Expediency Quotes

Frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.

The diplomat holds all acts honorable which bring him success, all things are righteous which serve his ends. If cheating is necessary, he will cheat; if lying is useful, he will lie; if bribery helps, he will bribe; if murder serves, he will order murder; if burglary, seduction, arson or forgery brings success nearer, all and each of these will be done.

Whoever attacks the popular falsehoods of his time will find that a lie defends itself by telling other lies. Nothing is so prolific, nothing can so multiply itself, nothing can lay and hatch as many eggs, as a good, healthy, lie.

When a treaty must depend for its execution ... on a law or laws to be passed by Congress ... it is the Constitutional duty of the House of Representatives to deliberate on the expediency of carrying such treaty into effect.

Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party.

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

The White House is another world. Expediency is everything.

Protection is not a principle but an expedient

America is governed by rules of law, and those are not ones that the President of the United States or anybody else can just set aside for the sake of expediency Even when we are deeply supportive of Turkish democracy, and even when we care deeply about any attempts to overthrow their government or any other illegal actions, we've got to go through a legal process.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

You can't learn too soon that the most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.

Party honesty is party expediency.

Before some things can be politically expedient, they must first become popular.

Principle is ever my motto, not expediency.

What a President may do as a matter of expediency or extremity may never reach a definitive constitutional decision.

When you're failing, there's a very powerful incentive to put ideology aside and just do what seems to work.

[The Emperor] Vespasian's friends overcame his scruples by telling him that against Jews there could be no question of impiety, and that he ought to prefer expediency to decency when the two were incompatible.

If the ends don't justify the means, what does?

What passes in the world for talent or dexterity or enterprise is often only a want of moral principle. We may succeed where others fail, not from a greater share of invention, but from not being nice in the choice of expedients.

Judgment without character is expediency... or worse.

Neither tolerance nor intolerance is grounded in science and reason, but they are themselves acts of faith grounded in social custom and the politics of expediency and power.

Policy sits above conscience.

I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.