Compromise Quotes

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

“The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.”
― C.S. Lewis

“When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“I cannot compromise my respect for your love. You can keep your love, I will keep my respect.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Love without sacrifice is like theft”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Still it might be nice, once in a while, not to have to choose between evils. Just once, couldn't I choose the lesser good?”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Danse Macabre

“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
― Barry Goldwater

“Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.”
― Steven Erikson, Gardens of the Moon

“I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.”
― Ayn Rand

“Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

[Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]”
― John Fitzgerald Kennedy

“Come a day there won’t be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don’t push me, and I won’t push you. Dong le ma?”
― Joss Whedon

“Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Compromise is a stalling between two fools.”
― Stephen Fry

“Marriage is about compromise; it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Wedding

“The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

“Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil one could almost believe one's own secret sin didn't matter.”
― Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

“In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Compromise, communicate, and never go to bed angry - the three pieces of advice gifted and regifted to all newlyweds.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Compromise means to go just a little bit below what you know is right. It's just a little bit, but it's the little foxes that spoil the vine.”
― Joyce Meyer

“When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.”
― John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace

“Too often, we say we are defeated by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated. We are simply disobedient. It might be good if we stop using the terms victory and defeat to describe our progress in holiness. Rather, we should use the terms obedience and disobedience. When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility. I am saying something outside of me has defeated me. But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me. We may in fact be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey.

We need to brace ourselves up and to realize that we are responsible for thoughts, attitudes, and actions. We need to reckon on the fact that we died to sin's reign, that it no longer has any dominion over us, that God has united us with the risen Christ in all His power and has given us the Holy Spirit to work in us. Only as we accept our responsibility and appropriate God's provisions will we make any progress in our pursuit of holiness.”
― Jerry Bridges, The Pursuit of Holiness

“Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“In what we call "real life"--if you want to be successful, if you want to get on in the longterm--you always have to come to some kind of compromise with your own emotions: I can't overreact NOW! I have to accept THIS! I have to ignore THAT!--You're forever having to tailor your emotions to the circumstances, you go easy on the people you love, you slip into your hundred little daily roles, you juggle, you balance, you weigh things up so as not to jeopardize the entire structure, because you yourself have a stake in it.”
― Daniel Glattauer, Love Virtually

“That was my fault," Helen said hastily. "I went uninvited to the store yesterday and demanded to see Mr. Winterborne. I told him that I still wanted to marry him, and I made him exchange my ring for a new one, and then I-I had my way with him." She paused, realizing how that sounded. "Not in the store, of course."

Straight-faced, Kathleen said, "Dear me. I hope he didn't put up a struggle.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Marrying Winterborne

“We all get lots of people. And maybe we don’t always get to have them the exact way we want them, but if we can figure out a way to compromise, you know, then we can keep them all.”
― John Corey Whaley, Noggin

“The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.”
― Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

“Compromise is what binds people together. Compromise is sharing and conciliatory, it is loving and kind and unselfish.”
― Ali Harris, The First Last Kiss

“We walked through the streets with our protectors. We wore our dresses. We gave up our education because that was the price of safety. That was the bargain we made with the devil we knew to escape the devil we didn't.”
― C.J. Redwine, Deliverance