Principles Quotes

The hard core of morality and even of religion seems to me to be just what makes good comedy possible...Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work.

C.S. Lewis

My principle is to do whatever is right, and leave the consequences to Him who has the disposal of them

Thomas Jefferson

The wisest reason takes as her own principles those which the imagination of man has everywhere rashly introduced.

Blaise Pascal

The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.

Aristotle

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

Thomas Jefferson

The truth is that all examples of child protection and parental care, and all associated bodily organs... are examples of the working in nature of the kin-selection principle.

Richard Dawkins

The State legislatures should be immediately urged to relinquish the right of establishing banks of discount. Most of them will comply, on patriotic principles, under the convictions of the moment; and the non-complying may be crowded into concurrence by legitimate devices.

Thomas Jefferson

Our principles are founded on the immovable basis of equal right and reason.

Thomas Jefferson

We understand nothing of the works of God unless we take it as a principle that He wishes to blind some and to enlighten others.

Blaise Pascal

All the principles of skeptics, stoics, atheists, etc., are true. But their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true.

Blaise Pascal

Adam Smith, and other able writers to whom I have alluded, not having viewed correctly the principles of rent, have, it appears to me, overlooked many important truths, which can only be discovered after the subject of rent is thoroughly understood.

David Ricardo

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

Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.

Albert Schweitzer

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

I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

George Eliot

Who is going to educate the human race in the principles and practice of conservation?

Aldous Huxley

Seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.

Mahatma Gandhi

If most of those who took part in this one-dimensional debate were honest with themselves, they would admit that they do not in principle believe that the United States can do any good overseas for anyone but the American government, its armed forces, or privileged American elites.

Christopher Hitchens

A doctrine serves no purpose in itself, but it is indispensable to have one if only to avoid being deceived by false doctrines.

Simone Weil