Quotes about principles

Success is the ability to rise above principle.

— Gerald Barzan

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.

— Jacques Barzun

Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.

— Henry Ward Beecher

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die -- and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

— Albert Camus

The principles which men give to themselves end by overwhelming their noblest intentions.

— Albert Camus

You can't live principles you can't understand.

— Stephen R. Covey

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition.

— Albert Einstein

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Values provide perspective in the best of times and worst.

— Charles A. Garfield

We may be personally defeated, but our principles never.

— William Lloyd Garrison

The principles we live by, in business and in social life, are the most important part of happiness.

— Harry Harrison

Amid the pressure of great events, a general principle gives no help.

— Georg Hegel

In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.

— Thomas Jefferson

Its easy to have principles when you're rich. The important thing is to have principles when you're poor.

— Ray Kroc

Obey the principles without being bound by them.

— Bruce Lee

Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.

— Wyndham Lewis

People must have righteous principles in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

— Martin Luther

Principle, particularly moral principal, can never be a weathervane, spinning around this way and that with the shifting winds of expediency. Moral principle is a compass forever fixed and forever true. And that is as important in business as it is in the classroom.

— Edward R. Lyman

The proclamation and repetition of first principles is a constant feature of life in our democracy. Active adherence to these principles, however, has always been considered un-American. We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.

— David Mamet

Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle.

— Lord Melbourne

You may be flexible on strategy, but must remain consistent on principle!

— Brubaker Movie

Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate. Ignorance and fear, you will repeat to them, ignorance and fear -- those are the twin bases of every religion.

— Marquis De Sade

Our principles are the springs of our actions. Our actions, the springs of our happiness or misery. Too much care, therefore, cannot be taken in forming our principles.

— Red Skelton

It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.

— Mark Twain

Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

— Mark Twain

Principal is a passion for truth!

— Source Unknown

Americans are willing to go to enormous trouble and expense defending their principles with arms, very little trouble and expense advocating them with words. Temperamentally we are ready to die for certain principles (or, in the case of overripe adults, send youngsters to die), but we show little inclination to advertise the reasons for dying.

— Elwyn Brooks White

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

— Oscar Wilde

Important principles may and must be flexible.

— Abraham Lincoln

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

— Mark Twain