True patriotism is better than the wrong kind of piety.
Abraham Lincoln
Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.
Abu Bakr
We are certainly influenced by role models, and if we are surrounded by images of beautiful rich people, we will start to think that to be beautiful and rich is very important - just as in the Middle Ages, people were surrounded by images of religious piety.
Alain de Botton
Ancestor worship, or filial piety so characteristic of Asian cultures, for example, does not really resonate with Americans who favor children, not grandparents.
Alan Dundes
Impiety. Your irreverence toward my deity.
Ambrose Bierce
Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.
Aristotle
For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.
I have seen too many of my male friends - no matter whether they're on the football field or inside a church - bash gays and then revel in their machismo or piety.
Cory Booker
You might think that religion was the one area in which professional jealousy would take a back seat. But no: ecclesiastical memoirs are as viperish as any, though their envy tends to cloak itself in piety.
Craig Brown
Hebrew in America has a bemusing past. The Puritans, out of scriptural piety, once dreamed of establishing Hebrew as the national language.
Cynthia Ozick
A virtuous character is likened to an unblemished flower. Piety is a fadeless bud that half opens on earth and expands through eternity. Sweetness of temper is the odor of fresh blooms, and the amaranth flowers of pure affection open but to bloom forever.
Dorothea Dix
Paganism is infectious, more infectious than diphtheria or piety.
E. M. Forster
Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
Edmund Burke
In a society which is structured the wrong way, piety has no effect.
Friedrich Durrenmatt
I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'
Friedrich Nietzsche
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
I am persuaded, you will permit me to observe, that the path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction.
George Washington
In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side, stricken men await the verdict of fate.
Georges Duhamel
Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.
Herbert Spencer
Our religion does not discriminate according to color, sex or anything else. What counts is piety and faith.
Recently, a friend sent me the online musings of a televangelist who advised his thousands of followers that the Federal Reserve achieved satanic ends by manipulating the world's money supply. Paranoia has replaced piety.
Evangelical Christian politicians who cheat often raise questions about hypocrisy, especially if they preached piety in public and disregarded it in private. When Jewish politicians fall, they shatter different expectations, particularly that American Jews need to work together to preserve respectability and fireproof against anti-Semitism.
Piety is not a goal but a means to attain through the purest peace of mind the highest culture.
Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.
The hypocrisy and false piety of the deniers aside, the relationships of gays have no effect on heteros. Especially all the heteros who've done such a marvelous job of debasing marriage on their own all these many years.
Faith is never identical with piety.
I didn't study theology out of piety. I studied it because I wanted to know.
If people want to compete for leadership of a religious group, they can compete in piety. A chilling thought. Or funny.
Yes, yes, children must early be made to practise piety, godliness, and propriety; a person of good breeding is one into whom 'good maxims' have been instilled and impressed, poured in through a funnel, thrashed in and preached in.
There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage.
I'm no fan of Sarkozy, but I support a ban on face veils because they erase women from society and are promoted by an ultra-conservative ideology that equates piety with the disappearance of women.
I detest the niqab and the burka for their erasure of women and for dangerously equating piety with that disappearance - the less of you I can see, the closer you must be to God.
The moving finger writes, and having written moves on. Nor all thy piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.
Not to help justice in her need would be an impiety.
Keeping our eyes on journey's end is what we need - the place where we see at last the world that is greater than the world, the new creation that cannot be contained in present thought or social order or piety.
Wonder, connected with a principle of rational curiosity, is the source of all knowledge and discover, and it is a principle even of piety; but wonder which ends in wonder, and is satisfied with wonder, is the quality of an idiot.
