Unprincipled Quotes & Sayings

He said that he was sorry but Robert Bey had called and told him i was no longer in the party. I was burnt. I got the Bronx Ministry to put him on the phone and proceeded to call him the unprincipled, arrogant idiot he was ... i hate arrogance whether it's white or purple or Black. Some people let power get to their heads ... the only great people i have met have been modest and humble. You can't claim that you love people when you don't respect them, and you can't call for political unity unless you practice it in your relationships. — Assata Shakur

The principled man is merely one whose ancestors were ruthlessly unprincipled, affording him the option of acting upon fine sentiments. — Lynn Cullen

John Boehner was and is an unprincipled ward-heeler who simply couldn't weather the transition of the Republican Party from a corporatist party with a sizable conservative base to a purely conservative party. — Alex Pareene

New Zealand's nuclear free movement is a broad-based and popular movement. Our nuclear free status is a challenge to much that is accepted as orthodox in international relations. It was formally adopted in the cold war era as a form of resistance to the dismal doctrines of nuclear deterrence. It is still a rebuke to the unprincipled exercise of economic power and military might. — David Lange

The truth was, the more he got portrayed as an unprincipled, ruthless prick, the more clients flocked to him. Because when it came to divorce, people wanted a ruthless prick. They lined up for one. — Michael Crichton

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intellegent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reason to despair of him. He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as his only AVAILABLE one, thus proving that he is himself AVAILABLE for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought. — Henry David Thoreau

Why are our people going out there," said Mr. Boggis of the Thieves' Guild.
"Because they are showing a brisk pioneering spirit and seeking wealth and ... additional wealth in a new land," said Lord Vetinari.
"What's in it for the Klatchians?" said Lord Downey.
"Oh, they've gone out there because they are a bunch of unprincipled opportunists always ready to grab something for northern," said Lord Vetinari.
"A mastery summation, if I may say so, my lord," said Mr. Burleigh.
The Patrician looked down again at his notes. "Oh, I do beg your pardon, I seem to have read those last to sentences in the wrong order ... — Terry Pratchett

The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo. Reading court documents detailing the sordid unraveling of Charles's sham fortune, which would have devastating effects on his daughter and her unsuspecting husband, I couldn't help thinking that one of the interesting things about Dumas's villains is that, while greedy and unprincipled themselves, they produce children who can be innocent and decent. This was something that the writer understood very well from his own family. — Tom Reiss

They have stolen the public lands. They have grasped all to themselves, and by their unprincipled greed brought a crisis of unparalleled distress on forty millions of people, who have natural resources to feed, clothe and shelter the whole human race. — Denis Kearney

Please do not think that I am accusing socialists of insincerity or that I wish to hold them up to scorn either as bad democrats or as unprincipled schemers and opportunists. I fully believe, in spite of the childish Machiavellism in which some of their prophets indulge, that fundamentally most of them always have been as sincere in their professions as any other men. Besides, I do not believe in insincerity in social strife, for people always come to think what they want to think and what they incessantly profess. As regards democracy, socialist parties are presumably no more opportunists than are any others; they simply espouse democracy if, as, and when it serves their ideals and interests and not otherwise. Lest readers should be shocked and think so immoral a view worthy only of the most callous of political practitioners, ... — Joseph Alois Schumpeter

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. — Neil Gaiman

In 302, the Roman emperor Diocletian commanded "there should be cheapness," declaring, "Unprincipled greed appears wherever our armies ... march ... Our law shall fix a measure and a limit to this greed." The predictable result of Diocletian's food price controls were black markets, hunger and food confiscation by his soldiers. Despite the disastrous history of price controls, politicians never manage to resist tampering with prices
that's not a flattering observation of their learning abilities. — Walter E. Williams

A cold-blooded, calculation, unprincipled, usurper, without a virtue, no statesman, knowing nothing of commerce, political economy, or civil government, and supplying ignorance by bold presumption. — Thomas Jefferson

A good list of questions to ask your advisor will include the following: Where will my money be held? Right answer: Somewhere else! Are you a broker? Right answer: No! Are you a dually registered advisor? Right answer: No! Do you or any affiliate have proprietary investments of any kind? Right answer: No! How are you compensated? Right answer: Total disclosure in writing and never make commissions on any investment product. What are the credentials of you and/or your team? Right answer: If planning is involved, a CFP is ideal to have on the team. What is your planning and investment management approach? Right answer: The firm should follow a coherent philosophy rather than a bunch of different strategies (unprincipled) and should follow an approach that does not involve market timing or active trading. — Peter Mallouk

For almost one hundred years, leaders of the white South managed to freeze race relations and racial ideology in something close to the Confederate pattern, thus demonstrating that the passage of time by itself does not erase a conflicted past. Elite southern men and women created an ideology of the Lost Cause that wrapped antebellum society, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and postwar racism in the mantle of a protective, laudatory myth. The Lost Cause portrayed the white South as cultured, chivalrous, and superior while making the North into the aggressor - crude, unprincipled, and vindictive.

[...] Even after 1900 the Lost Cause ideology continued to gain strength under the leadership of a new generation, until most southern whites came to believe that their history and the myth were identical [75 - 76]. — Paul D. Escott

The Constitution has been eviscerated while Democrats have stood by with nary a whimper. It is a gutless, unprincipled party, bought and paid for by the same interests that buy and pay for the Republican Party. — Rocky Anderson

Look, we want freedom and we want liberty in this country. But we've also got to have the guts to stand up and run a tight ship in America. Morality is now a word that many people consider very square and outdated. But if we don't stand up for it, we deserve what we will get in the end - unprincipled anarchy. — Cliff Robertson

the majority of those in government were unprincipled, greedy, bigots and he wanted no part of that. If you weren't on the side of corruption taking place and the back room deals, you were not in the circle of power. Maybe one day after the US cleaned its house, — Toni Mariani

Robert Zubrin's masterful study ... makes for riveting reading. a cautionary tale of what happens when powerful, unprincipled elites are not only alienated from the mass of their fellow men, but come to see them as a barrier to imagined social, evolutionary, or environmental progress. — Steven W. Mosher

From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity. — John Galt

The inside operation of Congress - the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building - is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it. — Bella Abzug

Lepida, has anyone ever told you that you're a cruel spiteful selfish slut? ... You're vicious. You're unprincipled. You mistreat your slaves and abuse your daughter. And furthermore you're the worst, most neglectful, most criminal wife in Rome. I think we can go now. — Kate Quinn

The meaning is, I believe, that in the human soul there is a better and also a worse principle; and when the better has the worse under control, then a man is said to be master of himself; and this is a term of praise: but when, owing to evil education or association, the better principle, which is also the smaller, is overwhelmed by the greater mass of the worse - in this case he is blamed and is called the slave of self and unprincipled. Yes, — Plato

Majorities, as such, afford no guarantees for justice. They are men of the same nature as minorities. They have the same passions for fame, power, and money, as minorities; and are liable and likely to be equally - perhaps more than equally, because more boldly - rapacious, tyrannical and unprincipled, if intrusted with power. — Lysander Spooner

Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. — Al Capp

We must be vigilant that we don't sink into the morass of sectarianism, mixing, pettiness etc. We must not get involved in unprincipled slagging matches etc or into positions that are sectarian, anti-revolutionary, morally damaging that give succour to the enemy & that confuse & divide the working class — Thomas S. Power

[I]f the citizens neglect their Duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good so much as for selfish or local purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the Laws; the public revenues will be squandered on unworthy men; and the rights of the citizen will be violated or disregarded. — Noah Webster

Scott calls Bois-Guilbert "an unprincipled voluptuary," which is hard to improve on. — Richard Armour

Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone - extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic - whether Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition, whether preaching, praying, speechifying or scribbling - never a gentleman. — Benjamin Disraeli

If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it. — Henry David Thoreau

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer. — Edmund Burke

I like my code to be elegant and efficient. The logic should be straightforward to make it hard
for bugs to hide, the dependencies minimal to ease maintenance, error handling complete according to an articulated strategy, and performance
close to optimal so as not to tempt
people to make the code messy with unprincipled optimizations. Clean code does one thing well.

-Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++
and author of The C++ Programming
Language — Robert C. Martin

We both are a pejorative - liberals. Spartak, I believe an active and powerful government is the only counterbalance against rapacious business interests, unprincipled individuals and groups often all too willing to deceive, poison, and ruin in the name of their own liberty. Without us, the powerful face no limits, no scrutiny, pay no price and never face justice. My life's work is to return integrity and influence to the public sphere. I wear barronial scorn with pride." He shook his head. "Of course most people think I'm a fool."

U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Washington
Speaking to his niece and then Spartak Jones in a restaurant named after author Ayn Rand, San Francisco, in the year 2115
The Chronicles of Spartak - Rising Son, a novel — Steven A. Coulter

I sometimes think God allows Great Britain to be unprincipled for the good of mankind. — Julia Ward Howe

I wonder whether certain dreadful events, of the sort this picture is full of, are not so incalculably rich in the possibilities of moral and aesthetic blackmail that they can never be represented maturely or even un-deceitfully, and so had better not be represented at all...Indeed, few films ever made have so vigorously seized the spectator by the throat and so implacably insisted, with one unprincipled bang over the head after another, that he turn himself into the wildest animal possible, and mistrust and hate with all his might any lingering question which troubles him about his obligations to do so. — James Agee

We must dispel the negative and harmful atmosphere that has been created by avaricious and unprincipled realtors who engage in "blockbusting." If we had in America really serious efforts to break down discrimination in housing, and at the same time a concerted program of government aid to improve housing for Negroes, I think that many white people would be surprised at how many Negroes would choose to live among themselves, exactly as Poles and Jews and other ethnic groups do. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I am unable to accept the idea that I should be an obedient subject of a gang of corrupt, unprincipled thugs who pontificate about freedom while enslaving the population. — John Pugsley

Word of the day- kakistocracy. From the Greek meaning government by the worst persons, least qualified or most unprincipled. — Peggy Noonan

Gods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible. — Janet E. Morris

And if these be unprincipled agents who scruple at nothing, he will be a bold man who will deny that there are always to be found men at the bar who lend their services most cordially to back and support these agents in their most desperate cases. — George Combe

Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy - not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits - despotic in his ordinary demeanour - known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty - when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity - to join in the cry of danger to liberty - to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion - to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day - It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may "ride the storm and direct the whirlwind. — Alexander Hamilton

I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

That humanity and sincerity which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them. The friends of liberty trust to the professions of others because they are themselves sincere, and endeavour to secure the public good with the least possible hurt to its enemies, who have no regard to anything but their own unprincipled ends, and stick at nothing to accomplish them. — William Hazlitt

While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue. — Leslie Charteris

Rewards corrupt the unprincipled. — Iimani David

And am I answerable that thoughtless and unprincipled men exist whose shades of contenance may resemble mine? — James Fenimore Cooper

Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method. — Theodore Roosevelt

He who has once made himself notorious as utterly unprincipled, is not credited even when he speaks the truth. — Periander

However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. — George Washington

If you permit unprincipled and ambitious men to monopolize the soil, they will become masters of the country in the certain order of cause and effect ... — Howard Zinn

Consider what an amoral, unprincipled cynicI am-think of all the improvements you could make to my character. — Judith McNaught

these old people - there's no trusting them, Fred. There's an aunt of mind down in Dorsetshire that was going to die when I was eight years old, and hasn't kept her word yet. They're so aggravating, so unprincipled, so spiteful - unless there's apoplexy in the family, Fred, you can't calculate upon 'em, and even then they deceive you just as often as not. — Charles Dickens

A community narrows down and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up to its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled paper. — Sarah Orne Jewett

It is very extraordinary, if the head of the money department of a country, being unprincipled enough to sacrifice his trust and his integrity, could not have contrived objects of profit sufficiently large to have engaged the co-operation of men of far greater importance than Reynolds, and with whom there could have been due safety, and should have been driven to the necessity of unkennelling such a reptile to be the instrument of his cupidity. — Alexander Hamilton

You know in politics you are dealing in the realm of choices. You don't always have clear-cut decision between a thoroughly principled position and a thoroughly unprincipled one. You're making snap decisions with paucity of information, generally trying to do the best that you can, but you will make errors, and sometimes it's a decision between a bad and a worse alternative. It has to be done, because we need to order our society, and of politics it can literally be said: Bad job, but someone's got to do it. — Peter Costello

Don't die on me," she whispered when the clock struck midnight and he still had not moved. "It's only a little shoulder wound. Goddess, George-don't die on me."
His eyes flickered open and he smiled. "I didn't know you cared," he whispered. "And why insult me? I won't die for a wee nick like this; I've had worse in my day."
Alanna wiped her wet cheeks. "Of course I care, you unprincipled pickpocket!" she whispered. "Of course I care. — Tamora Pierce

You have that boy on such a high pedestal. It's far too slippery up there for one so unprincipled as a solitary fae. It's not as if I haven't tried to drag him down. I looked inside his soul. Hoped to find his weaknesses. Only to discover that even those could be considered strengths under the right circumstances. — A.G. Howard

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself. Intelligence is unprincipled, but stupidity is honest and straightforward. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

So do fundamentalists believe in majority rights or minority rights? The answer is, apparently, neither. They'll pull whichever argument suits them out of its file when necessary, but basically they are unprincipled on the issue of school prayer. They have a big double standard that basically says, "Whatever I want is right. — Bob Altemeyer

You know what Mr. Bates called me?" Seward shook his head with wonder. "An unprincipled liar. And here I am one of the most heavily principled men in politics." Lincoln chuckled. In every way, making allowances for regional differences, Seward's humor was not unlike his own. "And since you're a smart man, Governor, you never actually lie. Smart men never have to. — Gore Vidal

What distinguishes this system of categories from the old unprincipled random collection of concepts, and what alone entitles it to be considered as philosophy, is this essential fact about it: By means of it the true significance of the pure concepts of the understanding, and the condition of their use, could be precisely determined — Anonymous