...it's easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time.
Interpretation
Sticking to your principles consistently is easier than doing so with occasional exceptions.
This quote emphasizes the importance of having steadfast principles and the ease that comes with adhering to them fully. When you commit to your values without compromise, it simplifies decision-making and reinforces your integrity, whereas allowing for exceptions can lead to confusion and moral ambiguity.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about the importance of integrity in leadership.
You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.
Disruptive innovations create jobs, efficiency innovations destroy them.
Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.
Don't worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
Whenever we have thanked these men and women for what they have done for us, without exception they have expressed gratitude for having the chance to help - because they grew as they served.
Intimate, loving, and enduring relationships with our family and close friends will be among the sources of the deepest joy in our lives.
One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
When a plane crashes and some die while others live, a skeptic calls into question God's moral character, saying that he has chosen some to live and others to die on a whim; yet you say it is your moral right to choose whether the child within you should live or die. Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral. When you decide who should live or die, it's your moral right.
My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.
I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent the implication that some of the places I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions, whether they are religious or philosophical, or I might be a vegetarian, make me any less of an American.
Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
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