– Lyndon B. Johnson
A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.
– Mohandas K. Gandhi
All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.
– Mohandas K. Gandhi
It is the weak man who urges compromise — never the strong man.
– Elbert Hubbard
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.
– G. K. Chesterton
There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.
– Mary Parker Follett
Abraham Lincoln did not go to Gettysburg having commissioned a poll to find out what would sell in Gettysburg. There were no people with percentages for him, cautioning him about this group or that group or what they found in exit polls a year earlier. When will we have the courage of Lincoln?
– Robert Coles
Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.
– Janis Joplin
Most people hew the battlements of life from compromise, erecting their impregnable keeps from judicious submissions, fabricating their philosophical drawbridges from emotional retractions and scalding marauders in the boiling oil of sour grapes.
– Zelda Fitzgerald