A Quote by Judith Martin

When a society abandons its ideals just because most people can't live up to them, behavior gets very ugly indeed.

Judith Martin

Quote Topics

Because Behavior Gets Ideals Indeed Just Just Be Just Because Live Most People Society Them Ugly Up Very

Quote Author

Judith Martin
American - Author
Born: September 13, 1938

There's some way in which we would prefer not to see very clearly the immense gifts and intelligence of some of the people who live in our most abject conditions. Maybe there are some things at work in deciding who gets to be society's winners and who gets to be society's losers that don't have to do with merit.

Katherine Boo

I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don't find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they're just too small to think the world is their norm.

Rick Steves

Integrity is the integration of ideals, convictions, standards, beliefs-and behavior. When our behavior is congruent with our professed values, when ideals and practice match up, we have integrity.

Nathaniel Branden

The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty more than bread.

D. H. Lawrence

It's a generational project just to get America to live up fully to its ideals and to have the kind of society where everybody has a shot, and every kid is getting a good education, and people are getting living wages, and they have decent retirement.

Barack Obama

People adjust their behavior to fit the society they live in. They integrate because they have to. But what they are on the inside doesn't change.

Sandra Brown

It was a weird game. There was ugly shooting and a lot of turnovers and mistakes, and we were just fortunate to get the win. I should have done better, but it was just a very ugly and weird game... I knew the game was going to be an ugly game when I saw those three guys at the scorer's table. Ugly people call ugly games.

Shaquille O'Neal

We know that we can defeat Islamist terrorism without violating our ideals; indeed, we must. These ideals, these American ideals.

Evan McMullin

All musicians start out with ideals but hanging on to them in the face of media scrutiny takes real integrity. Tougher still is to live up to the ideals of your dedicated fans.

Billy Bragg

Although both my grandfathers encountered ethnic prejudice, they viewed this as an aberration-a failure of some Americans to live up to the nation's ideals. It did not dawn on them to blame the bad behavior of some Americans on America itself.

Robert P. George

One of the regrets of my life is that I did not study Latin. I'm absolutely convinced, the more I understand these eighteenth-century people, that it was that grounding in Greek and Latin that gave them their sense of the classic virtues: the classic ideals of honor, virtue, the good society, and their historic examples of what they could try to live up to.

David McCullough

You can't just hope things away. All of us have to care, to really focus on our cities, because that's where most people live, and they're crumbling. And along with them are the futures of a lot of people. So it's a wake-up call, but no one film can do all that; we're just trying to be a part of the conversation.

Heidi Ewing

...the Muslims of recent times had fallen very short indeed of the ideals of their faith, ...nothing could be more erroneous than to measure the potentialities of Muhammad's message by the yardstick of present-day Muslim life and thought - just as he [Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi] said, 'it would be erroneous to see in the Christians' unloving behavior toward one another a refutation of Christ's message of love...'

Muhammad Asad

We have a lot to learn from [bonobos], because they're a very egalitarian society and they're a very empathetic society. Sexual behavior is not confined to one aspect of their life that they set aside. It permeates their entire life.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh

The United States is truly remarkable, a nation founded on a set of Enlightenment ideals so beautifully expressed by the Declaration of Independence and codified in the U.S. Constitution. We should feel good about our ideals, even when we don't quite manage to live up to them.