When a party sheds it principles for victory, it will inevitably end up with neither.
Too many women throw themselves into romance because they're afraid of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. I won't do that.
President Obama was right to ban torture, but the public must understand that this decision carries a potential cost in lost information. That's what makes it a moral choice.
It was expected of me that I was to bow to the name of Andrew Jackson, and follow him in all his motions, and windings, and turnings, even at the expense of my consciences and judgment. Such a thing was new to me, and a total stranger to my principles.
As Crockett was a Democrat, party loyalty required him to support the Democrat president.
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'm not the kind of person that would step on people just to get where I wanted to be, but I have crossed moral boundaries when I've either been afraid or desperate.
To say that an artist sells out means that an artist is making a conscious choice to compromise his music, to to weaken his music for the sake of commercial gain.
Compromises may not make great heroes, but they do make great democracies.
If the price of continuing my political career is to be complicit in a really bad thing then that's not a price I'm prepared to pay.
While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
I didn't want to get married to somebody just because I was ageing and wanted a child.
I don't know how you can govern without ever compromising.
The idea that public safety, the safety of the innocent, is an absolute which trumps every other consideration, is tacitly abandoned in the way we live.
Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.
The sad thing is that apparently if you want to become the next Premier or the leader, suddenly you've got to shut down your human side.
In the very early days of Wham! the attention felt great, but I do wonder how much freedom I gave away by trying to become something I wasn't.
I'll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who's in the entertainment industry does to some extent.
I won't be a pundit because you have to be saying certain things that you might not even want to, but you have to.
You can cooperate and not compromise your core values. But I'm a realist with the philosophy that sometimes you've got to take bites out of the apple instead of the whole apple.
I do think the moral line you walk all the time about putting something in for the sake of the film and not being affected by people's lives is a very tough one.
Conciliation is not capitulation, nor is compromise to be deemed equivalent to imbalanced concession.
I feel that if you made your writing too contrived to meet the market, it wouldn't be any good.