Top 85 Expediency's Quotes
#1. No human actions ever were intended by the Maker of men to be guided by balances of expediency, but by balances of justice.
John Ruskin
#2. It is for ordinary minds, not for psychoanalysts, that our rules of evidence are framed. They have their source very often in considerations of administrative convenience, or practical expediency, and not in rules of logic.
Benjamin Cardozo
#3. Justice is a contract of expediency, entered upon to prevent men harming or being harmed.
Epicurus
#4. Experience having long taught me the reasonableness of mutual sacrifices of opinion among those who are to act together for any common object, and the expediency of doing what good we can; when we cannot do all we would wish.
Thomas Jefferson
#5. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#6. In a darkening world where the shadows of violence, political expediency, materialism and junk culture grow ever longer, sport as it is practised by its good pros remains a bastion of decency, a place where virtue is rewarded and cheating exposed.
Eamon Dunphy
#7. I have found in my experience that expediency, whether it is practical or not, is an unreliable guide for behavior. Human behavior must be guided by a higher principle. Practicality has its place but only within a framework of values, which all men of good will share.
King Hussein I
#8. It is a rather lamentable fact that few can call upon courage with the expediency they can fear.
Gitty Daneshvari
#9. Don't give up on your ideals. Don't compromise. Don't turn to expediency. And for heaven's sake ... don't get cynical.
Ronald Reagan
#10. To deny a genocide because of convenience and expediency having to do with an illegal war or occupation in Iraq to me, is double hypocritical.
Serj Tankian
#11. I am pro-Israeli, not because of political expediency, but because I believe Israel is the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.
Jimmy Carter
#12. A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency, or simply to swell its numbers.
Ronald Reagan
#13. Neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power
John Money
#14. We are sensible of the duty and expediency of submitting our opinions to the will of the majority, and can wait with patience till they get right if they happen to be at any time wrong.
Thomas Jefferson
#15. That speech (Daniel Webster's) raised the idea of Union above contract or expediency and enshrined it in the American heart.
Robert A. Caro
#16. Not curiosity, not vanity, not the consideration of expediency, not duty and conscientiousness, but an unquenchable, unhappy thirst that brooks no compromise leads us to truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#17. Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its approval upon Regularity of conformation.
Edwin A. Abbott
#18. Do not let arguments of expediency persuade you. That is the slow road to oblivion. That is the tortured path to undoing step by step, bit by bit, as the river creates a canyon, the way of life that we love.
Chuck Schumer
#19. Opinions upon moral questions are more often the expression of strongly felt expediency than of careful ethical reasoning; and the opinions so formed by one generation become the conscientious convictions or the sacred instincts of the next.
Robert Gascoyne-Cecil
#21. If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.
Henry Adams
#22. What he's really saying is: Please be a human being. With a life so full of rules and regiments, it's so easy to forget that's what they are. She knows - she sees - how often compassion takes a back seat to expediency.
Neal Shusterman
#23. If practicality and morality are polarized and you must choose, you must do what you think is right, rather than what you think is practical.
Philip K. Dick
#24. I believe the moral losses of expediency always far outweigh the temporary gains.
Wendell Willkie
#25. What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years?
Hunter S. Thompson
#26. Don't become cynical. Don't give up hope. Don't believe that everything is judged only by expediency. There is idealism in this world. There is human brotherhood.
Golda Meir
#27. When it comes to politics and elections, far too many Christians spend more time appealing to family, history and tradition, culture, racial expediency, and personal preference than they do to what the Bible teaches.
Tony Evans
#28. Once we start worrying too often or too deeply about what certain individuals and what certain groups think about us, then we might start selling our souls for the sake of expediency. I suggest if that day ever comes, then the press has had it.
Otis Chandler
#29. Strengthened by the experiences of almost two decades in the various capitals, the Nazis were confident that their best "propaganda" would be their racial policy itself, from which, despite many other compromises and broken promises, they had never swerved for expediency's sake.
Hannah Arendt
#30. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought, is questioned; much is to say on both sides,and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#31. I cannot too greatly emphasize the importance and value of Bible study - more important than ever before in these days of uncertainties, when men and woman are apt to decide questions from the standpoint of expediency rather than the eternal principles laid down by God, Himself.
John Wanamaker
#32. The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but consistency or a consistent expediency.
Henry David Thoreau
#34. There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.
Joseph Conrad
#35. There is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of 'expediency.' There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals, the only sliders are backsliders.
Henry David Thoreau
#37. An uplifting sense of purpose is more than an impetus for individual accomplishment, it is also a necessary insurance policy against expediency and impropriety.
Gary Hamel
#38. All religions are branches of the same mighty tree, but I must not change over from one branch to another for the sake of expediency.
Mahatma Gandhi
#39. If we continue to approach problems from the perspective of temporary expediency, future generations will face tremendous difficulties.
Dalai Lama
#40. Out of ignorance or expediency we give all snowflakes the same name.
Marty Rubin
#41. Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority.
H.L. Mencken
#42. Justice, not expedience, must be the guiding light. The orator must fix his eye on the polestar of justice, and plough straight thither. The moment he glances toward expediency, he falls from his high estate.
John Peter Altgeld
#43. Custom adapts itself to expediency.
Tacitus
#44. Lenin only believes in the revolution and in the virtue of expediency.'One must be prepared for every sacrifice, to use, if necessary, every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth, for the sole purpose of accomplishing, despite everything, the communist task'.
Albert Camus
#45. The supremacy of expediency is being refuted by time and truth. Time is an essential dimension of existence defiant of man's power, and truth reigns in supreme majesty, unrivaled, inimitable, and can never be defeated.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#47. Where there are few expectations, expediency wins.
Robert Genn
#48. When you assemble from your several counties in the Legislature, were every member to be guided only by the apparent interest of his county, government would be impracticable. There must be a perpetual accomodation and sacrifice of local advantage to general expediency.
Alexander Hamilton
#49. More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.
Peter Singer
#50. Integrity, a standard of personal morality and ethics, is not relative to the situation you happen to find yourself in and doesn't sell out to expediency. Its short supply is getting shorter - but without it, leadership is a facade.
Denis Waitley
#51. Justice has nothing to do with expediency. Justice has nothing to do with any temporary standard whatever. It is rooted and grounded in the fundamental instincts of humanity.
Woodrow Wilson
#52. Expediency is a law of nature. The camel is a wonderful animal, but the desert made the camel.
Benjamin Disraeli
#53. I hesitated. Truth shot a sly glance at expediency, expediency waggled its eyebrows significantly, truth made a little noise at the back of its throat, and expediency jumped straight on in there.
Kate Griffin
#54. It's a failure of national vision when you regard children as weapons, and talents as materials you can mine, assay, and fabricate for profit and defense.
John Hersey
#55. God gives manhood but one clew to success,
utter and exact justice; that he guarantees shall be always expediency.
Wendell Phillips
#56. Purest religion is highest expediency. Many things are lawful but they are not all expedient.
Mahatma Gandhi
#57. The Republicans have put together serious detailed counter-proposals when we have objected to this administration's agenda. And so, I want to tell the President and remind him again, we're not voting no for political expediency. We've got our principles, and we're going to stand up and defend those.
Eric Cantor
#58. But courage which goes against military expediency is stupidity, or, if it is insisted upon by a commander, irresponsibility.
Erwin Rommel
#59. It is not expedient or wise to examine our friends too closely; few persons are raised in our esteem by a close examination.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#61. Private and public life are subject to the same rules-truth and manliness are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better than policy or tact of expediency or other words that were devised to conceal a deviation from a straight line.
Robert E.Lee
#62. I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R'. And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.
Milton Friedman
#63. Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.
Roy Hattersley
#64. The great difference between the real leader and the pretender is that the one sees into the future, while the other regards only the present; the one lives by the day, and acts upon expediency; the other acts on enduring principles and for the immortality.
Edmund Burke
#65. A lawyer's truth is not Truth. It is consistency, or consistent expediency
Henry David Thoreau
#66. Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.
Richard Whately
#67. Christian obligation cannot be made to accord with a law of expediency. The Christian's maxims are, Do right because you are bound to do right. Do right though the heavens fall. There is a world of difference between You had better and You are bound to.
Francis Landey Patton
#68. As writers like to remark, books are never finished, they are merely abandoned. This acceptance of necessary expediency leads to the increasing doubt and anxiety characteristic of the last hours before the first significant encounter with reality: the separation event.
Venkatesh G. Rao
#69. Natural justice is a compact resulting from expediency by which men seek to prevent one man from injuring others and to protect him from being injured by them.
Epicurus
#70. Perhaps it is the expediency in the political eye that blinds it.
Virgilia Peterson
#71. Short-term expediency always fails in the long term.
Frank Herbert
#72. ...when the createdness of the other person is not viewed as necessary as our own - then there is no reason (beyond expediency) to treat the other as a person. All injustice and cruelty come, basically, from this distorted view of reality.
Sydney J. Harris
#73. The great ideals of liberty and equality are preserved against the assaults of opportunism, the expediency of the passing hour, the erosion of small encroachments, the scorn and derision of those who have no patience with general principles.
Benjamin Cardozo
#74. Young people are just as attracted to the truth as they are convenience and expediency.
Pope Francis
#75. The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
W. Somerset Maugham
#76. A certain alloy of expediency improves the gold of morality and makes it wear all the longer.
Don Marquis
#77. The law is simply expediency wearing a long white dress.
Quentin Crisp
#78. I am not going to stop speaking out on behalf of policies that I think are right - regardless of ideology, party or political expediency.
Harold Ford Jr.
#79. My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn't always discuss for reasons of political expediency,
Shirley Chisholm
#81. [Law] is one part justice to nine parts expediency. Who needs it.
Lucille Kallen
#82. Metaphor ... is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.
Laura Riding
#83. Cowardice asks: Is it safe? Expediency asks: Is it politic? But Conscience asks: Is it right?
William Morley Punshon
#84. When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.
Lao-Tzu
#85. Moral, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.
Ambrose Bierce
