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"The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
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"Rulers do not reduce taxes to be kind. Expediency and greed create high taxation, and normally it takes an impending catastrophe to bring it down."

"The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
Explore more quotes by W. Somerset Maugham


"Things were easier for the old novelists who saw people all of a piece. Speaking generally, their heroes were good through and through, their villains wholly bad."


"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequence than to have a really affectionate mother."


"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."


"Character? I should have thought it needed a good deal of character to throw up a career after half an hour's meditation, because you saw in another way of living a more intense significance. And it required still more character never to regret the sudden step. I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual. But again I held my tongue, for who am I to argue with a knight?"


"I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me."


"I can imagine no more comfortable frame of mind for the conduct of life than a humorous resignation."


"They will notdisappoint you, and you will look upon them morecharitably. Men seek but one thing in life-their pleasure."
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