Quotes About Principle

Nevertheless, to question authority is not, in principle, to attack it, although authority always assumes that this is the case since authority must repeatedly establish its right to rule; and if this is done by force, then it turns out that it was a tyranny all along. Good heavens, I can't believe I am preaching this to an audience of Irishmen! Just think about it: a quarter of an hour of rational thinking and an Englishman turns into an Irishman.

This is the nonduality principle of Buddhism: there is nothing to throw away. If a person has never suffered, he or she will never be able to know happiness. If a person does not know what hunger is, he or she will never know the joy of eating every day. Thus pain and suffering are a necessary condition of our understanding, of our happiness.

Triviality is evil - triviality, that is, in the form of consciousness and mind that adapts itself to the world as it is, that obeys the principle of inertia. And this principle of inertia truly is what is radically evil.

Well, here is one who, whatever her defects, probably does what she believes as nearly as possible.

Buddhist meditation is based on the principle of nonduality. This means that if we are mindfulness, if we are love, we are also ignorance, we are also suffering, and there is no reason to suppress anything at all.

The truth is the truth, whether or not it is accepted by the majority. Therefore, I tell you children, it takes great courage to stand up for and protect what is right.

The first time that I was elected I was called the Judas Iscariot of the black community because I took a stand that was inconsistent of cutting across the grain.

A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.

Were I confirmed as a judge, I would decide cases according to the rule of law beginning to end.

Honest people, mistakenly believing in the justice of their cause, are led to support injustice.

Justice is the truth in action.

The ends must justify the means.

I understand that the end does not justify the means. And this should be a lasting value for democracy.

My conscience is informed by reason. It's like Kant's categorical imperative: behave to others as you would wish they behaved to you.

A good, hard-hitting dissent keeps you honest.

Dishonesty of any kind will create a blemish.

People know where I stand in the Labour party and what I believe in.

Occam's razor: The simplest explanation that accommodates all variables is most likely the truth.

I'm a very truthful person, but if the greater good is best served by a lie then I'll tell it.

Philosophers should consider the fact that the greatest happiness principle can easily be made an excuse for a benevolent dictatorship. We should replace it by a more modest and more realistic principle - the principle that the fight against avoidable misery should be a recognized aim of public policy, while the increase of happiness should be left, in the main, to private initiative.

There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.

Again, we cannot search the whole world in order to make sure that nothing exists which the law forbids. Nevertheless, both kinds of strict statements, strictly existential and strictly universal, are in principle empirically decidable, each, however, in one way only: they are unilaterally decidable. Whenever it is found that something exists here or there, a strictly existential statement may thereby be verified, or a universal one falsified.

I believe in traditional marriage.

Defeat in this world is no disgrace if you fought well and fought for the right thing.