Quotes about principle
page 24

“Invariably will you find perseverance exemplified as the radical principle in every truly great character. It facilitates, perfects, and consolidates the execution of the plan conceived, and renders profitable its results when attained. By continuing to advance steadily in the same way, light constantly increases, obstacles disappear, efficient habits are confirmed, experience is acquired, the use of the best means is reduced to easy action, and success becomes more sure.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 450.

Way, Light, Success, Perfection

“My foreign policy has three fundamental branches: first, confidence in our cause, a recognition that the principles America was based upon are not something we shrink from or apologize for, that we stand for those principles; the second is clarity in our purpose, which is that when we have a foreign policy objective, we describe it honestly and clearly to the American people, to Congress and to the people of the world; and number three is resolve in our might, that in those rare circumstances, those rare circumstances where we decide it's essential for us to apply military might, that we do so with overwhelming force, that we do so in the clarity of a mission, understanding the nature of the U. S. interest involved, understanding when the mission would be complete, what will be left when it is -- what will be left behind us when that mission has been -- has been terminated.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

televised remarks, , quoted in * 2012-09-12
What They Said, Before and After the Attack in Libya
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/12/us/politics/libya-statements.html
2012-09-18
2012

People, World, Confidence, Understanding

“This is your country as well as anybody else's country. This country is founded upon the principle of equality. He that is meritorious and virtuous, intellectual and well informed, must stand highest, without regard to color.”

Andrew Johnson (1808–1875) American politician, 17th president of the United States (in office from 1865 to 1869)

To Union soldiers (1865), as quoted in Andrew Johnson: A Profile http://web.archive.org/web/20110316175449/http://home.nas.com/lopresti/ps17.htm (1969), "Johnson and the Negro", by Lawanda Cox and John H. Cox; edited by Eric L. McKitrick, Hill & Wang, New York pp. 141. Quote

Color, Country

“That wild Irish novel (Blackcock's Feather, Maurice Walsh), a wonderful Elizabethan cloak and dagger story, has started me spinning again, those same old threads; the link between begetting and killing, i. e. that sex and death must both be phenomena of fallen Creation…Another odd parallel; the very men who haven't the courage to beget children, to accept fatherhood, are likely to be pacifists on principle, and opponents of the death penalty. What was it that old Afghan, Mahbud Ali, said to Kim: "When I was fifteen I had shot my man and begot my man!".. as representative of God and Christ glorified, consecrated to him, he [the priest] is absolved from these characteristics of fallen humanity, dispensed, raised above them - neither for ascetic reasons, nor on human grounds, but simply because these are the symbols of the Adamite order.”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights p. 41-42 Diaries 1951.

Death, Men, God, Children

“The war we are fighting until victory or the bitter end is in its deepest sense a war between Christ and Marx.
Christ: the principle of love.
Marx: the principle of hate.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Der Kampf, den wir heute ausfechten bis zum Sieg oder bis zum bitteren Ende, ist im tiefsten Sinne ein Kampf zwischen Christus und Marx.
Christus: das Prinzip der Liebe.
Marx: das Prinzip des Hasses.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Love, Hate, War, Sense

“And then there is a second thing, a second principle that we've got to go back and rediscover. And that is that all reality has spiritual control. In other words, we've got to go back and rediscover the principle that there is a God behind the process. Well this you say, "Why is it that you raise that as a point in your sermon, in a church? The mere fact we are at church, we believe in God, we don't need to go back and rediscover that. The mere fact that we are here, and the mere fact that we sing and pray, and come to church—we believe in God." Well, there's some truth in that. But we must remember that it's possible to affirm the existence of God with your lips and deny his existence with your life. The most dangerous type of atheism is not theoretical atheism, but practical atheism […]. And the world, even the church, is filled up with people who pay lip service to God and not life service. And there is always a danger that we will make it appear externally that we believe in God when internally we don't. We say with our mouths that we believe in him, but we live with our lives like he never existed. That is the ever-present danger confronting religion. That's a dangerous type of atheism.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

Life, God, People, Truth

“Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and destroy. […] the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board, so that people would know what is happening and act accordingly.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

referring to 1969 https://web.archive.org/web/20031106175309/http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/4/11.html Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1992

People

“While the broad principles of democracy are universal, the fact remains that their application varies considerably … We are at the beginning of the road, at the very beginning. We still have a long way to go.”

Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922–2016) 6th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Quoted in "Boutros Boutros-Ghali: The world is his oyster" by Gamal Nkrumah in Al-Ahram weekly No. 777 (10 - 18 January 2006)
2000s

Way, Democracy, Universe

“We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintain it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

James Monroe (1758–1831) American politician, 5th President of the United States (in office from 1817 to 1825)

The Monroe Doctrine (2 December 1823)

Peace, Light, Parting, Dependency

“Lasker mouthed, “Trust him,” and Max sighed. Trust a lawyer? It flew in the face of his most cherished principles.”

Jack McDevitt book Ancient Shores

Source: Ancient Shores (1996), Chapter 8 (p. 78)

“Urban life was thus founded upon the principle of deliberately confounding those who were not a part of it. Civilization was a strategy of exclusion.”

Michael Swanwick book Jack Faust

Source: Jack Faust (1997), Chapter 16, “The Wild Hunt” (p. 287)

Life, Parting

“We shall not … begin this logic by definitions, axioms, or principles; we shall begin by observing the lessons which nature gives us.”

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714–1780) French academic

The Logic of Condillac (trans. Joseph Neef, 1809), "Of the Method of Thinking", p. 3.

Nature

“For as long as I can remember,' I said, continuing to speak to the figure standing in the archway, 'I have had an intense and highly aesthetic perception of what I call the icy bleakness of things. At the same time I have felt a great loneliness in this perception. This conjunction of feelings seems paradoxical, since such a perception, such a view of things, would seem to preclude the emotion of loneliness, or any sense of a killing sadness, as I think of it. All such heartbreaking sentiment, as usually considered, would seem to be on its knees before artworks such as yours, which so powerfully express what I have called the icy bleakness of things, submerging or devastating all sentiment in an atmosphere potent with desolate truths, permeated throughout with a visionary stagnation and lifelessness. Yet I must observe that the effect, as I now consider it, has been just the opposite. If it was your intent to evoke the icy bleakness of things with your dream monologues, then you have totally failed on both an artistic and an extra-artistic level. You have failed your art, you have failed yourself, and you have also failed me. If your artworks had really evoked the bleakness of things, then I would not have felt this need to know who you are, this killing sadness that there was actually someone who experienced the same sensations and mental states that I did and who could share them with me in the form of tape-recorded dream monologues. Who are you that I should feel this need to go to work hours before the sun comes up, that I should feel this was something I had to do and that you were someone that I had to know? This behavior violates every principle by which I have lived for as long as I can remember. Who are you to cause me to violate these long-lived principles?”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Bungalow House

Truth, Sadness, Dreams, Art

“It will rightly be asked: What is the synthetic principle on which this obviously highly important product of y-methylcyclopentenophenanthrene is built up in nature, and why is it that this particular type which, as founda tion of many substances indispensable to life and of extreme physiological and biological importance, plays such a vital role in the vegetable and animal kingdoms? However, the time has not yet come when we can give an answer to questions so fundamental and so important to an understanding of the workings of Nature. But I am firmly convinced that this problem - like all others - will eventually be solved.”

Otto Diels (1876–1954) German chemist

"Description and Importance of the Aromatic Basic Skeleton of the Steroids" (Nobel Lecture), 1950.

Life, Understanding, Question, Nature

Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) Anarchist, Entrepreneur, Abolitionist

Sections I–II, p. 11–12
Natural Law; or The Science of Justice (1882), Chapter II. The Science of Justice (Continued)

Men, Pleasure, World, Justice

“The Civil Rights Act of 1997 is simple, direct, and clear: it prohibits federal government discrimination and preferences on the basis of race and sex. Most of the arguments against this legislation are anything but simple, direct, and clear; they do not specifically address the simple issue of whether federal government preferences on the basis or race and sex are wise policies consistent with American legal and moral principles.”

Charles T. Canady (1954) American politician and judge

The Civil Rights Act of 1997 http://www.fed-soc.org/publications/detail/the-civil-rights-act-of-1997 (December 1, 1997)

Sex

“The truth, of course, is that libertarianism wants to advance principles of property but that it in no way wishes to defend, willy nilly, all property which now is called private.Much of that property is stolen. Much is of dubious title. All of it is deeply intertwined with an immoral, coercive state system which has condoned, built on, and profited from slavery; has expanded through and exploited a brutal and aggressive imperial and colonial foreign policy, and continues to hold the people in a roughly serf–master relationship to political–economic power concentrations.”

Karl Hess (1923–1994) American journalist

"Letter From Washington," http://www.panarchy.org/hess/libertarianism.html The Libertarian Forum 1, no. 6 http://web.archive.org/web/20071201123614/http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.pdf (15 June 1969), p. 2

People, Truth, Way

“The moral government of God is a movement in a line onwards towards some grand consummation, in which the principles, indeed, are ever the same, but the developments are always new,— in which, therefore, no experience of the past can indicate with certainty what new openings of truth, what new manifestations of goodness, what new phases of the moral heaven may appear.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 284.

God, Truth, Appearance, Past

“You write you could never be a Theosophist. Well I suppose I could say the same thing, if you're referring to what most theosophists are. But that does not alter the fact that I believe that the principles of theosophy are true, and that it leads to clarity in one's spiritual development. Which means that we [= Mondrian ànd the catholic painter and his former teacher L. Schelfhout, after their reconciliation] quite agree on this point. Self-awareness is, in my view, of crucial importance to all human beings. I can understand how the Catholic doctrine may lead to vagueness, but Theosophy, which is a spiritual science, can never do so.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In a letter to Lodewijk Schelfhout, Paris 29 January 1914; as quoted in 'Beeldende Kunst: Opmerkingen over de tentoonstelling van den Modernen Kunstkring.. Der Ploeg (1912)', W. Steenhoff, p. 147
1910's

Understanding, Teachers, Science

“The principle of TM is simple, being is bliss in its nature, infinite happiness, mind is always moving in the direction of greater happiness. It is the experience of everyone: wherever the mind goes, it goes in the direction of greater happiness.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1917–2008) Inventor of Transcendental Meditation, musician

Quoted from: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi - Lake Louise, Canada (1968) - MaharishiUniversity http://www.bienfaits-meditation.com/en/maharishi/videos/mechanics-of-the-technique

Happiness, Nature

“I will admit no bond that holds me to a party a day longer than I agree to its principles. When men meet together to confer, and ascertain whether or not they do agree, and find that they differ – radically, essentially, irreconcilably differ – what belongs to an honorable position except to part? They cannot consistently act together any longer.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Reply in the Senate to a speech of Senator Douglas, May 1860.
1860s

Men, Parting

“What I've learnt is when you walk into a family argument and people tell you it's about principle don't get involved. There is more to life than principles.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Channel 4 News, Monday 26 September 2011 http://www.channel4.com/news/ed-miliband-has-an-angry-insurgent-side

Life, People, Family

“Henceforth there are to be no fixed or inviolable principles of law at all—only an endlessly changing legal response to the fashionable causes of the moment.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

All Our Pomp of Yesterday http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_3_oh_to_be.html (Summer 1999). City Journal (1998 - 2008)

Law, Fashion, Change

“In Western Europe since Roman times, private property was considered sacrosanct. The principle enunciated by the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca that kings rule by the will of the people became fundamental to Western civilization, together with private property, which was the main source of productive wealth.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

“Property and Freedom: The Inseparable Connection,” speech at an “Evenings at FEE” event, October 2004. https://fee.org/resources/property-and-freedom-the-inseparable-connection/

People, Time, Wealth

“As many of you may know, my first chosen career was in the United States Navy, where I served as a submarine officer. At that time, my shipmates and I were ready for combat and prepared to give our lives to defend our nation and its principles. At the same time, we always prayed that our readiness would preserve the peace.
I served under two presidents, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, men who represented different political parties, both of whom had faced their active military responsibilities with honor.
They knew the horrors of war. And later as commanders in chief, they exercised restraint and judgment, and they had a clear sense of mission.
We had a confidence that our leaders, both military and civilian, would not put our soldiers and sailors in harm's way by initiating wars of choice unless America's vital interests were in danger.
We also were sure that these presidents would not mislead us when issues involved our national security.”

Jimmy Carter (1924) American politician, 39th president of the United States (in office from 1977 to 1981)

Post-Presidency, DNC address (2004)

Men, War, Peace, Way

“We are on the eve of great changes…We have set an example to the world in all ages; we have given them the representative system. The very rules and regulations of this House have been taken as the model for every representative assembly throughout the whole civilised world; and having besides given them the example of a free press and civil and religious freedom, and every institution that belongs to freedom and civilisation, we are now about giving a still greater example; we are going to set the example of making industry free—to set the example of giving the whole world every advantage of clime, and latitude, and situation, relying ourselves on the freedom of our industry. Yes, we are going to teach the world that other lesson. Don't think there is anything selfish in this, or anything at all discordant with Christian principles. I can prove that we advocate nothing but what is agreeable to the highest behests of Christianity. To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the dearest. What is the meaning of the maxim? It means that you take the article which you have in the greatest abundance, and with it obtain from others that of which they have the most to spare; so giving to mankind the means of enjoying the fullest abundance of earth's goods, and in doing so, carrying out to the fullest extent the Christian doctrine of 'Doing to all men as ye would they should do unto you.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in the House of Commons (27 February 1846), quoted in John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds.), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden, M.P. Volume I (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), p. 198.
1840s

Men, Age, World, Thinking

“The fundamental principle of the atheism of Spinoza is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe, and the unity of that substance, in which he supposes both thought and matter to inhere. There is only one substance, says he, in the world; and that substance is perfectly simple and indivisible, and exists every where, without any local presence. Whatever we discover externally by sensation; whatever we feel internally by reflection; all these are nothing but modifications of that one, simple, and necessarily existent being, and are not possest of any separate or distinct existence. Every passion of the soul; every configuration of matter, however different and various, inhere in the same substance, and preserve in themselves their characters of distinction, without communicating them to that subject, in which they inhere.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
G - L

World, Feeling, Soul, Communication

“A fight between several parties of the British people: Nothing of the kind! A fight between two or three big money combines, that and nothing else. Without the weight of money behind the party machines, in an electoral battle today determined purely by principle and by the number of active workers…British Union could fight and beat today the old parties over the whole electoral field. But you know and I know, the battle is nothing of the kind. The battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight. Or when they speak democracy, they don't mean government by the people…they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money.”

Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) British politician; founder of the British Union of Fascists

Speech in Earls Court (July 1939). http://www.oswaldmosley.com/audio/earlscourt.m3u

Money, People, Democracy, Fight

“With respect to the present expedition, it is defensible on the ground that the enormous power of France enables her to coerce the weaker state to become the enemy of England…the law of nature is stronger than even the law of nations. It is to the law of self-preservation that England appeals for justification of her proceedings. It is admitted…that if Denmark had evidenced any hostility towards this country, then we should have been justified in measures of retaliation. How then is the case altered, when we find Denmark acting under the coercion of a power notoriously hostile to us? Knowing, as we do, that Denmark is under the influence of France, can there be the shadow of a doubt that the object of our enemy would have been accomplished? Denmark coerced into hostility stands in the same position as Denmark voluntarily hostile, when the law of self-preservation comes into play…England, according to that law of self-preservation which is a fundamental principle of the law of nations, is justified in securing, and therefore enforcing, from Denmark a neutrality which France would by compulsion have converted into an active hostility.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (3 February 1808) on the British bombardment of Copenhagen, quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), pp. 1-3.
1800s

Hostility, Law, Nature, Country

“Sigmund Freud would have been a wonderful witness here. He would have explained the use of derivatives as denial and rationalization—the pretense that we are doing one thing when we really mean to do something else; the relationship between the banker and its client as one of ambivalence and reliance on the father figure; the use of accounting conventions as repression and the absence of reality testing; the work environment as the pleasure/pain principle—current pleasure for future damage, let someone else pick up the pieces; leveraging and doubling our bets as counter-phobic behavior; termination therapy as what happens when the CFO and Treasurer get caught; and, of course, transference—how the trader seeks to shift responsibility to his or her superior when the string runs out.”

Eugene Rotberg (1930)

Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs. http://3197d6d14b5f19f2f440-5e13d29c4c016cf96cbbfd197c579b45.r81.cf1.rackcdn.com/collection/papers/1990/1994_0623_RotbergTestimony.pdf, 23 June 1994

Pain, Pleasure, Behavior, Reality

“Among the various subjects of the inquiry, however, which, inconsequence of the vague use of language, are comprehended under the general title of metaphysics, there are some, which are essentially distinguished from the rest, both by the degree of evidence which accompanies their principles, and by the relation which they bear to the useful sciences and arts: and it has unfortunately happened, that these have shared in that general discredit, into which the other branches of metaphysics have fallen. To this circumstance is probably to be ascribed, the little progress which has hitherto been made in the PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND; a science, so interesting in its nature, and so important in its applications, that it could scarcely have failed, in these inquisitive and enlightened times, to have excited a very general attention, if it had not accidentally been classed, in the public opinion with the vain and unprofitable disquisitions of the schoolmen.”

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) Scottish philosopher and mathematician

Source: Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 1792, p. 9; Lead paragraph (II)

Art, Nature, Science, Time

“The left should carve out a new long-term narrative about British foreign policy: one that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage again. And one that reasserts our commitment to the responsibility to protect those most at risk of mass atrocity crimes. This isn’t really about being pro or anti-military intervention. Rather it’s a call to redefine the principles that will guide the decisions we take, as well as a commitment to then honour them.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

Decision

“Though the words "personal" and "personality" date to the 1380s, "responsibility" emerged only in the 1640s, as England began its great democratic ferment. This linguistic lag marked an arrested moral development. Our civilization developed personality early and responsibility late. Only the duties of democratic governance required a word to express the abstract principle, "a state of being responsible."”

Mark Riebling (1963) American writer

Personal Responsibility: How the Framers coined a phrase as they created a nation (2010)

Personality

“"I exist" does not follow from "there is a thought now." The fact that a thought occurs at a given moment does not entail that any other thought has occurred at any other moment, still less that there has occurred a series of thoughts sufficient to constitute a single self. As Hume conclusively showed, no one event intrinsically points to any other. We infer the existence of events which we are not actually observing, with the help of general principle. But these principles must be obtained inductively. By mere deduction from what is immediately given we cannot advance a single step beyond. And, consequently, any attempt to base a deductive system on propositions which describe what is immediately given is bound to be a failure.”

Alfred Jules Ayer book Language, Truth, and Logic

Source: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 47.

Failure, Help

“A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the Right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional – a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Apartheid South Africa: Reality vs. Libertarian Fantasy" http://praag.org/?p=12425, Praag.org, December 20, 2013. 2010s, 2013

History, Idea, Reality

“In principle, a self-organising system cannot be constructed, since its organisation and behaviour cannot be prescribed and created by an external source. It emerges autonomously in certain conditions (which cannot be prescribed either). The task of the researcher is to investigate in what kind of systems and under what kind of conditions self-organisation emerges.”

Rein Vihalemm (1938–2015) Estonian philosopher of chemistry

Source: Chemistry as an Interesting Subject for the Philosophy of Science, 2001, p. 195

“I've come up through the ranks of this parliamentary party and let me tell you the principles that have guided me on that journey since my first election 25 years ago: Loyalty to the party, service to our country and a determination to always do my best for the people. They are principles that still guide me.”

Brian Cowen (1960) Irish politician

Loyalty to a fault over Molloy affair is costing Cowen dearly, Irish Independent, 26 September 2009, 2010-06-12 http://www.independent.ie/national-news/loyalty-to-a-fault-over-molloy-affair-is-costing-cowen-dearly-1897480.html, address to the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party meeting in Athlone on 14 September 2009. 2009

People, Loyalty, Country

“By a ‘spontaneous disturbance’ we shall mean any change in the underlying conditions, the cause of which we are prepared to take for granted and do not wish to examine, but the effect of which on the domestic and external position of our two countries we wish to examine. By a ‘policy’ change we shall mean a change which the State or some public authority brings about as a result of a definite decision of State policy in order to achieve some given end of general economic policy and in particular to offset some of the effects of a ‘spontaneous disturbance’. Finally, by an ‘induced’ change is meant a change in some quantity which occurs on purely commercial principles because of the repercussions of some previous ‘spontaneous’ or ‘policy’ change.”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

Source: The balance of payments, 1951, p. 43; As cited in: Metaxas, Phillip Edmund, and Ernst Juerg Weber. Australia's contribution to international trade theory: The dependent economy model. (2013), p. 18

Decision, Change, Country

“Women care about specifics, about details. Men care about generalities, about abstract principles.”

Rudy Rucker (1946) American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author and philosopher

Source: The Sex Sphere (1983), p. 153-154

Women, Men

“In its application to natural science Grosseteste based his method of verification and falsification on two assumptions about the nature of reality. (a) The first was the principle of the uniformity of nature, meaning that forms are always uniform in their operations…. In support of this principle he quoted 'Aristotles II de Generat.:…'the same cause, provided it remains in the same condition, cannot produce anything but the same effect.' (b) The second assumption Grosseteste made was that of the principle of economy, or lex parsimoniae. This he also derived from Aristotle, who stated it as a pragmatic principle.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

Quotes, Support, Nature, Reality

“Who stands fast? Only the man whose final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, or his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all this when he is called to obedient and responsible action in faith and in exclusive allegiance to God — the responsible man, who tries to make his whole life an answer to the question and call of God. Where are these responsible people?”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

Source: Letters and Papers from Prison (1967; 1997), Who Stands Fast?, p. 5.

Life, God, People, Faith

“Most things that we and the people around us do constantly… have come to seem so natural and inevitable that merely to pose the question, 'Why are we doing this?' can strike us as perplexing – and also, perhaps, a little unsettling. On general principle, it is a good idea to challenge ourselves in this way about anything we have come to take for granted; the more habitual, the more valuable this line of inquiry.”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

Punished by Rewards

People, Way, Idea, Question

“A Christianity split into a diversity of ecclesiastical streams, the dualism implicit within its political agenda – nation-forming on the one side, universalism on the other was further accentuated. The classical eastern orthodox form stressing the power of the emperor was in principle universalist enough in its vision of Constantinople as the New Rome, but in practice Byzantium became a rather thoroughly Greek empire, alienating non-Greeks in Egypt, Syria or the west. This combined with its considerable degree of Caesaropapism led to the generation of a type of church-state relationship characteristic of eastern autocephalous churches of a highly nationalist type.”

Adrian Hastings (1929–2001) Roman Catholic priest, historian and author

Source: The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism (1997), p. 202; As cited in: Cristian Romocea (2011) Church and State: Religious Nationalism and State Identification in Post-Communist Romania . p. 90.

Universe

“Accessions have continually been made to the Republican Party, ever since its organization, it has won to the support of its principles good men, from time to time, from all the other parties, until it now embraces the best men of the country. It has become a compact and overshadowing organization, sufficiently powerful to take possession of and to administer the Government, upon the great principles of liberty, equality, and justice, as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.”

Elbridge G. Spaulding (1809–1897) American politician

Remarks on the Republican platform (1860)

Men, Justice, Support, Time

“The principles and practices of democracy continue to spread ever more widely, and it is hard to imagine that there is a corner of the globe into which they will not eventually penetrate. But the euphoria of democratic revolutions is typically short-lived, and its attainment seems typically to be followed by disgruntlement and even cynicism about the actual operation of democratic institutions. It might be widely accepted that democracy is a good thing, yet it is equally apparent that democrats have much work to do in improving the performance of democratic institutions. Of course, it is far easier to perceive the need for reform than to prescribe specific proposals.”

Ian Shapiro (1956) American political theorist

Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo, "Introduction" in Designing democratic institutions (2000) edited by Ian Shapiro and Stephen Macedo.

Democracy, Imagination

“In principle, it might be possible to obtain evidence of focal-attentive processing in the absence of awareness of what is being processed… in practice, however, a complete dissociation of consciousness from focal-attentive processing is difficult to achieve.”

Max Velmans (1942) British psychologist

Source: Is human information processing conscious?, 1991, p. 665; As cited in: Giorgio Marchetti, " Against the view that consciousness and attention are fully dissociable https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279725/." Attention and consciousness in different senses (2011): 23.

“We lost -- we lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave in to the temptations of corruption. We lost their trust when rather than reform government, both parties made it bigger. We lost their trust when instead of freeing ourselves from a dangerous dependence on foreign oil, both parties -- and Sen. Obama -- passed another corporate welfare bill for oil companies. We lost their trust when we valued our power over our principles. We're going to change that.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

2000s, 2008, (2008)

People, Change, Dependency

“There is, in a apple, in a head, a culminating point, and this point - in spite of the effect, the tremendous effect: shadow or light, sensations of colour - is always the one nearest to the eye. The edge of objects recede to another point placed on your horizon. This is my great principle, my conviction, my discovery. The eye must concentrate, grasp the subject, and the brain will find a means to express it..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 222 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

Light

“An enlightened impartial observer…will be disposed to think that in the common interests of humanity this remarkable strike and the results of this strike, which have tended somewhat to strengthen the condition of labour in the face of capital, is the record of what we ought to regard as satisfactory, as a real social advance; that it tends to a greater, a more uniform, and a more firm establishment of just relations; that it tends to a fair principle of division of the fruits of industry.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Cheshire (23 September 1889) on the London dock strike, quoted in The Times (24 September 1889), p. 10.
1880s

Thinking

“After so many great men have worked on this subject, I almost do not dare to say that I have discovered the universal principle upon which all these laws are based, a principle that covers both elastic and inelastic collisions and describes the motion and equilibrium of all material bodies.
This is the principle of least action, a principle so wise and so worthy of the supreme Being, and intrinsic to all natural phenomena; one observes it at work not only in every change, but also in every constancy that Nature exhibits. In the collision of bodies, motion is distributed such that the quantity of action is as small as possible, given that the collision occurs. At equilibrium, the bodies are arranged such that, if they were to undergo a small movement, the quantity of action would be smallest.
The laws of motion and equilibrium derived from this principle are exactly those observed in Nature. We may admire the applications of this principle in all phenomena: the movement of animals, the growth of plants, the revolutions of the planets, all are consequences of this principle. The spectacle of the universe seems all the more grand and beautiful and worthy of its Author, when one considers that it is all derived from a small number of laws laid down most wisely. Only thus can we gain a fitting idea of the power and wisdom of the supreme Being, not from some small part of creation for which we know neither the construction, usage, nor its relationship to other parts. What satisfaction for the human spirit in contemplating these laws of motion and equilibrium for all bodies in the universe, and in finding within them proof of the existence of Him who governs the universe!”

Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters

Les Loix du Mouvement et du Repos, déduites d'un Principe Métaphysique (1746)

Wisdom, Men, Law, Beauty

“The difference principle, for example, requires that the higher expectations of the more advantaged contribute to the prospects of the least advantaged.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter II, Section 16, pg. 95

“As for acquiescing in what a man understands not, or cannot reconcile to his reason, they know best the fruits of it that practice it. For my part, I'm a stranger to it, and cannot reconcile myself to such a principle. On the contrary, I am pretty sure he pretends in vain to convince the judgment, who explains not the nature of the thing. A man may give his verbal assent to he knows not what, out of fear, superstition, indifference, interest, and the like feeble and unfair motives: but as long as he conceives not what he believes, he cannot sincerely acquiesce in it, and remains deprived of all solid satisfaction. … But he that comprehends a thing, is as sure of it as if he were himself the author.”

John Toland book Christianity not Mysterious

Christianity not Mysterious (1696), Section II: That the Doctrines of the Gospel are not contrary to Reason, Chapter 1

Fear, Motivation, Understanding, Nature

“As coordination contains all the principles of organization, it likewise expresses all the purposes of organization, in so far as these purposes relate to its internal structure. To avoid confusion we must keep in mind that there are always two objectives of organization, the internal and the external. The latter may be anything, according to the purpose or interest that calls the group together, but the internal objective is coordinative always.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 20

“All arguments on the hardship of a case, either on one side or the other, must be rejected, when we are pronouncing what the law is; for such arguments are only quicksands in the law, and, if indulged, will soon swallow up every principle of it.”

Sir Francis Buller, 1st Baronet (1746–1800) British judge

Yates v. Hall, (1785), 1 T. R. 80.

Law

“I try to live by proper ethical and moral standards and carry out my national duties in accordance with the principles of the God I believe in.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

Additional remarks about the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission, Address to the Editors' Forum, Suva, 27 July 2005

God

“Who would stand before a blackboard, and pray the Principle of mathematics to work out the problem? The rule is already established, and it is our task to work out the solution.”

Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) religious leader

Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1889), p. 491 https://archive.org/stream/healthwitscience00eddyrich#page/491/mode/1up

Mathematics, Problem

“The recognition of certain basic impossibilities has laid the foundations of some major principles of physics and chemistry; similarly, recognition of the impossibility of understanding living things in terms of physics and chemistry, far from setting limits to our understanding of life, will guide it in the right direction. And even if the demonstration of this impossibility should prove of no great advantage in the pursuit of discovery, such a demonstration would help to draw a truer image of life and man than that given us by the present basic concepts of biology.”

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

Life's irreducible structure (1968)

Life, Understanding, Help, Drawing

“They who no longer believe in principles still proclaim them, to conceal, both from themselves and others, the selfishness of the motives by which they are dominated.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 46

Motivation, Selfishness

“If you're too sloppy, then you never get reproducible results, and then you never can draw any conclusions; but if you are just a little sloppy, then when you see something startling, (…) you nail it down (…). So I called it the "Principle of Limited Sloppiness."”

Max Delbrück (1906–1981) biophysicist

Interview with Max Delbruck http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechOH:OH_Delbruck_M (1978), p. 76-77. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, California.

Drawing

“I have discovered in the Hebrew Bible teachings of righteousness, humaneness, and human dignity—at the source of my parents' teachings of mentschlichkeit—undreamt of in my prior philosophizing. In the idea that human beings are equally God-like, equally created in the image of the divine, I have seen the core principle of a humanistic and democratic politics, respectful of each and every human being, and a necessary correction to the uninstructed human penchant for worshiping brute nature or venerating mighty or clever men. In the Sabbath injunction to desist regularly from work and the flux of getting and spending, I have discovered an invitation to each human being, no matter how lowly, to step outside of time, in imitatio Dei, to contemplate the beauty of the world and to feel gratitude for its—and our—existence. In the injunction to honor your father and your mother, I have seen the foundation of a dignified family life, for each of us the nursery of our humanization and the first vehicle of cultural transmission. I have satisfied myself that there is no conflict between the Bible, rightly read, and modern science, and that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis offers "not words of information but words of appreciation," as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: "not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being"—the recognition of which glory, I would add, is ample proof of the text's claim that we human beings stand highest among the creatures. And thanks to my Biblical studies, I have been moved to new attitudes of gratitude, awe, and attention. For just as the world as created is a world summoned into existence under command, so to be a human being in that world—to be a mentsch—is to live in search of our summons. It is to recognize that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence. It is to stand in the world not only in awe of its and our existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life that does honor to the special powers and possibilities—the divine-likeness—with which our otherwise animal existence has been, no thanks to us, endowed.”

Leon R. Kass (1939) American academic

Looking for an Honest Man (2009)

Life, Men, God, World

“This doctrine found wide acceptance among the nonconformist clergy who later made up the Congregational Church. The great apostle of this movement was the Reverend John Wise, of Massachusetts. He was one of the leaders of the revolt against the royal governor Andros in 1687, for which he suffered imprisonment. He was a liberal in ecclesiastical controversies. He appears to have been familiar with the writings of the political scientist, Samuel Pufendorf, who was born in Saxony in 1632. Wise published a treatise, entitled "The Church's Quarrel Espoused", in 1710, which was amplified in another publication in 1717. In it he dealt with the principles of civil government. His works were reprinted in 1772 and have been declared to have been nothing less than a textbook of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Suffering, Appearance

“No Habit or Quality is more easily acquir'd than Hypocrisy, nor any thing sooner learn'd than to deny the Sentiments of our Hearts and the Principle we act from: But the Seeds of every Passion are innate to us, and no body comes into the World without them.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

"An Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools", p. 319
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

World, Passion, Heart

“Every work of art is the child of its age and, in many cases, the mother of our emotions. It follows that each period of culture produces an art of its own which can never be repeated. Efforts to revive the art-principles of the past will at best produce an art that is still-born. It is impossible for us to live and feel, as did the ancient Greeks. In the same way those who strive to follow the Greek methods in sculpture achieve only a similarity of form, the work remaining soulless for all time. Such imitation is mere aping. Externally the monkey completely resembles a human being; he will sit holding a book in front of his nose, and turn over the pages with a thoughtful aspect, but his actions have for him no real meaning.”

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) Russian painter

I. Kandinsky's introduction: Lead paragraph
1910 - 1915, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1911

Books, Age, Art, Way

“The problems of subject search on the Internet are no different in principle: search engines may permit easy location of verbally expressed topics, but we still seek to improve our methods of navigation.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 11; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

Search, Problem

“And so, the idea of slave property contradicts the idea of private property, and the Southerners taking their stand on their property rights and their slaves were, in fact, taking their stand on a principle which was incompatible with the idea of constitutional government.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Q&A

Idea

“The slaving Poor are incapable of any Principles: Gentlemen may be converted to true Principles, by Time and Experience. The middling Rank of Men have Curiosity and Knowledge enough to form Principles, but not enough to form true ones, or correct any Prejudices that they may have imbib’d: And ’tis among the middling Rank, that Tory Principles do at present prevail most in England.”

David Hume book Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary

Part I, Essay 9: Of The Parties of Great Britain; final lines of this essay in the 1741 and 1742 editions of Essays, Moral and Political, they were not included in later editions.
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)

Men, Knowledge, Time

“The principle of my political life …. is, that all ameliorations and improvements in political institutions can be obtained by persevering in a perfectly peaceable and legal course, and cannot be obtained by forcible means, or if they could be got by forcible means, such means create more evils than they cure, and leave the country worse than they found it.”

Daniel O'Connell (1775–1847) Irish political leader

Writing in The Nation (Irish newspaper), 18 November, 1843.

Life, Evil, Country

“If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that Divine Being, so much the better. When you go one step beyond the mundane system, you only excite an inquisitive humour which it is impossible ever to satisfy.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Cleanthes, Part IV
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

God, World

“In my search for these values I like to work both realistically and abstractly. In my drawing and painting I turn from one to the other as a necessity or impulse and not because of a preconceived design of action. When drawing what I see I am usually most conscious of the underlying principle of abstract form in human beings and their relationship one to the other. In making my abstract drawings I am most often aware of those human values which dominate the structure and meaning of abstract forms. Sculpture is the fusion of these two attitudes and I like to be free as to the degree of abstraction and realism in carving. The dominant feeling will always be the love of humanity and nature; and the love of sculpture for itself.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 285

Love, Feeling, Search, Nature

“But if these truths to which the declaration refers have not before been adopted in their combined entirety by national authority, it is a fact that they had been long pondered and often expressed in political speculation. It is generally assumed that French thought had some effect upon our public mind during Revolutionary days. This may have been true. But the principles of our declaration had been under discussion in the Colonies for nearly two generations before the advent of the French political philosophy that characterized the middle of the eighteenth century. In fact, they come from an earlier date. A very positive echo of what the Dutch had done in 1581, and what the English were preparing to do, appears in the assertion of the Reverend Thomas Hooker of Connecticut as early as 1638, when he said in a sermon before the General Court that 'The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

'The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance'.
1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

God, People, Truth, Appearance

“The result of my work has been the most extraordinary, the most unforeseen, and the happiest, that ever was; for, after having performed all the equations, multiplications, antitheses, and other operations of my method, and having finally finished the problem, I have found that my principle gives exactly and precisely the same proportion for the refractions which Monsieur Descartes has established.”

Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) French mathematician and lawyer

Epist. XLII, written at Toulouse (Jan. 1, 1662) and reprinted in Œvres de Fermat, ii, p. 457; i, pp. 170, 173, as quoted by E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity from the Age of Descartes to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1910) p. 10. https://books.google.com/books?id=CGJDAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA10

Problem

“Henryson's greatness is most plainly to be seen in the range of general principles and ideas which informs his poetry and which allows it to encompass tragedy and comedy alike. He is the most Shakespearian of the early Scottish poets.”

Robert Henryson (1425–1506) Scottish makar (poet)

John MacQueen, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography vol. 26, s. n. Henryson, Robert.
Criticism

Idea

“This State, this city, this campus, have stood long for both human rights and human enlightenment — and let that forever be true. This Nation is now engaged in a continuing debate about the rights of a portion of its citizens. This Nation is now engaged in a continuing debate about the rights of a portion of its citizens. That will go on, and those rights will expand until the standard first forged by the Nation's founders has been reached, and all Americans enjoy equal opportunity and liberty under law. But this Nation was not founded solely on the principle of citizens' rights. Equally important, though too often not discussed, is the citizen's responsibility. For our privileges can be no greater than our obligations. The protection of our rights can endure no longer than the performance of our responsibilities. Each can be neglected only at the peril of the other. I speak to you today, therefore, not of your rights as Americans, but of your responsibilities. They are many in number and different in nature. They do not rest with equal weight upon the shoulders of all. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of responsibility. All Americans must be responsible citizens, but some must be more responsible than others, by virtue of their public or their private position, their role in the family or community, their prospects for the future, or their legacy from the past. Increased responsibility goes with increased ability, for "of those to whom much is given, much is required."”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Address at Vanderbilt University

Family, Law, Communication, Nature

“Newton's own motto, "hypotheses non fingo" was, in a sense, disregarded by Newton himself: he rejected hypotheses only where they violated his own "regula philosophandi", that is to say, his principle of their strict parsimony. In terms of present-day methodology, we reject hypotheses as scientifically meaningless if they are incapable even of indirect test; and we reject them as superfluous or as implausible if they are too complex and artificial to conform with well established canons of inductive probability. But freedom of scientific theorizing must be preserved wherever the conditions of meaningfulness and of economy appear to be satisfied.”

Arthur Beer (1900–1980) German astronomer

Arthur Beer (ed.), Vistas in Astronomy (1955) Introduction to Vol.1 https://ia600304.us.archive.org/35/items/VistasInAstronomy-Volume1/Beer-VistasInAstronomyVolume1.pdf

Sense, Freedom, Appearance

“It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Toynbee, cited in: Arnold Joseph Toynbee, ‎Edward DeLos Myers (1955) A study of history. Vol. 7. p. 388

Life, Way, Motivational

“The purpose of this book is to legitimate the administrative state in terms of constitutional principle… Because public administrators at virtually all levels of government take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, this neglect deprives the profession of the opportunity to consider an important normative foundation for its activities.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Source: To run a constitution, 1986, p. ix

Books

“A religious spirit animates the infancy of our literature, and must continue to gloe in its maturity. The public taste calls for this quality, and would relish no work in which it might be supplanted by a principle of infidelity. Our best authors have written under the influence of Christian feeling; but had they been destitute of this sentiment, they would have found it necessary to accommodate themselves to the opinions of the people, and follow Christian precedents. The beneficent influence of religion on literature, is like that of our evening sun, when it awakens in the clouds those beautiful and burning tints, which clothe the firmament in gold and purple. It constitutes the heart of learning - the great source of its moral power. Religion addresses itself to the highest and holiest of our sentiments - benevolence and veneration, and their excitement stirs up the imagination, strengthens the undeerstanding, and purifies the taste. Thus, both in the mind of the author and the reader, Christianity and literature act and react on each other, with the effect of elevating both, and carrying the human character to the highest perfection which it is destined to reach. Learning should be proud of this companionship, and exert all her wisdom to render it perpetual.”

Daniel Drake (1785–1852) American physician and writer

Daniel Drake (1834). Discourse on the History, Character, and Prospects of the West: Delivered to the Union Literary Society of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, at Their Ninth Anniversary, September 23, 1834. Truman and Smith. p. 31

Wisdom, People, Religion, Beauty

“It is impossible to know what words like liberation or enlightenment mean until you realize them for yourself. This being so, it is of no use to speculate about what enlightenment is; in fact, doing so is a major hindrance to its unfolding. As a guiding principle, to progressively realize what is not absolutely True is of infinitely more value than speculating about what is.”

Adyashanti (1962) Spiritual teacher

The Way of Liberation (2012)

“Thus, we have three principles for increasing adequacy of data: if you must work with a single object, look for imperfections that record historical descent; if several objects are available, try to render them as stages of a single historical process; if processes can be directly observed, sum up their effects through time. One may discuss these principles directly or recognize the “little problems” that Darwin used to exemplify them: orchids, coral reefs, and worms—the middle book, the first, and the last.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Worm for a Century, and All Seasons", p. 132
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Books, Problem, Time

“Taxonomy is a Greek word which means an arrangement based on any kind of law or principle.”

John F. Sowa (1940) artificial intelligence researcher

Sowa (1992) cited in: Raad Al-Asady (1995) Inheritance Theory: An Artificial Intelligence Approach. p. 17

Law

“Foldings of the earth's crust, low hills, extensive plains, mountain-chains and narrow valleys, broad table-lands and wide valleys, local chimneys or volcanoes, river-beds, lake-basins, inland seas,—such are some of the phenomena which, disconnected as they seem at first glance, have nevertheless been brought under certain principles, and explained according to definite physical laws.”

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) Swiss naturalist

Geological Sketches (1870), ch 4, p. 98 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018968388;view=1up;seq=116

Law, Mountain, Sea

“It is a principle universally agreed upon, that all powers not given are retained.”

George Nicholas (1754–1799) American lawyer

Speech given at the Virginia Ratifying Convention (6-10-1788); per Elliot, Jonathan; The Debates, Resolutions, and Other Proceedings, in Convention, Vol 2; Page 196

Universe

“And I'm going on in believing in Him. You'd better know Him, and know His name, and know how to call His name. You may not know philosophy. You may not be able to say with Alfred North Whitehead that He's the Principle of Concretion. You may not be able to say with Hegel and Spinoza that He is the Absolute Whole. You may not be able to say with Plato that He's the Architectonic Good. You may not be able to say with Aristotle that He's the Unmoved Mover. But sometimes you can get poetic about it if you know Him. You begin to know that our brothers and sisters in distant days were right. Because they did know Him as a rock in a weary land, as a shelter in the time of starving, as my water when I'm thirsty, and then my bread in a starving land. And then if you can't even say that, sometimes you may have to say, "He's my everything. He's my sister and my brother. He's my mother and my father." If you believe it and know it, you never need walk in darkness. Don't be a fool. Recognize your dependence on God. As the days become dark and the nights become dreary, realize that there is a God who rules above. And so I’m not worried about tomorrow. I get weary every now and then. The future looks difficult and dim, but I’m not worried about it ultimately because I have faith in God.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool (1967)

God, Faith, Fools, Sister

“I have always paid great attention to natural forms, such as bones, shells, and pebbles, etc. Sometimes for several years running I have been to the same part of the seashore – but each year a new shape of pebble has caught my eye, which the year before, though it was there in hundreds, I never saw… Pebbles show Nature's way of working stone. Some of the pebbles I pick up have holes right through them... A piece of stone can have [for the sculptor] a hole through it and not be weakened – if the hole is of a studied size, shape and direction. On the principle of the arch, it can remain just as strong.”

Henry Moore (1898–1986) English artist

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), pp. 250-251

Way, Nature, Study, Strong

“Out of a desire that there may be a progress in these directions, with all that such progress means, this great Society continues its efforts. It recognizes that whoever has an evil tongue cannot have a pure mind. We read that 'out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh'. This is a truth which is worthy of much thought. He who gives license to his tongue only discloses the contents of his own mind. By the excess of his words he proclaims his lack of discipline. By his very violence he shows his weakness. The youth or man who by disregarding this principle thinks he is displaying his determination and resolution and emphasizing his statements is in reality only revealing an intellectual poverty, a deficiency in self-control and self-respect, a want of accurate thinking and of spiritual insight, which cannot come save from a reverence for the truth. There are no human actions which are unimportant, none to which we can be indifferent. All of them lead either towards destruction and death, or towards construction and life.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Authority and Religious Liberty (1924)

Life, Death, Truth, Youth

“In the application of the ordinary principles of geometry and trigonometry to such Astronomical measures… it may sometimes be expedient to resolve the process into several successive steps, and these steps may perhaps require different kinds of treatment. But… all are simple and within ordinary comprehension, and the only complexity arises from the circumstance that the student may find it necessary to have a clear view of several such steps at once…”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Introduction
Popular Astronomy: A Series of Lectures Delivered at Ipswich (1868)

Success

“Brethren, understand that the gospel is a gospel which brings a present salvation; and try to feel that it is not presumption, but simply out of the very fundamental principle of it, when you are not afraid to say, "I know that my Redeemer is yonder, and I know that He loves me."”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 526.

Love, Feeling, Understanding

“The churches became a major target for Communist-Socialist infiltration many years ago. These people were successful in capturing many key positions in a number of important religious organizations. Some religious leaders openly advocate and defend Communist principles. They are apologists for the Soviet Union and even advocate capitulation under threat of atomic war.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

War, People, Success

“There are, in fact, as I began to say above, not a few principles which are the special property of mathematics, such principles as are discovered by the common light of nature, require no demonstration, and which concern quantities primarily; then they are applied to other things, so far as the latter have something in common with quantities. Now there are more of these principles in mathematics than in the other theoretical sciences because of that very characteristic of the human understanding which seems to be such from the law of creation, that nothing can be known completely except quantities or by quantities. And so it happens that the conclusions of mathematics are most certain and indubitable.”

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer

Vol. VIII, p. 148
Joannis Kepleri Astronomi Opera Omnia, ed. Christian Frisch (1858)

Law, Mathematics, Understanding, Nature

“This great principle does not deny to the needy nor to the poor the assistance they should have. The wholly incapacitated, the aged, the sickly are cared for with all tenderness, but every able-bodied person is enjoined to do his utmost for himself to avoid dependence, if his own efforts can make such a course possible; to look upon adversity as temporary; to combine his faith in his own ability with honest toil; to rehabilitate himself and his family to a position of independence; in every case to minimize the need for help and to supplement any help given with his own best efforts. We believe [that] seldom [do circumstances arise in which] men of rigorous faith, genuine courage, and unfaltering determination, with the love of independence burning in their hearts, and pride in their own accomplishments, cannot surmount the obstacles that lie in their paths. We know that through humble, prayerful, industrious, God-fearing lives, a faith can be developed within us by the strength of which we can call down the blessings of a kind and merciful Heavenly Father and literally see our handicaps vanish and our independence and freedom established and maintained.”

Henry D. Moyle (1889–1963) Member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

Conference Report, Apr. 1948, p. 5, and quoted in The Celestial Nature of Self-reliance http://lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg/menuitem.b12f9d18fae655bb69095bd3e44916a0/?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=0b3ac5e8b4b6b010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1| Quotes as an apostle

Love, Men, God, Lie

“It has been said, that the principle involved in the above and in similar applications is that of the equal distribution of our knowledge, or rather of our ignorance the assigning to different states of things of which we know nothing, and upon the very ground that we know nothing, equal degrees of probability. I apprehend, however, that this is an arbitrary method of procedure. Instances may occur, and one such has been adduced, in which different hypotheses lead to the same final conclusion.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

Source: 1850s, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), p. 370

Knowledge

“The common impression regards this scale or chain merely as a "type" of organization, characteristic only of the vaster institutions of government, army, church and industry. This impression is erroneous. It is likewise misleading, for it seems to imply that the scalar chain in organization lacks universality. These great organizations differ from others only in that the chain is longer. The truth is that wherever we find an organization even of two people, related as superior and subordinate, we have the scalar principled.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: The Principles of Organization, 1947, p. 14-15

People, Truth, Universe

“Solvency is maintained by means of a national debt, on the principle, "If you will not lend me the money, how can I pay you?"”

Ralph Waldo Emerson English Traits

English Traits (1856), reprinted in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 2 (Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1870), p. 206 ( full text at GoogleBooks http://books.google.com/books?id=21IRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA206)

Money

“Time ‘keeping’ devices produce a measure of duration, according to general principles of standardized mechanical production, so that a clock-marked minute is stripped of qualitative distinctness automatically. Chronometrically, any difference between one minute and another is a mechanical discrepancy, strictly analogous to a production line malfunction.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Time in Transition" https://web.archive.org/web/20121113235339/http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/article/777/time-in-transition (2011) (original emphasis)

Time

“It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man's thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself…This general principle, that men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology…Human desires are the steam which makes the soial machine work. Only by understanding them can the propagandist control that cast, loose-jointed mechanism which is modern society.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Page 75 as quoted in Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism edited by Mark P. Leone, Jocelyn E. Knauf, p.40
Propaganda (1928)

Men, School, Motivation, Understanding

“We face the dilemma… that if everyone gets his deserts, some may be driven from the table: and if everyone comes to the table, some may not get their deserts. In practice, this seems to be resolved by the establishment of a social minimum as reflected for instance, in the poor law, in social security and various welfare sevices. The principle of desert come into play above this social minimun. That is to say, society lays a modest table at which all can sup and a high table at which the deserving can feast”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Boulding (1962) "Social Justice in Social Dynamics", in: R.B. Brandt, ed. Social Justice. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. p. 83 as cited in: Toril Aalberg (2003) Achieving Justice: Comparative Public Opinion on Income Distribution. p. 33
1960s

Law

“In the [past] one thousand years many parts of our country had been ruled by the Muslims and then by the British, but the nation had never compromised, in principle, its sovereignty over any part of the motherland. As a result, our nation had never ceased to strive for throwing out the aggressors and liberate those parts. And history tells us that ultimately it did succeed in freeing the entire land from the clutches of foreign invaders. However, for the first time, Partition conceded the moral and legal right to them over certain parts of the country and declared an ignominious finale to the one thousand years old heroic struggle for freedom. Thus it was an act of humiliating surrender on the point of principle. The usual interpretation of Partition, however, does not utter a word about this aspect. Even while conceding Partition to be a tragedy, it is sought to be made out as the only practical way out then available - as the inevitable price for achieving freedom.”

H.V. Sheshadri (1926–2005) Indian writer

Source: The Tragic Story of Partition (1982), p.12.

Way, History, Freedom, Time

“For Cioran the aphoristic style is less a principle of reality than a principle of knowing: that it’s the destiny of every profound idea to be quickly checkmated by another idea, which it itself has implicitly generated.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“‘Thinking against oneself’: reflections on Cioran,” p. 79
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Idea, Reality

“Not until right is founded upon reverence, will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love, will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles, will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal.”

Henry Giles (1809–1882) Irish minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 378.

Love, Universe

“To put it quite clearly: we have an economic programme. Point No. 13 in that programme demands the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism. … the basic principle of my Party’s economic programme should be made perfectly clear and that is the principle of authority… the good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners. If you say that the bourgeoisie is tearing its hair over the question of private property, that does not affect me in the least. Does the bourgeoisie expect some consideration from me?… Today’s bourgeoisie is rotten to the core; it has no ideals any more; all it wants to do is earn money and so it does me what damage it can. The bourgeois press does me damage too and would like to consign me and my movement to the devil.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Hitler's interview with Richard Breiting, 1931, published in Edouard Calic, ed., “First Interview with Hitler, 4 May 1931,” Secret Conversations with Hitler: The Two Newly-Discovered 1931 Interviews, New York: John Day Co., 1971, pp. 31-33. Also published under the title Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, published by Chatto & Windus in 1971
1930s

Money, Feeling, Communication, Question

Quotes about principle page 24

Quotes about principle
page 24