When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are usually right.
—Eugene V. Debs
If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles, one would hardly see anybody.
—Agatha Christie
We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!
—William Lloyd Garrison
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.
—Abraham Lincoln
The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
—W. Somerset Maugham
I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.
—Gustave Courbet
Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.
—Groucho Marx
Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
—Anatole France
In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principles contain it or stand against it.
—Jane Smiley
Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others.
—Groucho Marx
I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.
—Oscar Wilde
The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.
—Jerzy Kosiński