top of page
"Who'll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Compromise quotes

"If you ask me to compromise on principle, I will get out the veto pen."

"I was editing Canadian Literature. I didn't want to let Canadian Literature go, so they reached a nice compromise by which I received half a professor's salary."

"But just as they did in Philadelphia when they were writing the constitution, sooner or later, you've got to compromise. You've got to start making the compromises that arrive at a consensus and move the country forward."

"Compromise and tolerance are magic words. It took me 40 years to become philosophical."

"To be or not to be is not a question of compromise. Either you be or you don't be."

"True, Heaven prohibits certain pleasures; but one can generally negotiate a compromise."

"But to put out a greatest hits on one CD was totally impossible, I just couldn't do it. The best compromise was to put out two CDs - Early Days - which is what it is - and Latter Days."

"You must take the compromise to win, or else nothing. That means: you race or you do not."

"Oftentimes, when constituencies or sectors of opinion are distinct, when they are confronted with a situation where they're going to have to make a serious compromise, they react very negatively publicly, but they also recognize when they step back that this is right."
Explore more quotes by John Updike

"The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it."

"Most of American life consists of driving somewhere and then returning home, wondering why the hell you went."

"The essential self is innocent, and when it tastes its own innocence knows that it lives for ever."

"Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five."

"The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible like a saint's self-flagellation viewed by an atheist."

"Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."

"An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause."

"Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop, the gut expanded to take in more and more."
bottom of page