August Strindberg Quotes

I don't see much use in general slogans. Sometimes it is worth resisting evil with lesser evil, very commonly in fact.

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.

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.

A little hypocrisy is better than losing.

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

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.

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

Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any methods.

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

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.

You may either win your peace or buy it: win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.

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

You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

I imagine there are things I wouldn't do, but I haven't been offered those recently either.

He had no gifts for the compromises with human frailty which alone can grease the wheels of politics.

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

I never place myself mentally in the position of compromising principle and conscience. But there are times when I might harmonize differences in order to make progress, or maintain unity.

I could sit down and talk with the devil if necessary.

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

Compromise today is too often applauded simply for itself. The cost of compromise to principles and real lives doesn't seem to matter.

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

I don't know how you make a living without a few personal compromises.

To compromise simply means that you go a tiny bit below what you know is right.

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.