Principles Quotes

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.

E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

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

Albert Einstein

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

Mark Twain

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

Lord Melbourne

A doctrinaire is a fool but an honest man.

Lord Melbourne

My esoteric doctrine, is that if you entertain any doubt, it is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit from the unpopular, is easy... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it.

Lord Melbourne

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

Albert Camus

I have only two rules which I regard as principles of conduct. The first is: Have no rules. The second is: Be independent of the opinion of others.

Albert Einstein

The negative principle that no law is free law, is not much known except among lawyers.

Abraham Lincoln

Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right.

Thomas Jefferson

Lay down true principles and adhere to them inflexibly. Do not be frightened into their surrender by the alarms of the timid, or the croakings of wealth against the ascendency of the people.

Thomas Jefferson

Religion must so be the object and center to which all things tend, that whoever knows the principles of religion can give an explanation both of the whole nature of man in particular, and of the whole course of the world in general.

Blaise Pascal

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

Thomas Jefferson

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 American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

James Fenimore Cooper

A man far oftener appears to have a decided character from persistently following his temperament than from persistently following his principles.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Principal is a passion for truth!

Source Unknown

Every country and every people has a stake in the Afghan resistance, for the freedom fighters of Afghanistan are defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability.

Ronald Reagan

It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.

Henrik Ibsen

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

Jane Austen