Right Thing, Right Now

Charles de Gaulle explained that it wasn’t just raw courage that was required to lead, but that a statesman “must know when to dissemble, when to be frank…. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness and cunning. But all those things will be forgiven of him—indeed they will be regarded as high qualities—if he can make them th

as the poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper would explain in a New York church immediately following the Civil War, justice was not fulfilled if anyone was unequal before the law. “We are all bound together,” she said, “in one great bundle of humanity.” Our fates are tied up with each other’s, she understood, and the sooner people realize that, the be

“You could be good today,” Marcus Aurelius reminded himself, quite possibly as he was deliberating on some similarly controversial decision. “Instead you choose tomorrow.”

Loyalty is something we give. It’s not something we expect. Nor is it something we ought to expect to always be understood. We do it because it’s right.

But Rickover was also just a regular human being, someone with a temper, someone with colleagues and subordinates, a spouse, a son, parents, neighbors, bills to pay, traffic to navigate. What guided him, what he spoke about repeatedly in speeches and briefings, was the importance of this idea of a sense of right and wrong, a sense of duty and honor

“The phrase ‘I am not responsible’ has become a standard response in our society to complaints of a job poorly done,” Admiral Rickover once pointed out. “This response is a semantic error. Generally what a person means is, ‘I cannot be held legally liable.’ Yet, from a moral or ethical point of view the person who declaims responsibility is correct

Pragmatism without virtue is dangerous and hollow. Virtue without pragmatism is ineffectual and impotent.

Once in prison, they refused to comply further, undergoing hunger strikes nearly to the point of death. In a famous speech, which took its example from Cato, who died rather than serve Caesar, Pankhurst explained that she refused to accept the legitimacy of a government that so deprived its citizens. “You can kill that woman,” she said of herself a

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “and then you read.” It was books, history, philosophy, Baldwin said, that taught him that “the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

“I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three month stay in England and Europe,” Gandhi observed after one of his visits, “that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter what clime it flourishes.”