Source: Wuthering Heights
Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "Big businesses and the environment: different conditions, different outcomes", section "Businesses and the public" (Penguin Books, 2011, pages 484-485, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.
Essay published in The Advertiser (1748) http://thingsabove.freerovin.com/samadams.htm and later reprinted in The Life and Public Service of Samuel Adams, Volume 1 (1865), by William Vincent Wells <!-- Little, Brown, and Company; Boston -->
Context: Neither 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 to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man. We must not conclude merely upon a man's haranguing upon liberty, and using the charming sound, that he is fit to be trusted with the liberties of his country. It is not unfrequent to hear men declaim loudly upon liberty, who, if we may judge by the whole tenor of their actions, mean nothing else by it but their own liberty, — to oppress without control or the restraint of laws all who are poorer or weaker than themselves. It is not, I say, unfrequent to see such instances, though at the same time I esteem it a justice due to my country to say that it is not without shining examples of the contrary kind; — examples of men of a distinguished attachment to this same liberty I have been describing; whom no hopes could draw, no terrors could drive, from steadily pursuing, in their sphere, the true interests of their country; whose fidelity has been tried in the nicest and tenderest manner, and has been ever firm and unshaken.
The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.
New Year's Address to the Nation (1990)
Context: The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.
Letter to Steptoe Washington http://westillholdthesetruths.org/quotes/60/a-good-moral-character-is-the (5 December 1790)
1790s
“When there is a lack of honor in government, the morals of the whole people are poisoned.”
Quoted in the New York Times (9 August 1964)
“There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.”
“The most virtuous women have in them something that is never chaste.”
Les femmes les plus vertueuses ont en elles quelque chose qui n'est jamais chaste.
Part I, Meditation IV, aphorism XX.
Physiology of Marriage (1829)
"Tangled in the Party Line" in China File https://www.chinafile.com/tangled-party-line (6 September 2012)
