Integrity

Integrity comprises perceived consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles. It may be seen as the quality of having a sense of honesty and truthfulness in regard to the motivations for one's actions.

Sourced

• Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate, in adhering to an opinion once adopted.
  • William Cobbett, Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, p. 23, London, The Nonesuch Press (1927).

• Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays, First Series (1841).

• A little integrity is better than any career.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Behavior,” The Conduct of Life (1860).

• Take the initiative. Go to work, and above all co-operate and don't hold back on one another or try to gain at the expense of another. Any success in such lopsidedness will be increasingly short-lived. These are the synergetic rules that evolution is employing and trying to make clear to us. They are not man-made laws. They are the infinitely accommodative laws of the intellectual integrity governing universe.
  • Buckminster Fuller in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963).

• I am sure that in estimating every man’s value either in private or public life, a pure integrity is the quality we take first into calculation, and that learning and talents are only the second.
  • Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Garland Jefferson (June 15, 1792). The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 24, p. 82, ed. Julian P. Boyd, et al. (1950).

• Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
  • Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Ch. 41 (1759).

• When at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us — recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state — our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions — were we truly men of courage … were we truly men of judgment … were we truly men of integrity … were we truly men of dedication?
  • John F. Kennedy, address to the Massachusetts legislature (9 January 1961); Congressional Record (10 January 1961), vol. 107, Appendix, p. A169.

Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

By Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert

• Give us a man, young or old, high or low, on whom we know we can thoroughly depend — who will stand firm when others fail — the friend faithful and true, the adviser honest and fearless, the adversary just and chivalrous; in such an one there is a fragment of the Rock of Ages — a sign that there has been a prophet amongst us.
  • Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, p. 352.

• Honesty is the best policy, but he who acts on that principle is not an honest man.
  • Bishop Whately, p. 352.

• Though a hundred crooked paths may conduct to a temporary success, the one plain and straight path of public and private virtue can alone lead to a pure and lasting fame and the blessings of posterity.
  • Edward Everett, p. 352.

• Aaron Burr was a more brilliant man than George Washington. If he had been loyal to truth, he would have been an abler man; but that which made George Washington the chief hero in our great republic was the sagacity, not of intellectual genius, but of the moral element in him.
  • A. E. Dunning, p. 352.

• The man who, for party, forsakes righteousness, goes down; and the armed battalions of God march over him.
  • Wendell Phillips, p. 352.

• Gold thou mayest safely touch, but if it stick
  Unto thy hands, it woundeth to the quick.
  • George Herbert, p. 352.

Unsourced

• To starve to death is a small thing, but to lose one’s integrity is a great one.
  • Chinese proverb