Quotes About Compromise

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests. The heart. Carbon-based primitive in a silicon world.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Powerbook

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

“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

“Do not compromise yourself and put your goodness in the same impermanent category as whatever circumstance happening. Be the best you in every circumstance.”
― Steve Maraboli

“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

“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

“Compromise is a word found only in the vocabulary of those who have no will to fight.”
― St. Josemaría Escrivá

“I remember the second time I took Agatha out. I wanted to go to Dairy Queen, and she wanted to go to Burger King. In the end we settled for wieners and clams at Johnny Hermaphrodite’s.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Story That Talks about Talking Is Like Chatter to Chattering Teeth, and Every Set of Dentures Can Attest to the Fact That No.

“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

“The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.”
― Terry Tempest Williams, Leap

“I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Perfect

“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

“You cannot build a dream on a foundation of sand. To weather the test of storms, it must be cemented in the heart with uncompromising conviction.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"

“Nothing will bind the eyes of man quicker than the touch of compromise. A principle not compromised is a principle worth dying for. A dream not compromised is a dream worth living for.”
― Ogwo David Emenike

“It is hard to talk about a middle ground for something that is a fundamental right.”
― Teri Reynolds, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad

“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

“Sometimes customizing is necessary because of an injury or the inability to do, for a short or long period, the kind of exercise you formerly did. When you're used to customizing for fun, doing it under duress won't seem like such an imposition. Either way, experiment until you find activities that make you happy as well as healthy. Choose your exercise using the same criteria you'd apply to choosing a date--that is, attractive to you and able to hold your interest for an hour.”
― Victoria Moran, Younger by the Day: 365 Ways to Rejuvenate Your Body and Revitalize Your Spirit

“Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy”
― Phyllis McGinley

“There is no more confused message that you and I could give to a lost and dying world than to live in sin and at the same time to tell people about the transforming power of Jesus Christ. There isn't a more confusing thing we can do to our kids and the generation behind us, to this world.

God will not use a compromised life to reach a compromised world. God will use a life that is given over to Him, that is a demonstration of the message that through the power of Jesus Christ and His love He can transform our lives and set us free.”
― Joe Focht

“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

“Unless there is within us that which is above us, we shall soon yield to that which is about us.”
― P.T. Forsyth

“I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“[W]hat possible purpose does this lashing-out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his left? It was pure self-indulgence; even if he feels aggrieved, he has to judge his words by their usefulness, not by his desire to vent. This isn't about him.”
― Paul Krugman