Michael Shermer Quotes

You must obey the law, always, not only when they grab you by your special place.

We need to get back to a level of social responsibility that we haven't seen for a long time.

When you live in a community where people know you, it makes you want to be good and decent. It's a strong influence.

Why does everyone think that he can be decent enough without the policeman, but that the club is needed for "the others?

When we act ignorant as a community, we are not doing the right thing.

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.

Yes, we have the freedom to do what we please, but it only works because we don't do everything we might please - we should exercise some degree of personal, and corporate, responsibility.

It is time to return to core values, time to get back to basics, to self-discipline and respect for the law, to consideration for the others, to accepting responsibility for yourself and your family - and not shuffling it off on other people and the state.

I think this society suffers so much from too much freedom, too many rights that allow people to be irresponsible.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

Our society, including the liberals, must understand that there must be order.

Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get.

It's the community that helps form our moral compass. It's those attitudes that I've remembered through my entire lifetime.

To get people to do needed things is the perennial hard task of government, not to mention of religion and philosophy.

Obedience of the law is demanded; not asked as a favor.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

The European model is in danger if we obliterate the principle of personal responsibility.

Civilization rests on the fact that most people do the right thing most of the time.

An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.

It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.

Posterity is the world to come; the world for whom we hold our ideals, from whom we have borrowed our planet, and to whom we bear sacred responsibility. We must do what America does best: offer more opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all.

Who can protest and does not, is an accomplice in the act.

Obedience to the law is itself a moral duty.