I believe the moral losses of expediency always far outweigh the temporary gains.
Interpretation
Short-term benefits gained through unethical behavior are often outweighed by long-term moral consequences.
Wendell Willkie's quote emphasizes the importance of maintaining moral integrity over seeking immediate benefits through expedient decisions. It suggests that while taking shortcuts may lead to temporary advantages, such actions can lead to greater moral and ethical losses that harm one's character and reputation in the long run.
In practice
During a corporate ethics seminar, this quote could be used to highlight the importance of ethical decision-making.
Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin.
It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.
Today it is becoming increasingly apparent to thoughtful Americans that we cannot fight the forces and ideas of imperialism abroad and maintain any form of imperialism at home. The war has done this to our thinking.
No man has a right in America to treat any other man "tolerantly" for tolerance is the assumption of superiority. Our liberties are equal rights of every citizen.
To suppress minority thinking and minority expression would tend to freeze society and prevent progress. Now more than ever we must keep in the forefront of our minds the fact that whenever we take away the liberties of those we hate, we are opening the way to loss of liberty for those we love.
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
The origin of the absurd idea of immortal life is easy to discover; it is kept alive by hope and fear, by childish faith, and by cowardice.
To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
Even if I accepted that Jesus - like almost every other prophet on record - was born of a virgin, I cannot think that this proves the divinity of his father or the truth of his teachings. The same would be true if I accepted that he had been resurrected.
The sun too penetrates into privies, but is not polluted by them.
It stands to reason that if sacrifices are being given, somebody is collecting sacrifices.
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