The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.
Jeremy Bentham

It is Basic Management 101 that if you reward failure you are going to get more failure, and if you want success you should reward success. But if you look at the way this administration has approached national security, they have kind of got that principle backwards.
Chris Van Hollen

I take what I see work. I'm a strict believer in the scientific principle of believing nothing, only taking the best evidence available at the present time, interpreting it as best you can, and leaving your mind open to the fact that new evidence will appear tomorrow.
Adam Osborne

Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter what public, or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus; but to write solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure.
Felix Mendelssohn

Clean living is the cardinal principle in the lives of the world's greatest athletes, as the phenomenal performances of these outstanding characters will obviously show.
Major Taylor

There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.
Trip Hawkins

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

The movement of the emitters of the spectral lines may be deduced on the basis of the Doppler principle.
Johannes Stark

Since the generality of persons act from impulse, much more than from principle, men are neither so good nor so bad as we are apt to think them.
Augustus Hare

I'm a great supporter of the European Union. I didn't support entry to the Euro, not because I'm against it in principle but because I didn't think it was economically right for Britain. But that doesn't make me any less pro-European.
Gordon Brown

This may be done by grafting, by confining the roots, withholding water, bending the branches, or in a hundred other ways which all proceed upon the same principle.
Robert Fortune

The principle of evil in Europe is the enervating spirit of Russian absolutism.
Lajos Kossuth

But naturalists are now beginning to look beyond this, and to see that there must be some other principle regulating the infinitely varied forms of animal life.
Alfred Russel Wallace

One never knows whether people have principles on principle or whether for their own personal satisfaction.
Karel Capek

IT is difficult to speak or write with becoming moderation or propriety, on topics to which we are biased by prejudice, interest, or even principle.
Joseph Lancaster

There should be a moral principle there that says, let's green the ghetto first. Let's go to those communities where they have the least ability to pay for that retrofit and make sure they get that help, make sure they get that support. And give the young people standing on those corners the opportunity to put down those handguns and pick up some caulking guns and be a part of the solution.
Van Jones

Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project.
Joseph Beuys

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
Rudy Rucker

Unfortunately, the true force which propels our endless political disputes, our constant struggles for political advantage, is often not our burning concern for democracy, it is often of our dedication to the principle of the rule of law.
Olusegun Obasanjo

Here we are to remember that in consequence of our opinion that labor is the Father and active principle of wealth, as lands are the Mother, that the state by killing, mutilating, or imprisoning their members do withal punish themselves.
William Petty