Principles Quotes

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Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what is honorable is better. On such principles children and persons of every age which requires education should be trained.

I admired Him as a man rather than as a leader. He preached something beyond my liking, perhaps beyond my reason. And I would have no man preach to me.
I was taken by His voice and His gestures, not by the substance of His speech. He charmed me but never convinced me; for He was too vague, too distant and obscure to reach my mind.
I have known other men like Him. They are never constant nor are they consistent. It is with eloquence not with principles that they hold your ear and your passing thought, but never the core of your heart.

Now there cannot be first principles for men, unless the Divinity has revealed them; all the rest--beginning, middle, and end--isnothing but dreams and smoke.

Michel de Montaigne

By rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against the basic aristocratic principle of Nature...

A physical theory is not an explanation. It is a system of mathematical propositions, deduced from a small number of principles, which aim... to represent as simply, as completely, and as exactly as possible a group of experimental laws.

Arthur Conan Doyle

What decides the purpose of life is simply the programme of the pleasure principle. This principle dominates the operation of the mental apparatus from the start. There can be no doubt about its efficacy, and yet its programme is at loggerheads with the whole world, with the macrocosm as much as with the microcosm.

Long and painful experience has taught me one great principle in managing business for other people, viz., if you want to inspire confidence, give plenty of statistics.

Come what may, I am bound to think that all things are ordered for the best; though when the good is a furlong off, and we with our beetle eyes can only see three inches, it takes some confidence in general principles to pull us through.

Arthur Conan Doyle

America is today the hope of all honorable men who respect the rights of their fellow men and who believe in the principle of freedom and justice.

Albert Einstein

Kings were put to death long before 21 January, 1793, and before the regicides of the nineteenth century. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interesting in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

Michel de Montaigne

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

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

Thomas Jefferson

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

The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat what he believes to be true must determine his actions.

If variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being perserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offsping similarly characterized. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

The religion of Jesus is founded in the Unity of God, and this principle chiefly gave it triumph over the rabble of heathen gods then acknowledged. Thinking men of all nations rallied readily to the doctrine of one only God, and embraced it with the pure-morals which Jesus inculcated.

Thomas Jefferson

I worked on true Baconian principles, and without any theory collected facts.

I did not want this struggle. Since January, 1933, when Providence entrusted me with the leadership of the German Reich, I had an aim before my eyes which was essentially incorporated in the program of our National Socialist party. I have never been disloyal to this aim and have never abandoned my program... Only when the entire German people become a single community of sacrifice can we expect and hope that Almighty God will help us. The Almighty has never helped a lazy man. He does not help the coward. He does not help a people that cannot help itself. The principle applies here, help yourselves and Almighty God will not deny you his assistance.

What is wanted is men of principle, who recognize a higher law than the decision of the majority. The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.

Henry David Thoreau

Pay attention, my young friends: to go against the current; this is good for the heart, but we need courage to swim against the tide.... We Christians were not chosen by the Lord for little things; push onwards toward the highest principles. Stake your lives on noble ideals, my dear young people!

The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests.

His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.

The seizure of power by armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central task and the highest form of revolution. This Marxist-Leninist principle of revolution holds well universally, for China and for all other countries.

I have only two rules which I regard as principles of conduct. The first is: Have no rules. The second is: Be independent of the opinion of others.

Albert Einstein