled won my cheeks as I felt renewed disappointment. "You keep hurting me."
He had the decency to look guilty. "I don't mean to.
Samantha Young
#9. The first purpose of clothes ... was not warmth or decency, but ornament ... Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes. The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.
Thomas Carlyle
#10. We should strive to treat each other with common Human Decency
Dr. Seuss
#11. I don't see why it should be remarkable that you can acquire a reputation for fairness and decency. Those are qualities shared by so many people. And the great majority of people I meet are decent people, just trying to navigate their way through the world without causing too much trouble.
Michael Palin
#12. Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life
Rex Stout
#13. I might be capable of making figures that have heart, conscience, passion, emotion and decency. But there's no call for that at all in the world. People are only interested in monsters and freaks, so I give them their monsters. Monsters are what they want!
Joseph Roth
#14. If you are not going to be a comfort, have the decency to be an empty space.
Jennifer Crusie
#15. Judgment consists not in seeing through deceptions and evil intentions, but in being able to awaken the decency dormant in every person.
Eric Hoffer
#16. And who has prayed for Satan? In eight hundred years, who has had the common decency to pray for the one sinner who needed it most?
Mark Twain
#17. Surely that gift - the gift of a world of human decency - is the one that all countries hunger for still.
Lois Lowry
#18. He considered himself in a class above the ordinary run of beggars, who, he said, were an abject lot, without even the decency to be ungrateful. He
George Orwell
#19. At least, the sun had the decency to stay the hell away from us.
Jandy Nelson
#20. I fear yet this iron yoke of outward conformity hath left a slavish print upon our necks: the ghost of a linnen decency yet haunts us.
John Milton
#21. We delude ourselves if we think that decency is not rewarded in other people simply because we refuse to practice it ourselves.
Sarah Scheele
#22. So many of the world's problems, he mused, were solved by sheer human decency.
Maggie Stiefvater
#23. In times of crisis not one should be counted special. Everyone was human therefore equal to the same misery and misfortune and good luck as everyone else. What happened to the whole 'we gotta stick together' motto? When hard times came-a-knocking, people baled on good sense and decency.
Shelly Crane
#24. To do the right thing you must sometimes defend people who don't understand you, or who fear you, or who are angry at you. There are times when you have to operate purely on faith and continue to trust human decency even when it is no longer visible.
G. Willow Wilson
#25. [The church's] job is to provide permanent solace and spiritual leadership to the people as a whole, whatever their government at the moment, so long as it stays within the bounds of moral decency.
James A. Michener
#26. I feel deeply my responsibility to teach sacred things. I am so aware that the world is changing and will be vastly different from the one I have known. Values have shifted. Basic decency and respect for good things are eroding.
James E. Faust
#27. 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
#28. Once again ... Rick Bass draws us into his magical human worlds, rendered urgently by a hypnotic prose that tracks a parallel and untamed natural world, often with a trace of loss and always patrolled by unmistakable decency. He is a master of this form ...
Doug Peacock
#29. In addition to fines, violators of decency standards could be required to air public service announcements serving educational and informational needs of children.
Charles W. Pickering
#30. There is not much mental distance between a feeling of having been screwed and the ethic of total retaliation, or at least the kind of random revenge that comes with outraging the public decency.
Hunter S. Thompson
#31. When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.
Mary Doria Russell
#32. Humanity, morality, decency, might be forgotten, but codfish must still be had for the use of the faithful in Lent and on fast days.
Francis Parkman
#33. The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
Willa Cather
#34. And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank
Joseph Conrad
#35. Lost Decency (a memoir) covers three phases of Afghanistan's last 50 years (Where it was? What Happened and Where it is headed?)
Atta Arghandiwal
#37. Personally, I'm tired of hearing the whole have-you-no-decency routine from people who have made quite clear that they possess none themselves.
Glenn Reynolds
#38. With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.
Michael Johns
#39. It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
Edith Wharton
#40. I do think that television, in its early years, played a significant role in that standard-setting, enforcing a certain decency among people. They took their role seriously, and the people behind the camera took their role seriously, too.
John Seabrook
#41. But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude.
William S. Burroughs
#42. Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.
Glen Duncan
#43. I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.
Cornel West
#44. One person can make a difference," said Seeley, "and bit by bit, little by little moral decency can and will prevail.
Cathrina Constantine
#46. Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.
Cornel West
#48. I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.
Victoria Woodhull
#49. Faye, if you got eaten by another shark, would you please at least have the decency to say so? My time is kind of limited, if you know what I'm sayin'.
Elle Lothlorien
#50. Love is where you find it. I think it is foolish to go around looking for it, and I think it can 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
#51. There's a sort of decency among the dead, a remarkable discretion: you never find them making any complaint against the doctor who killed them!
Moliere
#52. Once I fucked you, it would be all over for me. I had to have a guarantee I could get you back. Christ, Blue, the first time I saw you, I wanted to throw you over the couch and fuck you."
Blue flushed but smiled a little. "So why didn't you?"
"Common decency."
"Highly overrated.
S.E. Jakes
#53. All this because one race did not have the decency to be ashamed of dealing in human flesh.
Whitney Otto
#54. Ethics, decency and morality are the real soldiers
Kiran Bedi
#55. It really is amazing how some young people feel that short stature and small minds are a sign of superiority. I wonder what ever happened to decency and courtesy?
L.E. Modesitt Jr.
#56. In thy apparel avoid singularity, profuseness, and gaudiness. Be not too early in the fashion, nor too late. Decency is half way between affectation and neglect. The body is the shell of the soul, apparel is the husk of that shell; the husk often tells you what the kernel is.
Francis Quarles
#57. Decency and tolerance, to be of any value, must be capable of withstanding the severest strain.
Mahatma Gandhi
#58. Fight against yourself, recover yourself to decency, to modesty, to freedom. And, in the first place, condemn your actions; but when you have condemned them, do not despair of yourself. For both ruin and recovery are from within.
Epictetus
#59. This is why I say that the individual's most potent weapon is a stubborn belief in the triumph of common decency.
Paul Rusesabagina
#60. If you can't say anything nice, at least have the decency to be vague.
Susan Andersen
#61. There are some midshipmen who will never have the decency to lie down and die, whatever the circumstances. Because they are born to be hanged, no doubt,' added the lieutenant darkly.
Patrick O'Brian
#62. Remember this? You gave it to me for ensuring your trigger finger got reattached to your hand. You said it would remind me of that spark of decency inside me. I'm trying to do something decent now, Captain.
Eoin Colfer
#63. That so unlikely an outcome should accrue to a man possessed of such limited talent and so many flaws, and one lacking in a sense of ethics and decency was one of the bitter ironies of history.
William Thomas Green Morton
#64. I was like you once, long time ago. I believed in the dignity of man. Decency. Humanity. But I was lucky. I found out the truth early, boy.
And what is the truth, Stark?
It's all very simple. There's no such thing as the dignity of man. Man is a base, pathetic and vulgar animal.
Charles Grandison Finney
#65. We always assume someone else will come to the rescue, but it's never us. Surely somebody will have the decency to be the hero. Right? It doesn't work like that. Not when everyone assumes someone else will do the right thing.
Jeff Goins
#66. Fog and hypocrisy - that is to say, shadow, convention, decency - these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance.
Ada Leverson
#67. Don't be afraid to go to your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend your own ideas of decency.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#68. A man's religious choice didn't matter in the least if it was his path to decency and remembering his fellow man.
Heather Graham
#69. It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H.L. Mencken
#70. I'd like to be remembered as a guy who tried - who tried to be part of his times, tried to help people communicate with one another, tried to find some decency in his own life, tried to extend himself as a human being. Someone who isn't complacent, who doesn't cop out.
Paul Newman
#71. The death penalty exacts a terrible price in dollars, lives and human decency. Rather than tamping down the flames of violence, it fuels them while draining millions of dollars from more promising efforts to restore safety to our lives.
Robert M. Morgenthau
#72. Nothing is more heart-breaking than the demise of decency.
Guo Moruo
#73. Good manners, to those one does not love, are no more a breach of truth, than "your humble servant," at the bottom of a challengeis; they are universally agreed upon, and understand to be things of course. They are necessary guards of the decency and peace of society.
Lord Chesterfield
#74. ...beneath his youth and his daredevil attitude lay the kind of decency that could stand up to the ugliness of the world. On Pamarthe they called that quality bedrock. A warrior of bedrock was one on whose loyalty a kingdom could be built.
Claudia Gray
#75. If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are.
Dorothy Parker
#76. Suddenly I am furious, that with my life on the line, they don't even have the decency to pay attention to me. That I'm being upstaged by a dead pig.
Suzanne Collins
#77. Excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth.
Oscar Wilde
#78. HUD's mission is to provide decency and sanitary housing for low and moderate income people in this country.
Alphonso Jackson
#79. The point was living with grace, decency, and attention to the world, and breaking free of the artificial constructs in your own life.
Scott Jurek
#80. I pray that if a god watches over us, it will have the decency to avoid the tasteless maneuver of voyeuristic trespass.
Joshua Emmet
#81. Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish.
Thurgood Marshall
#82. ... there's no question of heroism in all this. It's a matter of common decency. That's an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is - common decency.
Albert Camus
#83. Silence is not weakness and decency is not pride
Arthur Machen
#84. His success in dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with decency and morality - kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and empathy - can also be impressive political resources.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#85. You should have had the decency to die when you needed to."
"Sorry," I admitted. "I've been going through a bit of a rebellious streak. I swear it's almost over.
Ally Carter
#86. People minus space equals Poverty ... What is living for? If the answer is a life of dignity, decency and opportunity, then every increase in population means a decrease in all three. The crowd is a threat to every single being.
Marya Mannes
#87. Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated.
Sherman Alexie
#88. Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical - as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can't exist.
T.H. White
#89. War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace. - Baba
Khaled Hosseini
#90. that there's some meaning, some willfulness to life. Fairness. Basic decency. Good things happen
Nicola Yoon
#91. Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.
Terence McKenna
#92. There is a bedrock decency to people in the Midwest. They are thoughtful and ready to help you if something needs to be done.
Shelley Fabares
#93. A meaningful life is made up of a series of daily acts of decency and kindness, which, ironically, add up to something truly great over the course of a lifetime.
Robin S. Sharma
#94. I gather a repulsive nobody writing in a paper no one of any decency would be seen dead with has written something loathesome and inhumane.
Stephen Fry
#95. Justice is the reason we have law, and law is man's feeble attempt to teach decency to others.
Joy Ratcliff Cagle
#96. You think you're superior to the others, don't you? We'll you're not. In fact you're worse for mistaking basic human decency for moral superiority.
Nenia Campbell
#97. Survival wasn't nearly as hard as he'd thought once he left decency behind.
Leigh Bardugo
#98. A firm rule must be imposed upon our nation before it destroys itself. The United States needs some theology and geometry, some taste and decency. I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss.
John Kennedy Toole
#99. The greatest progress we have made, and the greatest progress we have yet to make, is in the human heart. In the end, all the world's wealth and a thousand armies are no match for the strength and decency of the human spirit.
William J. Clinton
#100. Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat?
Jack Kerouac
