Our national determination to keep free of foreign wars and foreign entanglements cannot prevent us from feeling deep concern when ideals and principles that we have cherished are challenged.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.
Frank Lloyd Wright

"Think simple" as my old master used to say - meaning reduce the whole of its parts into the simplest terms, getting back to first principles.
Frank Lloyd Wright

A return to first principles in a republic is sometimes caused by the simple virtues of one man. His good example has such an influence that the good men strive to imitate him, and the wicked are ashamed to lead a life so contrary to his example.
Niccolo Machiavelli

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
Blaise Pascal

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
Noam Chomsky

If you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign.
George W. Bush

Some believe all that parents, tutors, and kindred believe. They take their principles by inheritance, and defend them as they would their estates, because they are born heirs to them.
Alan Watts

A family is a place where principles are hammered and honed on the anvil of everyday living.
Charles R. Swindoll

Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles.
Woodrow Wilson

To abandon oneself to principles is really to die - and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
Albert Camus

The 'morality of compromise' sounds contradictory. Compromise is usually a sign of weakness, or an admission of defeat. Strong men don't compromise, it is said, and principles should never be compromised.
Andrew Carnegie

I shall argue that strong men, conversely, know when to compromise and that all principles can be compromised to serve a greater principle.
Andrew Carnegie

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.
Margaret Thatcher

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
Everett Dirksen

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.
Lyndon B. Johnson

I cannot consent that my mortal body shall be laid in a repository prepared for an Emperor or a King my republican feelings and principles forbid it the simplicity of our system of government forbids it.
Andrew Jackson

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.
Marquis de Sade