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Morals are private. Decency is public. -- Rita Mae Brown
Decency is the least of all laws, but yet it is the law which is most strictly observed. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Decency renders all things tolerable. -- Joseph Marie, baron de Gerando
Decency is indecency's conspiracy of silence -- George Bernard Shaw
The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency. -- Theodore Roosevelt
As much as we need a prosperous economy, we also need a prosperity of kindness and decency. -- Caroline Kennedy
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
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
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
I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence - providing they have the facts, providing they have the information. -- Studs Terkel
That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force. -- Danny Boyle
Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it. -- Pablo Casals
Decency cannot be discussed without indecency! -- George Bernard Shaw
Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated. -- Sherman Alexie
Decency and tolerance, to be of any value, must be capable of withstanding the severest strain. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Decency requires that when a programme is approved by the majority, all should carry it out faithfully. -- Mahatma Gandhi
Decency, not to dare to do that in public which it is decent enough to do in private. -- Michel de Montaigne
Decency is not news. It is buried in the obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime. -- Robert A. Heinlein
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If you don't believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency. Decency is very good. Better decent than indecent. But I don't think it's enough. -- Harold MacMillan
The Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004 helps address the continuing degradation on the broadcast airwaves and helps send a clear message to the broadcast industry that Alabama families, like the rest of American families, have had enough. -- Mike Rogers
The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails. Because it would necessarily affect the Internet itself, the [Communications Decency Act] would necessarily reduce the speech available for adults on the medium. This is a constitutionally intolerable result. -- Stewart Dalzell
All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Mannersand Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance. -- Lord Chesterfield
I believe in an ultimate decency of things. -- Robert Louis Stevenson
Don't overestimate the decency of the human race. -- H. L. Mencken
Caprice in women often infringes upon the rules of decency. -- Jean de la Bruyere
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it. -- Christopher Hitchens
God's most lordly gift to man is decency of mind. -- Aeschylus
I had a marketing idea that everybody hated, decency is sexy. -- James L. Brooks
I surround myself with positive, productive people of good will and decency. -- Ted Nugent
On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way. -- A. Bartlett Giamatti
Justice consists in doing no injury to men; decency in giving them no offense. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
It is impossible to practice parliamentary politics without having patience, decency, politeness and courtesy. -- Khaleda Zia
I believe that we should die with decency so that at least decency will survive. -- Dag Hammarskjold
Achievements on the golf course are not what matters, decency and honesty are what matter. -- Tiger Woods
If someone lacked decency or respect, I didn't allow that person to stay in my world. -- Gabrielle Union
Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? -- Joseph N. Welch
There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense. -- Jeannette Rankin
People who don't know how to keep themselves healthy ought to have the decency to get themselves buried, and not waste time about it. -- Henrik Ibsen
No matter how noble the objectives of a government, if it blurs decency and kindness, cheapens human life, and breeds ill will and suspicion; it is an evil government. -- Eric Hoffer
We learned about dignity and decency - that how hard you work matters more than how much you make... that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. -- Michelle Obama
When you're going into an employment environment that looks pretty scary, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community. -- Henry Rollins
Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness....Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency? -- Joseph N. Welch
I think someone should have had the decency to tell me the luncheon was free. To make someone run out with potato salad in his hand, pretending he's throwing up, is not what I call hospitality. -- Jack Handey
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
Be not intimidated...nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice. -- John Adams
Richard Nixon was an evil man - evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Without moral progress, stimulated by faith in God, immorality in all its forms will proliferate and strangle goodness and human decency. Mankind will not be able to fully express the potential nobility of the human soul unless faith in God is strengthened. -- James E. Faust
I'm under the impression that this notion of decency is disappearing from our society where conflicts are made worse on cinema and on television, where people are nasty and cruel on the Internet and where, in general, everybody seems to be very angry. -- Helen Mirren
Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example? -- Dennis Prager
I believe that poverty is often the result of inappropriate behavior - out-of-wedlock births, dropping out of school, crime and drugs - which should not be rewarded. But often it isn't, and common decency requires that we take care of the least of these. -- Joe Klein
It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization. -- Friedrich August von Hayek
If once a woman breaks through the barriers of decency, her ease is desperate; and if she goes greater lengths than the men, and leaves the pale of propriety farther behind her, it is because she is aware that all return is prohibited, and by none so strongly as by her own sex. -- Charles Caleb Colton
I know that I come from mid-20th century America, urban, specifically downtown New York, specifically an Italian-American area, Roman Catholic - that's who I am. And a part of what I know is there's a decency to people who tried to make a living in the kind of world that was around us and also the Skid Row area of the Bowery; it impressed me. -- Martin Scorsese
And die with decency. -- Thomas Otway
Honor is decency without vanity. -- Arthur Koestler
Honesty is nothin' compared to decency. -- Jackie Mason
The laws of decency enforce themselves. -- Louise Colet
Is there decency left in American politics? -- Byron Dorgan
Ethics, decency and morality are the real soldiers -- Kiran Bedi
Perhaps what you call conventionality, I call decency. -- Dodie Smith
The only goal is the decency of means. -- Stefan Themerson
silence is not weakness and decency is not pride -- Arthur Machen
Tibet's a tragedy. It's an insult to human decency. -- Elie Wiesel
Nothing is more heart-breaking than the demise of decency. -- Guo Moruo
Common decency is a core part of who people are. -- E. J. Dionne
A woman without a degree of decency and delicacy is unsexed. -- Charlotte Mary Yonge
Normal: lacking in taste, compassion, understanding, kindness, and ordinary human decency. -- Frank Portman
You judge a society by the decency of living of the weakest -- Zygmunt Bauman
I respect anyone who has to fight and howl for his decency. -- Deborah Kerr
Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country. -- Mason Cooley
Morals are a matter of private agreement; decency is of public concern. -- Marguerite Yourcenar
Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency. -- Terence McKenna
There are those without decency who must be fought without hesitation, without pity. -- Henri
But you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. -- William S. Burroughs
That laughter costs too much which is purchased by the sacrifice of decency. -- John Quinton
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency to get the book written. -- William Faulkner
If I had any decency, I'd be dead. Most of my friends are. -- Dorothy Parker
If you can't be kind, at least have the decency to be vague. -- Jerry Seinfeld
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Your own brain ought to have the decency to be on your side! -- Terry Pratchett
If you can't say anything nice, at least have the decency to be vague. -- Susan Andersen
Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency of sin. -- Horace Bushnell
The most fundamental winning formula is to bet on human decency and be patient. -- Robert Breault
REJECT THE LIES AND VIOLENCE. STAND FOR LOVE, TRUTH, DECENCY AND THE COMMON GOOD. -- Bryant McGill
So many of the world's problems, he mused, were solved by sheer human decency. -- Maggie Stiefvater
At least, the sun had the decency to stay the hell away from us. -- Jandy Nelson
No one's so old that he mayn't with decency hope for one more day. -- Seneca the Younger
I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency. -- Tennessee Williams
Immodest words admit of no defence, For want of decency is want of sense. -- Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon
Politeness, delicacy [and] decency ... are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice. -- John Adams
Life would be a great deal easier if dead things had the decency to remain dead. -- Doug MacLeod
War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace. - Baba -- Khaled Hosseini
War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba -- Khaled Hosseini
War doesn't negate decency. It demands it, even more than in times of peace." - Baba" -- Khaled Hosseini
Poverty didn't necessarily engender an envy of wealth; sometimes it might beget a passion for decency. -- Patricia Hampl
Why only hate? Where does love remain? Or at least a little decency toward other people? -- Friedrich Kellner
A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her. -- W. C. Fields
You're no angel. You're Fallen. You just haven't had the decency to lose your wings. [Reaver] -- Larissa Ione
Above all, it is not decency or goodness of gentleness that impresses the Middle East, but strength. -- Meir Kahane
There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health. -- Samuel R. Delany
My cares and my inquiries are for decency and truth, and in this I am wholly occupied. -- Horace
When once the forms of civility are violated, there remains little hope of return to kindness or decency. -- Samuel Johnson
Said to Mairin; "There's little decency to good loving" Maddie said. "If 'tis decent, it isn't much fun"! -- Maya Banks
HUD's mission is to provide decency and sanitary housing for low and moderate income people in this country. -- Alphonso Jackson
Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical?as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can't exist. -- T.H. White
If the story-tellers could ha' got decency and good morals from true stories, who'd have troubled to invent parables? -- Thomas Hardy
As for plenty, we had not only for necessity, conveniency and decency, but for delight and pleasure to superfluity. -- Margaret Cavendish
Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known. -- Michael Shermer
We can't hire out our own inner work, but we can do the manual labor with delight and decency. -- Sakyong Mipham
It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
A better politics is one where we appeal to each otherâ??s basic decency instead of our basest fears. -- Barack Obama
Masters of the bluff and masters of the proposition, but the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency. -- Bob Dylan
Yeah," I said, "but you're an artist. You don't believe in decency and honesty and gratitude. Where shall we eat? -- Jack Kerouac
Almost everything you think is sacred, good and decent, is a lie and an all-out assault against truth and decency. -- Bryant McGill
I've got great faith in the essential fairness and decency - you may say goodness - of the human being. -- Norman Vincent Peale
I saw the end of his life right there in that single moment. His pride, his decency, his secrets, his death. -- Alice Hoffman
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
Skepticism is the agent of reason against organized irrationalism--and is therefore one of the keys to human social and civic decency. -- Stephen Jay Gould
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