Quotes About Principles

Everybody, even me, sometimes had to compromise on something, doing things we know to be wrong, and this happens doing whatever job in the world. But a singer must have the courage of saying no.

In this world, there must be a certain degree of honor just as there must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without honor, there will always be some others who bear in themselves the honor of many men.

Nothing that isn't a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconsistency.

I shall endeavor to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality.

That the GIs on Omaha Beach did indeed possess the essential fighting skills to save the day has become an elemental moral of American history. No one realized it at the time, particularly the unfortunate men who were subjected to the enemy's relentless barrage of bullets and shells, but Omaha Beach would become one of those exceptional moments in history when Americans defined themselves by their actions as a people worthy of the principles upon which the nation was founded.

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

A true knight has a strict code of chivalry by which he lives his life: He cannot refuse a challenge and he always keeps his word. I also have a code of honor, but it is flexible.

I also have a code of honor, but it is flexible.

The question is, if we already know what the right and the wrong answers are to moral questions, prior to the formulation of an abstract principle, what is the point of formulating the principle?

quoting someone else] the American constitution is a document designed by geniuses to be eventually interpreted by idiots

I am not a Federalist," he declared in 1789, "because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever.… If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Há pessoas que, da moral, só têm um pedaço. É um tecido de que nunca farão um fato.

Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.

My father was the son of immigrants, and he grew up bilingual, but English is what my father taught me and what he spoke to me. America's strength is not our diversity it is our ability to unite around common principles even when we come from different backgrounds.

America's strength is not our diversity our strength is our ability to unite people of different backgrounds around common principles. A common language is necessary to reach that goal.

I have no more to say except this: We must live with our own conscience.

Like Molière's M. Jourdain, who spoke prose all his life without knowing it, mathematicians have been reasoning for at least two millennia without being aware of all the principles underlying what they were doing. The real nature of the tools of their craft has become evident only within recent times A renaissance of logical studies in modern times begins with the publication in 1847 of George Boole's 'The Mathematical Analysis of Logic'.

It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.

I assume that in great men whose names I dare not mention, the anarchic element was very powerful. You see, when fundamental changes are to occur in law, custom, and society, they presuppose a great distancing from established principles. And the anarch, should he take any action, is capable of working this lever.

If, to win, we have to set up the gallows in the public square, I would prefer to lose.

Erwin Chemerinsky

Morality does not derive its nature from books, but from the fitness of things.

When we are able to stay present with the internal discomfort created by the idea that somebody else might be mad at us, we end up becoming a bodhisattva with tremendous integrity. We end up building confidence that we can say what we think and mean what we say, more and more often. This kind of integrity and dignity become contagious, and in the end, even if somebody doesn't agree with us, that person at least respects us for our dedication to living by our principles.

I'd rather lay an egg in a box than go and steal an ox.