If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.
— Marcus Aurelius
Man-every man-is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.
— Ayn Rand, Introducing Objectivism
Every guilty person is his own hangman.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
— H. L. Mencken
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics – a rational ethics – as a precondition of rebirth.
— Ayn Rand
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
— Thomas Paine
Quality is not an act, it is a habit.
— Aristotle
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.
— Frederick Bastiat
It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
— Ronald Reagan
Honor is self-esteem made visible in action.
— Ayn Rand
There is … only one categorical imperative. Is is: Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that is should become a universal law.
— Immanuel Kant
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth.
— H. L. Mencken
Character is destiny.
— Heraclitus
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
— Henry David Thoreau
If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject.
— Ayn Rand
Do not overestimate the decency of the human race.
— H. L. Mencken
The worst guilt is to accept an unearned guilt.
— Ayn Rand
“Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience
It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.
— Aristotle
The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honor.
— Miyamoto Musashi
A man does what he must — in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers — and this is the basis of all human morality.
— John F. Kennedy
Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.
— Lord Herbert Louis Samuel
To know what is right and not to do it is the worst cowardice.
— Confucius
The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.
— Thomas Jefferson
Honor is the reward of virtue.
— Marcus Tulius Cicero
The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action.
— Confucius
I have often thought that morality may perhaps consist solely in the courage of making a choice.
— Leon Blum
Once one accepts the principle of self-ownership, what’s moral and immoral becomes self-evident. Murder is immoral because it violates private property. Rape and theft are also immoral — they also violate private property.
— Walter Williams
There can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
— Ayn Rand
No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft, and injustice to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it does not belong.
— Walter Williams
True morality consists not in following the beaten track, but in finding out the true path for ourselves and fearlessly following it.
— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Fame is something which must be won; honor, only something which must not be lost.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.
— Ayn Rand
There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
— H. L. Mencken
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
— Adam Smith
I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind – that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
— H. L. Mencken
Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil.
— Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
— Aristotle
Gratitude is a duty which ought to be paid, but which none have a right to expect.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
— Marcus Tulius Cicero
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
— Albert Einstein
Give me chastity and self-restraint, but do not give it yet.
— Saint Augustine
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
— H. L. Mencken
There is only one justification for having sinned, and that is to be glad of it.
— H. L. Mencken
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pleasures and pains of his species must become his own.
— Percy Bysshe Shelly
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
— Thomas Paine
In nothing do humans approach so nearly to the gods as doing good to others.
— Cicero
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
— Thomas Paine
Everyone must act according to the dictates of his own reason.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Miller, 1808
Fortitude is the guard and support of the other virtues.
— John Locke
Character is much easier kept than recovered.
— Thomas Paine
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
— Mark Twain
No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
