A Man Of Principle Quotes

#1. I am a man of principle, and one of my basic principles is flexibility.

Everett Dirksen

#2. A good man will find that there is goodness in the world; an honest man will find that there is honesty in the world; and a man of principle will find principle and integrity in the hearts
of others.

Albert Pike

#3. Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she'd always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist. Every girl's dream, if she can't have a vampire.

Karen Joy Fowler

#4. It is much easier to ruin a man of principle than a man of none, for he may be ruined through his scruples. Knavery is supple and can bend; but honesty is firm and upright, and yields not.

Charles Caleb Colton

#5. A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

A.P. Herbert

#6. Science regards man as an aggregation of atoms temporarily united by a mysterious force called the life-principle. To the materialist, the only difference between a living and a dead body is that in the one case that force is active, in the other latent.

Annie Besant

#7. The thing that is so powerful about the psychedelics is that they perform on demand, which almost in principle you cannot expect of a mystical experience because that would be essentially man ordering God at man's whim, which is not how it's supposed to work.

Terence McKenna

#8. Let the beggar speak for himself. He's in earnest. Haven't we been bred on the principle of self-sacrifice, till we've come to think a man's self is his uncleanest possession?

Bernard Capes

#9. Always, there was a tiny part of her that wanted to kill any man she knew. On principle.

Gail Carriger

#10. Man's principle trait is a readiness to believe anything. Otherwise, how could the Church have survived for almost two thousand years in the absense of universal gullibility?

Umberto Eco

#11. True gentleness is founded on a sense of what we owe to him who made us and to the common nature which we all share. It arises from reflection on our own failings and wants, and from just views of the condition and duty of man. It is native feeling heightened and improved by principle.

Hugh Blair

#12. The point is: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time. That's the Cave Man Principle.

Michio Kaku

#13. There was something cold and hard about the man, Nilssen thought - diverting his own ill feeling, as he often did, into a principle of aesthetic distaste.

Eleanor Catton

#14. The person is only a phenomenon, the principle is behind it. Thus from both sides, simultaneously, we find the breaking down of personalities and the approach towards principles, the Personal God approaching the Impersonal, the personal man approaching the Impersonal Man.

Swami Vivekananda

#15. If there is a form of government, then, whose principle and foundation is virtue, will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?

John Adams

#16. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so viscious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived as noble and godlike.

Mary Shelley

#17. To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the foot of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.

Joe Biden

#18. Now what is Judge Douglas Popular Sovereignty? It is, as a principle, no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.

Abraham Lincoln

#19. We follow ideas and not men, and rebel against this habit of embodying a principle in a man.

Errico Malatesta

#20. Nothing will bind the eyes of man quicker than the touch of compromise. A principle not compromised is a principle worth dying for. A dream not compromised is a dream worth living for.

Ogwo David Emenike

#21. Mahatma Gandhi was a man of peace and non-violence and lived by the Hindu principle of ahimsa, action based on refusal to do harm. As his war-strewn presidency shows, George Bush knows nothing about ahimsa and non-violence. Bush should reconsider this cynical, disrespectful display of symbolism.

Kevin Martin

#22. The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.

James Russell Lowell

#23. The greatest of all heroes is One
whom we do not name here! Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth.

Thomas Carlyle

#24. Winston Churchill was a man of blood and a politico without principle, whose apotheosis serves to corrupt every standard of honesty and morality in politics and history.

Ralph Raico

#25. An Army is a collection of armed men obliged to obey one man. Every change in the rules which impairs the principle weakens the army.

William Tecumseh Sherman

#26. Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle at the onset.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

#27. The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.

Fulton J. Sheen

#28. Hope is a vigorous principle; it is furnished with light and heat to advise and execute; it sets the head and heart to work, and animates a man to do his utmost. And thus, by perpetually pushing and assurance, it puts a difficulty out of countenance, and makes a seeming impossibility give way.

Jeremy Collier

#29. Submitted to the Sec. of War. On principle I dislike an oath which requires a man to swear he has not done wrong. It rejects the Christian principle of forgiveness on terms of repentance. I think it is enough if the man does no wrong hereafter.

Abraham Lincoln

#30. It has been said that no great work in literature or in science was ever wrought by a man who did not love solitude. We may lay it down as an elemental principle of religion, that no large growth in holiness was ever gained by one who did not take time to be often long alone with God.

Austin Phelps

#31. In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.

Stephen R. Covey

#32. It is not a liberty of circumstance, conceded to us alone, that we wish; it is the adoption absolute of the principle that no man, born red, black or white, can be the property of his fellow man.

Toussaint Louverture

#33. Weak minds make treaties with the passions they cannot overcome, and try to purchase happiness at the expense of principle; but the resolute will of a strong man scorns such means, and struggles nobly with his foe to achieve great deeds.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#34. A better principle than this, that "the majority shall rule," is this other, that justice shall rule. "Justice," says the code of Justinian, "is the constant and perpetual desire to render every man his due.

Christian Nestell Bovee

#35. Let it be a settled principle ... that men's salvation, if saved, is wholly of God; and that man's ruin, if lost, is wholly of himself.

J.C. Ryle

#36. So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen.

Frank O'Connor

#37. I disapprove of matrimony as a matter of principle ... Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself! (Amelia Peabody)

Elizabeth Peters

#38. To live in a state of liberty is not to live apart from law. It is, on the contrary, to live under the highest law, the only law that can really profit a man, the law which is consciously and deliberately imposed by himself on himself.

Auberon Herbert

#39. I don't have a philosophy as such. Maybe a guiding principle, Carnegie's A man who acquires the ability to take full possession of his own mind may take possessionof anything else to which he is justly entitled.' I'm very singular, driven. I like control... of myself and those around me.

E.L. James

#40. I am a man of principles, and my first principle is flexibility.

Everett Dirksen

#41. Man, who preys both on the vegetable and animal species, is himself a prey to neither. He too possesses the reproductive principle far beyond the degree requisite for the bare continuance of his species. What becomes of the surplus of human life to which this principle is competent?

James Madison

#42. It has sunk him, I cannot say how much it has sunk him in my opinion. So unlike what a man should be!-None of that upright integrity, that strict adherence to truth and principle, that distain of trick and littleness, which a man should display in every transaction of his life.

Jane Austen

#43. What is an atheist, but one who does not, or will not, see in the universe a ruling principle of love; and what a misanthrope, but one who does not, or will not, see in man a ruling principle of kindness?

Herman Melville

#44. Father taught us that opportunity and responsibility go hand in hand. I think we all act on that principle; on the basic human impulse that makes a man want to make the best of what's in him and what's been given him.

Laurance Rockefeller

#45. You can't be a part-time man of principle.

John Amaechi

#46. A state of war or anarchy, in which law has little force, is so far valuable, that it puts every man on trial. The man of principle is known as such, and even in the fury of faction is respected.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#47. A house must be built on solid foundations if it is to last. The same principle applies to man, otherwise he too will sink back into the soft ground and becomes swallowed up by the world of illusion.

Sai Baba

#48. There are three principles in a man's being and life:
The principle of thought, the principle of speech,
and the principle of action. The origin of all conflict
between me and my fellow-men is that I do not
say what I mean and I don't do what I say.

Martin Buber

#49. The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.

Max Planck

#50. A man must not only stand for the right principles, but he must also fight for them. Those who fight for principle can be proud of the friends they've gained and the enemies they've earned.

Ezra Taft Benson

#51. A man may cry out against sin in principle; but he cannot abhor it except by virtue of a godly aversion against it. I have heard many cry out against sin in the pulpit, but who still live with it without any problem in their heart, house, and everyday life.

John Bunyan

#52. Love is a power, a mighty principle that exists in its own right independent of any individual. Man changes, but the principle of love does not and cannot. Love does not leave men and women. Men and women leave love.

Barry Long

#53. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle - a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him, he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

H.L. Mencken

#54. Our principle is: to prevent all command over man by his fellowmen, to, make state, government, laws, or whatsoever form of compulsion existing, a thing of the past, to establish full freedom for all. Anarchism means first and foremost freedom from all government.

Johann Most

#55. Weak men often from the very principle of their weakness derive a certain susceptibility; delicacy and taste which render them, in those particulars, much superior to men of stronger and more consistent minds, who laugh at them.

Sir Fulke Greville

#56. The wise man realistically accepts as part of life and builds a philosophy to meet them and make the most of them. He lives on the principle of nothing attempted, nothing gained and is resolved that if he fails he is going to fail while trying to succeed.

Bill Vaughan

#57. A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

Ayn Rand

#58. Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social Life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.

Bertrand Russell

#59. The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal

Mark Twain

#60. Courage is not my leading virtue. I've always avoided change of any sort, operating on the principle of safety first. I married a "safe" man. I've made my living performing humdrum work, work that bored other people so much that they'd pay someone else to do it.

Christina Bartolomeo

#61. Modern civilisation has based its specific foundation on the principle of liberty which states that man is not a mere instrument to be used by others but rather a main autonomous living being.

Altiero Spinelli

#62. The passive receiving of Christ is the process by which a spiritual principle of grace is generated in the will of man.

William Ames

#63. Detailed scientific arguments by the authors present a serious challenge to the expositors of the Copernican Principle (that man is merely an impure lump of carbon crawling about on the surface of an insignificant speck of cosmic dust).

David Medved

#64. Man, as a form, bears within him the eternal principle of being, and by economic movement along his endless path his form is also transformed, just as everything that lives in nature was transformed in him.

Kazimir Malevich

#65. [L]earn how to distinguish the king from royalty; the king is but a man; royalty is the gift of God. Whenever you hesitate as to whom you ought to serve, abandon the exterior, the material for the invisible principle, for the invisible principle is everything.

Alexandre Dumas

#66. From a political point of view, there is but one principle, the sovereignty of man over himself. This sovereignty of myself over myself is called Liberty

Victor Hugo

#67. If true religion is to beam upon us, our principle must be, that it is necessary to begin with heavenly teaching, and that it is impossible for any man to obtain even the minutest portion of right and sound doctrine without being a disciple of Scripture.

John Calvin

#68. Only people who are assured of daily food can concern themselves with matters of principle and ethic. A man will become a slave rather than starve.

Pearl S. Buck

#69. A man that puts himself on the ground of moral principle, if the whole world be against him, is mightier than all of them.

Henry Ward Beecher

#70. It is a principle of his that no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was, since the world began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself.

Charles Dickens

#71. In fact, the underlying principle of the baroque is the idea of transformation, of movement, and animals becoming man, and man becoming animals, and mythology. It was a way to inspire pre-Christian character.

Camille Henrot

#72. Now the soul of man is divided into two parts, one of which has a rational principle in itself, and the other, not having a rational principle in itself, is able to obey such a principle. And we call a man in any way good because he has the virtues of these two parts.

Aristotle.

#73. The most beautiful sight this earth affords is a man or woman so filled with love that duty is only a name, and its performance the natural outflow and expression of the love which has become the central principle of their life.

J.G. Holland

#74. If I didn't look around it would not be true that somebody had opened the gate with the creaky hinges, and that is a wonderful principle for a man to get hold of. I had got hold of the

Robert Penn Warren

#75. Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!

Arthur Miller

#76. The universe is not for man alone, but is a theater of evolution for all living beings. Live and let live is its guiding principle. 'Ahimsa Paramo Dharmah' - Non-injury is the highest religion.

Virchand Gandhi

#77. On principle' one can do anything and what one does is, fundamentally, a matter of indifference, just as a man's life remains insignificant even though 'on principle' he gives his support to all the 'needs of the times.

Soren Kierkegaard

#78. I should like to know if, taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, you begin making exceptions to it, where will you stop? If one man says it does not mean a Negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man?

Abraham Lincoln

#79. The great principle of Justice: prevent crime rather than punish it. All that is needed to execute a guilty man is a firing squad or a hangman. To prevent there being guilty men requires great astuteness.

Augusto Roa Bastos

#80. If a man had a little button sewn on the inner pocket of his coat 'on principle' his otherwise unimportant and quite serviceable action would become charged with importance
it is not improbable that it would result in the formation of a society.

Soren Kierkegaard

#81. And hence he must be invisible; for a spirit cannot be seen by the eye of man: nor is there any thing in this principle contradictory to reason or experience.

Adam Clarke

#82. Once all come to know that by the concentration of the mind on one point, on one principle, on one desire, a power is radiated to that point with creative nature and demonstrative abilities, man will think more carefully, more constructively and more efficiently

Harvey Spencer Lewis

#83. I mean, the more a man was in the Devil's power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he's drunk.

C.S. Lewis

#84. It is the mark of the cultured man that he is aware of the fact that equality is an ethical and not a biological principle

Ashley Montagu

#85. Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

Henry Fielding

#86. Few things in life can be so appalling as the difference between a dry antiseptic statement of a principle by a well spoken man in a quiet office, and what happens to people when that principle is put into practice.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#87. Tolerance is the last virtue of a man without principle.

G.K. Chesterton

#88. A basic principle of American justice holds that a bad man has the same rights as a good man.

Massad Ayoob

#89. Know, O man you are a particle of the supreme feminine being sucked to an obscure vacuum - of a bliss but that we can only name - universe!

Preeth Nambiar

#90. The defects of every government and constitution both as to principle and form, must, on a parity of reasoning, be as open to discussion as the defects of a law, and it is a duty which every man owes to society to point them out.

Thomas Paine

#91. The same principle leads us to neglect a man of merit that induces us to admire a fool.
[Fr., Du meme fonds dont on neglige un homme de merite l'on sait encore admirer un sot.]

Jean De La Bruyere

#92. A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.

George William Curtis

#93. That every will must consider every other will its equal would be a principle hostile to life, an agent of the dissolution and destruction of man, an attempt to assassinate the future of man, a sign of weariness, a secret path to nothingness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#94. The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular.

Rudolf Arnheim