I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful must take himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors.

Would you want to do business with a person who was 99% honest?

That which is won ill, will never wear well, for there is a curse attends it which will waste it. The same corrupt dispositions which incline men to sinful ways of getting, will incline them to the like sinful ways of spending.

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity than straigthforward and simple integrity in another. A knave would rather quarrel with a brother knave than with a fool, but he would rather avoid a quarrel with one honest man than with both. He can combat a fool by management and address, and he can conquer a knave by temptations. But the honest man is neither to be bamboozled nor bribed.

Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one rascal less in the world.

It was a grand trait of the old Roman that with him one and the same word meant both honor and honesty.

A page of history is worth a pound of logic.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.