Warren Buffett Quotes

Sometimes you have to forget your principles and do what’s right.

The hardest thing in life is to know when to hold fast to one’s principles and when it is acceptable to bend them.

Life's not black-and-white. Sometimes the ends justifies the means.

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.

I would rather be an opportunist and float than go to the bottom with my principles around my neck.

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

Power shifts your thinking from what is right and wrong to what is necessary

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

More often there's a compromise between ethics and expediency.

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

It is safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue.

A little hypocrisy is better than losing.

Principles and rules are binding, but when they come into conflict they must be balanced.

[In a political contest] If you are faced with the lesser of two evils, you have the evil of two lesser.

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

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?

One clings to principles for only as long as they are not put to the test. When that happens one throws them away as the peasant does his slippers.

.In politics a man must learn to rise above principle.

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

I don't like compromise. In politics, you have to always choose a compromise, and sometimes, that, I don't like.

Let no one charge me with ever having abused or encouraged weakness or surrendered on matters of principle. But I have said, as I say again, that every trifle must not be dignified into a principle.

To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.

Instead of doing the best thing, we sometimes have to settle for the rightest thing.