Top 100 In Principle Quotes
#1. Universal suffrage is sound in principle. The radical element is right.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#2. I understood the importance in principle of public key cryptography but it's all moved much faster than I expected. I did not expect it to be a mainstay of advanced communications technology.
Whitfield Diffie
#3. In principle, junk bonds are basically useful, but they are used excessively and irrationally, notably in takeovers.
Maurice Allais
#4. There is no difference in principle between organic and psychic growth. As a plant produces its flower, so the psyche creates its symbols.
C. G. Jung
#5. She is softhearted yet strong willed.
She is compassionate yet unwavering in principle. She is a loving mother, yet she risked my life to save others.
J.L. Witterick
#6. The simplest kind of decision is binary: that is, the question can be answered, in principle at least, by either yes or no.
E. J. W. Barber
#7. As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.
Thomas Metzinger
#8. You must place interest in principle above interest on principal.
Julian Bond
#9. Defence was an afterthought, prompted by necessity; and its introduction as a State function, though effected doubtless with a view to the strengthening of the State, was really and in principle the initiation of the State's destruction.
Benjamin Tucker
#10. As I apprehend the Buddhist doctrine of karma, I agree in principle with that.
William James
#11. Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.
Dennis Gabor
#12. My message to Washington is very simple. Face reality. Be leaders. Demonstrate accountability. Engage in principle compromise. And understand your job is to find solutions.
Kenneth Chenault
#13. It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.
John Hersey
#14. Honesty in principle was one thing. In someone's face, it was another.
Sarah Dessen
#15. You cannot spontaneously levitate and hover above the ground, whether or not you are seated in the lotus position. Although, in principle, you could perform this stunt if you managed to let loose a powerful and sustained exhaust of flatulence.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#16. By dimension, we simply mean an independent direction in which, in principle, you can move; in which motion can take place. In an everyday world, we have left-right as one dimension; we have back-forth as a second one; and we have up-down as a third.
Brian Greene
#17. Y'know, Nature's unpredictable
that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision.
Jeanette Winterson
#18. In principle, if you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinitely.
Cynthia Kenyon
#19. Islam is in principle egalitarian, and has always had problems with power.
Mary Douglas
#20. The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.
Karl Popper
#21. The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.
John Searle
#22. Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.
John Sladek
#23. a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation.
Stephen Hawking
#24. The general point that a political theory is, among other things, a partisan intervention, is well taken. So question about the actual political implication of a theory cannot be excluded as, in principle, irrelevant.
Raymond Geuss
#25. A building is not a sentence, which in principle has the ability to match and express a thought closely. It is not linear, like language. Compared to the fluidity of words, a building is atrociously clumsy, but it can be lived and inhabited as books cannot be.
Rowan Moore
#26. Faith-not a faith in one's self or in one's own powers but faith in principle; in the Something Great which upholds right, and which may be relied upon to give us the victory in due time. Without this faith it is not possible for any one to rise to real greatness.
Wallace D. Wattles
#27. Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics;we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#28. Those who in principle oppose birth control are either incapable of arithmetic or else in favour of war, pestilence and famine as permanent features of human life.
Bertrand Russell
#29. Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.
Noam Chomsky
#30. Aiming at giving our kids a competitive edge in a consumer society - that, in principle, is a goal that is limitless.
Michael Sandel
#31. The basic notion of justice, is that the rights of everybody are equals, in principle. In the rights of others, we have to respect our own rights. It is only in that condition that we can reasonnably require that it be respected by others.
African Spir
#32. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Thomas Paine
#33. So you're saying if I have enough sex, then I'll get to the point where I'll never want to see another penis again?"
"In principle.
Nina Croft
#34. We need to accept tradition in principle, and at the same time we need to be critical of traditions, both our own and those of others, lest they become the 'commandments of men' about which Jesus warns us.
Chris A. Castaldo
#35. The key thing is to be "Conservative in principle but Liberal in sympathy".
Boris Johnson
#36. In principle the great religions of the world do not differ as much as they appear to.
Ernest Holmes
#37. Communal franchise is wrong in principle and harmful in practice; the time has come in Fiji for all races to get out of the thin water-tight compartments and start thinking in terms of residents of Fiji.
A. D. Patel
#38. To me there's nothing different in principle with a Catholic adoption agency, or indeed Methodist adoption agency, saying the rules in our community are different and therefore the law shouldn't apply to us. Why not then say sharia can be applied to different parts of the country? It doesn't work.
Trevor Phillips
#40. I'm a fatalist ... I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.
Arthur Miller
#41. A hypothesis is empirical or scientific only if it can be tested by experience. A hypothesis or theory which cannot be, at least in principle, falsified by empirical observations and experiments does not belong to the realm of science.
Francisco J. Ayala
#42. The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity.
Richard Dawkins
#43. Look at the history of civil laws in our world and the source from which they emerged, and you will see that the vast majority of them arose directly from, or where based in principle on, Roman Canon Law, or the laws of other religious origin. Sharia is another notable example.
Neale Donald Walsch
#44. Belief is a good thing in principle, but an annoying thing in human beings.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
#45. In principle any revolt strengthens the government it fails to overthrow.
Victor Hugo
#46. The Science Delusion is the belief that science already understands the nature of reality in principle leaving only the details to be filled in.
Rupert Sheldrake
#47. Unfair in practice is not the same thing as wrong in principle, but sometimes it has to do.
Hendrik Hertzberg
#48. I would never say, to justify a lapse in principle, "I am only human"
as though that were some kind of justification for weakness, moral weakness. Flesh and blood is much, much stronger than fools believe.
Jack Henry Abbott
#49. When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
Otto Von Bismarck
#50. The devaluation of words and promises regarding free enterprise is, in principle, worse than the devaluation of the rouble
Dmitry Medvedev
#51. Utterance does not in principle mean a weakening of conviction
that would not be anything to be deplored
but a weakness of conviction.
Franz Kafka
#52. The acceptance of vertical differentiation with the built-in principle of self-determination must apply on as many levels as possible.
P. W. Botha
#53. In principle, skeptics are neither closed-minded nor cynical. We are curious but cautious.
Michael Shermer
#54. Any place you compromise in principle you will execute in performance.
Johnnie Dent Jr.
#55. The benefits cap is right in principle because people don't pay their taxes so that families who could work don't work. People pay their taxes so we support people who really need to be supported.
David Cameron
#56. Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole.
Thomas Nagel
#57. Relativity theory forced the abandonment, in principle, of absolute space and absolute time.
Marshall McLuhan
#58. [Critical social science attempts] to determine when theoretical statements grasp invariant regularities of social action as such and when they express ideologically frozen relations of dependence that can in principle be transformed.
Jurgen Habermas
#59. a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If your retina ended up in the same state regardless of what light entered it, you would be blind .
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#60. The fact that Western Muslims are free means that they can have enormous impact. But it would be wrong to claim that we are imposing our ways on the West. New ideas are now coming from the West. To be traditional is not so much a question of protecting ourselves as to be traditionalist in principle.
Tariq Ramadan
#61. You are less majestically neutral than cloaking your cowardice in principle.
George Hearst
#62. Experimental work provides the strongest evidence for scientific realism. This is not because we test hypotheses about entities. It is because entities that in principle cannot be 'observed' are manipulated to produce a new phenomena
[sic] and to investigate other aspects of nature.
Ian Hacking
#63. It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.
Gregory Bateson
#64. In essence, Zizek's procedure here is no different in principle from that of Husserl, who wrote and rewrote voluminous drafts and was continually "introducing" the project of transcendental phenomenology. The one thing that has changed is that Zizek is publishing his drafts as he goes.
Adam Kotsko
#65. 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
#66. I am against any pact with the Nationalists because I am against pacts in principle.
David Steel
#67. It has today occurred to me that an amplifier using semiconductors rather than vacuum is in principle possible.
[Laboratory notebook, 29 Dec 1939.]
William Shockley
#68. In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.
Henry Adams
#69. I think it's just natural when you're governing, that it's not always easy to remain as pure in principle as you'd like to be.
Rona Ambrose
#71. I'm not a stickler for truth. To me, lying in poetry is much more fun. I'm against lying in life, in principle, in any other activity except poetry.
Charles Simic
#72. In principle. what is done is to take the nucleus out of a cell with a very fine micro-pipette or needle and introduce it into an egg. That had been done with amphibians a long time ago, and then there was a long pause of many years before people were clever enough to make that work in the sheep.
John Gurdon
#73. I am writing a manifesto and there's nothing I want, and yet I'm saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.
Tristan Tzara
#74. Once you can hang a price tag on something, you can in principle put a price tag on anything, including conscience and honor, to say nothing of body parts and children.
David Harvey
#75. belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise. If
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#76. Everybody's for democracy in principle. It's only in practice that the thing gives rise to stiff objections.
Meg Greenfield
#77. I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
Eleanor Catton
#78. Had always believed an immersive virtual reality afterlife was possible in principle. Maybe
Ken MacLeod
#79. On the mathematical side, you could in principle build a society in which people were fulfilling their needs and flourishing as human beings in a higher way than in a consumer society, provided you had the right investments in the opportunity to flourish in less materialistic ways.
Tim Jackson
#80. I assure the ex servicemen that One Rank One Pension has been accepted in principle but it is in talks. We want to get a solution which is acceptable to all. Discussions have come to the final leg, we hope for a positive result.
Narendra Modi
#81. The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.
Phillip E. Johnson
#82. If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are.
Rodney Brooks
#83. 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
Ernest Hemingway,
#84. There is no way to learn endurance other than simply to endure. We can't learn it in principle or in theory; only pain can teach it to us.
Chris Tiegreen
#85. I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle I am against manifestoes, as I am also against principles.
Tristan Tzara
#86. People who snack sometimes sometimes eat kind of thoughtlessly and end up eating a lot more. But in principle, it's a really good idea if you can exert the kind of discipline needed.
Michael Pollan
#87. If gay marriage was OK ... then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men; or indeed three men and a dog.
Boris Johnson
#89. I think that our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in principle, over the superstitions it has displaced.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#90. I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born, in principle, in a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly.
James A. Baldwin
#91. The world is the puzzle, itself; but it is always in principle.
Dada Bhagwan
#92. You know that, according to quantum theory, if two particles collide with enough energy you can, in principle, with an infinitesimal probability, produce two grand pianos.
Isidor Isaac Rabi
#93. In principle ... no government in the world can accept an armed terrorist group, some of them coming from abroad, controlling streets and villages in the name of 'jihad'.
Walid Muallem
#95. Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person's eyes.
Oliver Sacks
#96. He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it.
Jack Kerouac
#97. It is right in principle that those should be the best loved who have contributed most to the elevation of the human race and human life.
Albert Einstein
#98. There can be no ultimate statements science: there can be no statements in science which can not be tested, and therefore none which cannot in principle be refuted, by falsifying some of the conclusions which can be deduced from them.
Karl Popper
#99. If in principle we are all in favor of innovation, in practice we try to make our world safe and certain.
Larry Keeley
#100. [this element], the seat of the appetites and of desire in general, does in a sense participate in principle, as being amenable and obedient to it
Aristotle.
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