Sissela Bok Quotes

Honesty from health professionals matters more to patients than almost everything else that they experience when ill.

The role that one assigns to truthfulness will always remain central in considering what kind of person one wants to be—how one wishes to treat, not only other people, but oneself.

Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

Whatever matters to human beings, trust is the atmosphere in which it thrives.

Evil means, he insisted, corrupt and degrade not only the purposes for which they are undertaken but also the persons who stoop to such means. Overcoming the urge to resort to such means is hardest when one aims to rectify past injustices. It is because ‘hate the sin and not the sinner’ is a precept so rarely practiced that the poison of hatred spreads in the world.

Any awareness of how lies spread must generate a real sensitivity to the fact that most lies believed to be white are unnecessary if not downright undesirable.

When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe. We can do so through gesture, through disguise, by means of action or inaction, even through silence.

Act only on the maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.