“Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king.”
Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Song lyrics, Infidels (1983), Sweetheart Like You
Source: Rigante series, Stormrider, Ch. 5
“Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king.”
Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Song lyrics, Infidels (1983), Sweetheart Like You
Jeff Tweedy (1967) musician
Interviewed in 2004 http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,65688,00.html
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell (1792–1878) leading Whig and Liberal politician who served as Prime Minister on two occasions
Source: 1806 journal entry on the acquittal of Lord Melville for misappropriation of public funds, as quoted in Stuart J. Reid, Lord John Russell (1895), p.9
Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist
"Our Mobsters, Ourselves", The Nation (2 April 2001) https://www.thenation.com/article/our-mobsters-ourselves/ <br class="br">Context: In its original literal sense, "moral relativism" is simply moral complexity. That is, anyone who agrees that stealing a loaf of bread to feed one's children is not the moral equivalent of, say, shoplifting a dress for the fun of it, is a relativist of sorts. But in recent years, conservatives bent on reinstating an essentially religious vocabulary of absolute good and evil as the only legitimate framework for discussing social values have redefined "relative" as "arbitrary." That conflation has been reinforced by social theorists and advocates of identity politics who argue that there is no universal morality, only the value systems of particular cultures and power structures. From this perspective, the psychoanalytic – and by extension the psychotherapeutic – worldview is not relativist at all. Its values are honesty, self-knowledge, assumption of responsibility for the whole of what one does, freedom from inherited codes of family, church, tribe in favor of a universal humanism: in other words, the values of the Enlightenment, as revised and expanded by Freud's critique of scientific rationalism for ignoring the power of unconscious desire.
Samuel Butler (1835–1902) novelist
Honesty
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VIII - Handel and Music
Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…