Compromised Values Quotes

Heroism in a bad cause.

If one could recover the uncompromising spirit of one's youth, one's greatest indignation would be for what one has become.

In the mind of Bill Clinton, political considerations outweigh even life-and-death matters of great concern to his own law-enforcement officials, not to mention the nation.

I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position.

One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame.

Not men but measures"—a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honorable engagement.

I know many businesspeople in Russia who have knowingly signed up to effectively compromise their values for their own profit motive to become part of this criminal apparatus in Russia.

I'm fascinated by politicians, because I suspect the huge majority of them go into it full of ideas and for the best possible reasons but end up being hijacked.

As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them.

Once you start thinking about it in a mercenary frame of mind, then you're finished. You're a joke, because there are too many mercenaries out there already.

Every nation necessarily inhabits a morally compromised space. All too often our ideals seem to be held to ransom by what we believe, rightly or wrongly, to be objective reality.

But the more an organization succeeds and prospers, the more it is likely to be diverted from its original ideals, principles and purposes.

I don't trust politicians. I think that by the time they've made it, with the concessions they've had to make in that position, I don't believe they still have the beliefs they had at the root.

I felt like I'd spent many years making excuses for my executives and making excuses for political candidates I was representing and their views, when some of those political views, in my mind, were very distasteful.

The thematic bucket of vomit that I've been chained to since I was about 9 is the moral complexity of anti-heroism. I have always been interested in good people who do bad things for understandable reasons.

It seems to me we are losing our way in an effort to get the ratings.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous...but not quite.

The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.

Means and ends are central. If your means are corroded, your ends will be corroded. And if you're fighting to preserve liberty and you use means that eviscerate our liberties, the end will be corroded, too.