Principled Quotes

You know, freedom is a very popular idea, and young people love it, and they're open to ideas. And they like principled answers to our problems.

I have never suggested any principled difference between the natural and social sciences.

Take away the ability of an intelligent, principled, hard-working mind to get it wrong, and you take away the whole thing.

The worst thing you want is a willy-nilly judge who is swayed by the political whims of the era or the time. What you want is a judge who is thinking about what he or she is doing and is thinking about it in a principled way.

Why are some people highly principled and willing to do anything for their principles, while most of us are not? And I am willing to not only ask, but also answer the question.

I wish I had been wiser. I wish I had been more effective, I wish I'd been more unifying, I wish I'd been more principled.

Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

Principles do not mainly influence even the principled; we talk on principle, but we act on interest.

Let a man be firmly principled in his religion, he may travel from the tropics to the poles, it will never catch cold on the journey.

We're principled in the direction we're heading, but we're not going to be stubborn.

Mike Pence is a good man, a principled conservative, and he will make a great vice president.

Voters are hungry for principled, conservative fighters - because the threat to our liberties from Washington never has been greater.

Too often people enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought, never taking a principled stand. True justice will never come until those who are not injured are just as indignant as those who are

Somebody who sticks to his guns can be called a stubborn person or a principled person, it depends on whether you like his ideas or not. You can call somebody whose ideas you don't like an ideologist or a person of ideas. You can call somebody whose actions you don't like a pragmatist if you like them, or an opportunist if you don't.

They may then be willing to cast principled votes based on an educated understanding of the public interest in the face of polls suggesting that the public itself may have quite a different understanding of where its interest lies.

I wanted to understand. I'm not here to support one, but I am here to criticize all, on a principled position. I very much value the position of counter power. I think this is where ethics should be, in front of power as I said in Radical Reform. The power of counter-power is very important.

Max Askeli was a very courageous, principled man up to a point. He had left Italy before he was thrown in jail by [Francesco] Mussolini.

You want sanity, democracy, community, an intact Earth? We can't get there, obeying Constitutional theory and law crafted by slave masters, imperialists, corporate masters, and Nature destroyers. We can't get there, kneeling before robed lawyers stockpiling class plunder precedent up their venerable sleeves. So isn't disobedience the challenge of our age? Principled, inventive, escalating disobedience to liberate our souls, to transfigure our work as humans on this Earth.

I've said many times - I told William Buckley, I said, "You warped my mind and I never recovered from it." That was a principled, lawful understanding of the role of government, the Constitution. It was not based on racism, on demagoguery, but on strong principles that - which, consistent with the American heritage and our strength for the future.

So here we have found a means of a) alienating even the most flexible and patient Palestinians; while b) frustrating the efforts of the more principled and compromising Israelis; while c) empowering and financing some of the creepiest forces in American and Israeli society; and d) heaping ordure on our own secular founding documents. When will the Justice Department and the Congress and the Supreme Court become aware of this huge and rank offense, which is designed to bring us ever nearer to holy war?

We strive to hire and retain only those who embrace our MBM® Guiding Principles, which encompass integrity, compliance, value creation, Principled Entrepreneurship, customer focus, knowledge, change, humility, respect and fulfillment.

In a world of complex threats, our security and leadership depends on all elements of our power - including strong and principled diplomacy.

Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.

America can restore its strengths as the world-respected land of opportunity by returning to open-society principles. An open society invests in people and new ideas, rewards talent and hard work, values dialogue and learns from dissent, operates to high standards with transparent information, looks for common ground, sees problems as opportunities for creative change, and encourages those who are fortunate to help others get the same chance, because service is the highest ideal. With such standards in mind, America the Beautiful can return to its admired role as America the Principled.

All Americans and freedom-loving people around the world owe President Reagan our deepest gratitude for his strong, principled leadership that ended the Cold War and brought freedom to millions of people.

Ronald Reagan and Ron Paul had a message that was clear, it was principled, and it inspired. It was a vision for a future.

Feminism means having a choice. And feminism doesn't care which choices you make, either. Just that you have them. The point has never been to establish some principled refusal to give yourself to another human being. The point is to make sure you can give yourself--or not give yourself--of your free will.

When I was a Senator from New York, I represented and worked with so many talented principled people who made their living in finance. But even thought I represented them and did all I could to make sure they continued to prosper, I called for closing the carried interest loophole and addressing skyrocketing CEO pay. I also was calling in '06, '07 for doing something about the mortgage crisis, because I saw every day from Wall Street literally to main streets across New York how a well-functioning financial system is essential.

You've got the principled people who maybe are on salaried jobs, or CEOs, entrepreneurs, and all of those that are great people, but if you're not appealing - the permanent coalition is to join that with traditional Americans who feel like, that things aren't going well for them, and to develop policies that improve their lifestyle, not just upper-income lifestyles. And once that's believed by working people, that it's serious and a commitment and you care about people like me, for a change, Republicans could create a new majority.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

...the very notion that a candidate should openly solicit votes violated the principled presumption that such behavior itself represented a confession of unworthiness for national office.

A random group of homeless people under a bridge would be far more intellectually sound and principled than anything I've encountered at the university so far.

There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.

Anybody in my job steers a tightrope between being popular and being principled.

Gentlemanly, principled, helpful behaviour by older men vis-a-vis young women goes unnoticed, but it deserves real moral credit, and we could use more first-person testimony from the beneficiaries and practitioners about that too.

The corporate sector per se is bottom-line oriented. It can be very corrupt and it is not very principled. That is why I don't think it is sufficient just to have voluntary codes of behavior. I am in favor of legislation which helps to ensure that there is an even playing field and rewards those who play by the rules.

You know in politics you are dealing in the realm of choices. You don't always have clear-cut decision between a thoroughly principled position and a thoroughly unprincipled one. You're making snap decisions with paucity of information, generally trying to do the best that you can, but you will make errors, and sometimes it's a decision between a bad and a worse alternative. It has to be done, because we need to order our society, and of politics it can literally be said: Bad job, but someone's got to do it.

I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species . . . and to disperse the families I have an aversion.

Hopefully, at some point, people will at least credit the Republicans with carrying out their oversight responsibilities and with pursuing a principled course of action even in the face of everyone's short-attention spans.

He glosses over and doesn't even tell the truth....Here is a guy who is the ultimate flip-flopper running for president, and he's attacking me for not being principled? That doesn't wash.

So I think that our foreign policy, the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.

We're actually saying, here's a principle that I'd like to arc toward. That's a very different role in life. I didn't expect [Barack] Obama to go to the root of things. I didn't expect him to have a principled position on anything. I mean, just pay some moderate attention to the guy.

That was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do [give me asylum application]. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.

I have been brought up in a culture where capital punishment is indeed anathema. I have always thought of myself as a principled opponent to capital punishment. However, when thinking about how the topic is handled in other cultures, in particular the American, Russian and Chinese ones, I have realised that my own tack on the issue was utterly superficial.

Compassion is aptly summed up in the Golden Rule, which asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else. Compassion can be defined, therefore, as an attitude of principled, consistent altruism.

So every time the Democratic Party appears to be lifting up a principled, people-powered agenda, it slaps it down and it keeps becoming more dominated by corporate money and corporatist, militarist policies.

If Ralph Nader runs, President Bush is going to be re-elected, and if Ralph Nader doesn't run, President Bush is going to be re-elected. We're going to run on the president's strong and principled leadership and his positive agenda for a second term.

(I)f France's righteous bloviating against war makes them your Dashboard Saint of International Integrity, it's either because you are sand-poundingly ignorant of how the world works or it's because you think France's self-interest is more important than America's. If the former applies to you, read a book. If it's the latter, maybe you should move there along with Alec Baldwin, Robert Altman, and the rest of the crowd who promised to leave a long time ago. But whatever you do, don't call France's position principled, because that just insults us both.

London is one of the world's centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications. Ideas minted in Britain – the notion that it is bigoted to oppose bigotry; 'Islamophobic' to oppose clerics whose first desire is to oppress Muslims – swirl out through the press and the net to lands where they can do real harm.

Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy.