Quotes About Principles

I don't care about what is good and what is evil, I care about what is true.

Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.

Yet the mathematical calculations that would be necessary to explain the principles of vision are just as complex and difficult, and nobody has ever had any difficulty in believing

Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don't.

No society has ever survived or will ever survive without morality, and no morality has ever survived without a transcendent source."19

Major parties have lived more for patronage than for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there.

Fundamentally, racial hygiene was born of a new drive for society to be governed by scientific principles irrespective of all other considerations.

Its dominant voice belonged to the seventy-three-year-old Pennsylvanian Thaddeus Stevens, a founder of the Republican Party, who declared that America did not stand for "white man's government" and to say as much was "political blasphemy, for it violates the fundamental principles of our gospel of liberty. This is man's government; the government of all men alike.

Honour is not just a matter of internal good feeling, but also of external behaviour.

When I tell people that she was the most grown-up person I have known, I suppose what I mean is that there were principles very close behind, if not actually embedded in, all her actions and thoughts.

Any man who lives by his beliefs is to be admired, not mocked.

Abhor that which is evil; Cleave to that which is good.

Be radical, have principles, be absolute, be that which the bourgeoisie calls an extremist: give yourself without counting or calculating, don't accept what they call 'the reality of life' and act in such a way that you won't be accepted by that kind of 'life', never abandon the principle of struggle.

For the authentic revolutionary conservative, what really counts is to be faithful not to past forms and institutions, but rather to principles of which such forms and institutions have been particular expressions, adequate for a specific period of time and in a specific geographical area.

I may cut my coat to follow fashion, sir, but not my conscience.

No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it.

Don't side with assholes," she said. Her voice was very not chill.

I don't know who the good guys are anymore. But I do know what the enemy is. It's the compromise of principles. You lose the war when you lose your principles. And the first principle is to look out for your comrades.

It's entirely possible that the Jedi's increasingly clouded vision was the result of their own moral degeneration. They'd let so many of their principles slip that the reason they couldn't see the dark side was so close to them was the lack of sharp contrast with themselves, like trying to see a gray nerf in fog. They turned off the light themselves. —Bardan Jusik, former Jedi Knight Kyrimorut

Everything Jacen did to grab power was within the law. There's law, and there's justice, and sometimes they're not the same thing.

It was an ethical choice between rules or lives, and rules didn't always translate into what was right.

There is a fine line between neutral and amoral. In fact, there may be no line there at all.

People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same.

Nous ne nous présentons pas au monde en doctrinaires avec un nouveau principe en lui disant: voici la vérité, c'est ici qu'il faut tomber à genoux. Des principes du monde nous tirons pour le monde des principes nouveaux.