George Packer Quotes

You can compromise without violating your principles, but it is nearly impossible to compromise when you turn principles into ideology.

You can’t set aside … values in the name of political expediency.

Sometimes we forge our own principles and sometimes we accept others' principles, or holistic packages of principles, such as religion and legal systems. While it isn't necessarily a bad thing to use others' principles - it's difficult to come up with your own, and often much wisdom has gone into those already created - adopting pre-packaged principles without much thought exposes you to the risk of inconsistency with your true values.

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

Call your opinions your creed, and you will change them every week.

I've always said there is a boulevard that exists between compromising your principles and getting everything you want. Now, we should never compromise our principles. And I never have. Those are the things that people vote for you on, that's the core of who you are. But there's always a boulevard between that and getting everything you want.

Political life must be taken as you find it.

The ideologue says “whatever is right works.” The pragmatist says “whatever works is right.”

An ideologue believes that what is right will work. A pragmatist believes that what works is right.

Compromise for compromise sake is never good, unless it is grounded in principles.

The principles you live by create the world you live in; if you change the principles you live by, you will change your world.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

But principles defended at the expense of pragmatic application is the business of priests.

Never stand so high upon a principle that you cannot lower it to suit the circumstances.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

Renunciation is the very basis upon which ethics stands. There never was an ethical code preached which had not renunciation for its basis.

Be flexible, but stick to your principles.

I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.

You can't slice up morals.

When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind.

There are ultimately only two possible adjustments to life; one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live. The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just a perversion of the order of things.

Ideology... is a kind of contemporary mythology, a realm which has purged itself of ambiguity and alternative possibility.

I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.

There's more than one way to get to the goal that you want to get to, but once you compromise your own principles, then you're lost. You're really lost.