Quotes About Principles

What experience and history teach is this—that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

Principles early sown in the mind, are the seeds which produce fruit and harvest in the ripe state of manhood.

The same principles which at first view lead to scepticism, pursued to a certain point bring men back to common sense.

Weak men, indeed, are prejudiced towards rules and systems in life and government; and think if these are gone all is gone: but a man of a great soul and free spirit delights in the noble experiment of blowing up systems and dissolving governments, to mould them anew upon other principles and in another shape.

Pickering: Have you no morals, man?Doolittle: Can't afford them, Governor.

Smee made the leap between mind and mechanism, concluding that "it is apparent that thought is amenable to fixed principles. By taking advantage of a knowledge of these principles it occurred to me that mechanical contrivances might be formed which should obey similar laws, and give those results which some may have considered only obtainable by the operation of the mind itself.

The great presidents never forget the principle of the republic and seek to preserve and enhance them – in the long run– without undermining the needs of the moment. Bad presidents simply do what is expedient, heedless of principles. But the worst presidents are those who adhere to the principles regardless of what the fortunes of the moment demand.

Morality starts as a simple concept and becomes complicated.

If I compromise on this, soon I'll compromise on other things and then I won't be me anymore.

The concepts of right or wrong are always consequential. It can't be situational or it's not right or wrong.

Magic could not be measured and explained in scientific terms, for magic grew through destroying the very natural principles that made science as people knew it possible.

People say that physics has laws, I told him, walking to the bedroom door. I prefer to view them as a set of flexible guidelines.

As nature has uncovered from under this hard shell the seed for which she most tenderly cares - the propensity and vocation to free thinking - this gradually works back upon the character of the people, who thereby gradually become capable of managing freedom; finally, it affects the principles of government, which finds it to its advantage to treat men, who are now more than machines, in accordance with their dignity.

What is more, we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeing to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first itself be judged by moral principles in order to decide if it is fit to serve as an original example...even the Holy One of the gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.

From this it follows incontestably, that pure concepts of the understanding never admit of a transcendental, but only of an empirical use, and that the principles of the pure understanding can only be referred, as general conditions of a possible experience, to objects of the senses, never to things in themselves…

A Critique of pure Reason, i.e. of our faculty of judging a priori according to principles, would be incomplete, if the Judgement, which as a cognitive faculty also makes claim to such principles, were not treated as a particular part of it; although its principles in a system of pure Philosophy need form no particular part between the theoretical and the practical, but can be annexed when needful to one or both as occasion requires.

For morality, with regard to its principles of public right (hence in relation to a political code which can be known a priori), has the peculiar feature that the less it makes its conduct depend upon the end it envisages (whether this be a physical or moral advantage), the more it will in general harmonise with this end.

For human reason, without any instigations imputable to the mere vanity of great knowledge, unceasingly progresses, urged on by its own feeling of need, towards such questions as cannot be answered by any empirical application of reason, or principles derived therefrom; and so there has ever really existed in every man some system of metaphysics.

We have no reason for assuming the form of such a thing to be still partly dependent on blind mechanism, for with such confusion of heterogeneous principles every reliable rule for estimating things would disappear.

Philosophy may be said to contain the principles of the rational cognition that concepts

The rights of men must be held sacred, however great the cost of sacrifice may be to those in power. Here one cannot go halfway, cooking up hybrid, pragmatically-conditioned rights (which are somewhere between the right and the expedient); instead, all politics must bend its knee before morality...

Nu limba, legile, obiceiurile sau principiile despart sau unesc fiinÈ›ele, ci felul identic în care È›in cuÈ›itul È™i furculiÈ›a.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

That too was part of a machine from which she had not, for all her 'feelings' and her 'principles', the spirit or the courage really to escape.