Quotes About Principles

When two good men contend about principles, both are always right.

Men are not made religious by performing certain actions which are externally good, but they must first have righteous principles, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.

What's virtue in a man can't be virtue in a cat.

No man is a man without high morals and ethics.

What makes a man heavy is the gravity of virtue. Without it, man will be so light that he will be drifted in the winds of immorality.

Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest--beginning, middle, and end--isnothing but dreams and smoke.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

Morality has nothing to do with such a man as I am.

Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money.

I am not a man of my party. I do not talk only to socialists and union leaders.

Even an evil man can have principles—he can be true to his own evil, which is not always so easy.

Every brave man is a man of his word; to such base vices he cannot stoop, and shuns more than death the shame of lying.

That young man seeks opportunities to test his principles as readily as a drunk picks fights in a bar.

No man of honor ever quite lives up to his code, any more than a moral man manages to avoid sin.

A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.

A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.

A man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,Mthat was what distinguished him.

Show me a man who feels bitterly toward John Brown, and let me hear what noble verse he can repeat. He'll be as dumb as if his lips were stone.

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

If man looks within himself he must perceive two things: a law of right, and that which it condemns.

No great question will ever be settled in dollars and cents. Great questions must be settled on moral grounds and the tests of what makes free men.

In matters of conscience that is the best sense which every wise man takes in before he hath sullied his understanding with the designs of sophisters and interested persons.

I'm many things, most of 'em bad. But a man of political principles? No.

First the grub, then the morals.