Quotes About Principles

What is immoral to do is immoral to threaten.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.

The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country.

Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It's not hard. Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking Most people say that is it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgements are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations.

Try not to be a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.

You could never trust a politician, Brown said, because "he was always ready to sacrifice his principles for his advantage." Presidents and members of Congress were, to him, "fiends clothed in human form," for they compromised with evil.

There is no limit of degradation to which power cannot bring anyone even with the loftiest principles. We would hope that being unprepared for power, they would be ineffective. Their task is not "seize power" (those who use this term show that they seek personal power for themselves) but to abolish the bases for power. Power to all means power to nobody in particular.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

The real scientist is ready to bear privation and, if need be, starvation rather than let anyone dictate to him which direction his work must take.

We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.

Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.

That we should all have a say in choosing our own rulers and that those rulers 'powers over us should be limited—these principles are in obvious tension, as every society that has tried to combine liberty and democracy has discovered. Without Protestantism and its peculiar preoccupations, that strange and marvelous synthesis could never have come into being as it has.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum; whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of whose who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles. Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966

In the long run principles are just more important than expediency.

Like me, she has scruples. Why is it that only people with money have scruples? Do we have no money BECAUSE we have scruples?

No worthy end can ever really be accomplished with unworthy means.

An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized, as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power, and hostile to the principles of liberty.