Morality

"[When] trust is insidiously betrayed or wantonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that they themselves have deputed."
        --John Adams

"Society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases."
        --John Adams

"Statesmen may plan and speculate for liberty, but it is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue."
        --John Adams

"A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America then the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader...if virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security."
        --Samuel Adams

"[N]either the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt. He therefore is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue."
        --Samuel Adams

"Liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals."
        --Samuel Adams

"You can best reward a liar by believing nothing of what he says."
        --Aristippus

"Since custom is the principal magistrate of manīs life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs."
        --Francis Bacon

"The relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power."
        --James Baldwin

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men together in a society, they create for themselves in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
        --Frederic Bastiat

"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

"We are reaping the bitter fruit of decades of pathetic tolerance for all that is wrong in ourselves and others."
        --Linda Bowles

"Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his understanding, and makes his mind paralytic."
        --Edmund Burke

"If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals."
        --James Dobson

"The American elite ... is almost beyond redemption. Moral relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great moral mush -- sophistry washed down with Chardonnay."
        --Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton"

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom."
        --Benjamin Franklin

"A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason."
        --Hugo Grotius

"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness...The mere politician...ought to respect and cherish them. Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? ...reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail, in exclusion of religious principle."
        --Alexander Hamilton

"The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence."
        --Alexander Hamilton

"No free government can stand without virtue in the people, and a lofty spirit of patriotism...."
        --Andrew Jackson

"An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible."
        --William James

"[W]ith nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties."
        --Thomas Jefferson

"The basis of effective government is public confidence, and that confidence is endangered when ethical standards falter or appear to falter."
        --John F. Kennedy, 04/27/61

"No one can deceive you unless he makes you think he is telling the truth."
        --C.S. Lewis

"Virtue -- even attempted virtue -- brings light; indulgence brings fog."
        --C.S. Lewis

"For men are so simple and yield so much to immediate necessity, that the deceiver never lacks dupes."
        --Niccolo Machiavelli

"To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea."
        --James Madison

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
        --George Orwell

"The good have no need of an advocate."
        --Phocion

"Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue."
        --Francis Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"The weakling and the coward cannot be saved by honesty alone; but without honesty, the brave and able man is merely a civic wild beast who should be hunted down by every lover of righteousness."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"Under the higher law, under the great law of morality and righteousness, he is precisely as guilty if, instead of lying in a court, he lies in a newspaper or on the stump; and in all probability, the evil effects of his conduct are infinitely more widespread and more pernicious."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency."
        --Theodore Roosevelt

"If a sin or a wrong can never be identified as such, then we have effectively banished all moral standards from human acknowledgment and denied them all human support."
        --William A. Rusher

"Adult chimpanzees, dogs, pigs and members of many other species far surpass the brain-damaged infant in their ability to relate to others, act independently, be self-aware, and in any other capacity that could be said to give value to life."
        --Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University

"Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all. No infant, defective or not, has a strong claim to life as a person."
        --Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University

"Tolerance is a virtue when you put up with a lesser evil for the sake of a greater good, such as social peace. It isn't a virtue at all -- it becomes a vice -- when it means abandoning your moral standards out of cowardice or pusillanimity."
        --Joseph Sobran

"The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be."
        --Socrates

"The younger generation is being reared in a morally corrosive atmosphere where they are taught that in the name of liberty anything goes."
        --Margaret Thatcher

"You've got to be able to count on a man's word, and if you can't, forget it. ... I've had experience with the other kind as well, and that's the worst thing there is. A liar in public life is a lot more dangerous than a full, paid up Communist, and I don't care who he is."
        --Harry S. Truman

"Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
        --George Washington

"Of all the dispositions and habits, which lead to political prosperity, Religion, and Morality are indispensable supports. -- In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and Citizens. -- The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. -- A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. -- Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. -- Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure -- reason and experience both forbid us to expect, that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle."
        --George Washington, from his Farewell Address

"Tis substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government."
        --George Washington

"The American dream does not happen by asking Americans to accept whatīs immoral and wrong in the name of tolerance."
        --J.C. Watts, (Republican, Oklahoma)

"[A]ll history is a witness of the truth.that good morals are essential to the faithful and upright discharge of public functions."
        --Noah Webster

"When we move beyond talk about good and evil, when the language of virtue and vice is 'transcended,' we are left with the thin gruel of values-talk. How very democratic values-talk is: Unlike virtues, everyone has lots of values, as many as they choose. Hitler had scads of values. George Washington had virtues. Who among those who knew him would have spoken of Washington's 'values'? Values-talk comes naturally to a nonjudgmental age -- an age judgmental primarily about the cardinal sin of being judgmental. It is considered broad-minded to say, 'One person's values are as good as another's.' It is nonsense to say, 'One person's virtues are as good as another's.' Values are an equal-opportunity business: They are mere choices. Virtues are habits, difficult to develop and therefore not equally accessible to all. Speaking of virtues rather than values is elitist, offensive to democracy's egalitarian, leveling ethos. Which is why talk of virtues should be revived. ...[D]emocracy requires the cultivation of certain preventative virtues that counter certain tendencies of democracy."
        --George Will