I love the idea of rectitude.
The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.
The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war s...
For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude.
Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him.
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.
Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written in it?
Then, in the next place, we must know that every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice.
Pappy O'Daniel: Moral fibre? I invented moral fibre! Pappy O'Daniel was displaying rectitude and high-mindedness when that egghead you work for was still messing his drawers!
Understand that when the beast within you succeeds again in paralyzing into unending incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to try to make its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its rectitude. It knows that it alone knows you.
O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude...
That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any ...
It was at a conference in Cyprus in 1976, where the theme was the rights of small nations, that I first met Edward Said. It was impossible not to be captivated by him: of his many immediately seductive qualities I will start by mentioning a very impo...
Maximus was my model for self-control, fixity of purpose, and cheerfulness under ill-health or other misfortunes. His character was an admirable combination of dignity and charm, and all the duties of his station were performed quietly and without fu...
The opacity of the mind, its inability to project itself into the realm of another's personality, goes a long way to explain the friction of life. If we would set down other people's errors to this rather than to malice prepense we should not only ge...
