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| S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880. |
| Principle |
| Men pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon, and care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences. | 1 |
| Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of the necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degenerate spirits; and on the theatre of the world it is not by assuming the mask of a Davus or a Geta that an actor will obtain credit for manly simplicity and a liberal openness of proceeding. It is an erect countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honour and assure to us the confidence of mankind. Edmund Burke: Letters on a Regicide Peace, Letter III., 1797. | 2 |
| Burke possessed, and had sedulously sharpened, that eye which sees all things, actions, and events in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman, and therefore a seer. For every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. | 3 |
| Dangerous principles impose upon our understandings, emasculate our spirits, and spoil our temper. Jeremy Collier. | 4 |
| The principles which all mankind allow for true are innate; those that men of right reason admit are the principles allowed by all mankind. | 5 |
| A good principle, not rightly understood, may prove as hurtful as a bad. | 6 |
| He acts upon the surest and most prudential grounds who, whether the principles which he acts upon prove true or false, yet secures a happy issue in his actions. Robert South. | 7 |
| He who fixes upon false principles treads upon infirm ground, and so sinks; and he who fails in his deductions from right principles stumbles upon firm ground, and so falls. Robert South. | 8 |
| There is no security in a good disposition, if the support of good principles (that is to say, of religion, of Christian faith) be wanting. It may be soured by misfortunes, it may be corrupted by wealth, it may be blighted by neediness, it may lose all its original brightness, if destitute of that support. Robert Southey. | 9 |
| If they be principles evident of themselves, they need nothing to evidence them. John Tillotson. | 10 |
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