Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If all people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.
- Topic: Change, Honesty, Justice, Truth
- Photo: Jeffrey Benjamin
More Quotes from William Faulkner
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.
It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.
The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews.
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Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. All that is not a true change will disappear in the future society.
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
The world hates change, yet it is the only thing that has brought progress.
To change your mind and to follow him who sets you straight is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.
The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
Change how you see and see how you change.
You write in order to change the world…the world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimetre the way people look at reality, then you change it.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.
Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.
Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.
Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?
If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh unless, since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience the injustice of our fellows.
The first requisite of civilization is that of justice.
Perfect wisdom has four parts; Wisdom, the principle of doing things right. Justice, the principle of doing things equally in public and private. Fortitude, the principle of not fleeing danger, but meeting it. Temperance, the principle of subduing desires and living moderately.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
There is but one thing of real value—to cultivate truth and justice, and to live without anger in the midst of lying and unjust men.
Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.
Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.
Everything you said should be true but not everything true should be said.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.
But all my life through, the very insistence on truth has taught me to appreciate the beauty of compromise.
People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked.
And even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as honest man can be tortured into telling a life.
If you want to be successful, you must respect one rule: never lie to yourself.