Maxim Quotes

The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. (John Adams)
Might the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy be laid to heart! Might a sense of the true aims of life elevate the tone of politics and trade, till public and private honor become identical! View quote
Margaret Fuller
Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate. View quote
Bertrand Russell
There is a maxim about the universe which I always tell my students: That which is not explicitly forbidden is guaranteed to occur. View quote
Lawrence M. Krauss
Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself. View quote
John Searle
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim. View quote
Thomas Babington Macaulay
There is ... but one categorical imperative Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law. View quote
Immanuel Kant
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people. View quote
John Adams
The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. View quote
George Washington
Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim gun, and they have not. (Hilaire Belloc)
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation. View quote
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
That it is better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer, is a maxim that has been long and generally approved. View quote
Benjamin Franklin
It is a maxim, that those to whom everybody allows the second place have an undoubted title to the first. View quote
Jonathan Swift
'T is an old maxim in the schools, That flattery 's the food of fools Yet now and then your men of wit Will condescend to take a bit. View quote
Jonathan Swift
In all our associations; in all our agreements let us never lose sight of this fundamental maxim - that all power was originally lodged in, and consequently is derived from, the people. View quote
George Mason
Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you. View quote
Wayne W. Dyer
But it is a well-known maxim of war that whoever tries to hold on to everything at once, finishes up by holding nothing at all. View quote
Erich von Manstein
Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general. View quote
Barbara Tuchman
It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. View quote
Mark Twain
The maxim Nothing but perfection may be spelled Paralysis. (Winston Churchill)
It is a maxim universally agreed upon in agriculture, that nothing must be done too late; and again, that everything must be done at its proper season; while there is a third precept which reminds us that opportunities lost can never be regained. View quote
Pliny the Elder
I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false is guilty of falsehood, and the accidental truth of the assertion does not justify or excuse him. View quote
Abraham Lincoln
War loses a great deal of its romance after a soldier has seen his first battle. I have a more vivid recollection of the first than the last one I was in. It is a classical maxim that it is sweet and becoming to die for one's country; but whoever has seen the horrors of a battlefield feels that it is far sweeter to live for it. View quote
John S. Mosby
To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius; a vital appropriating exercise of mind closely allied to that which first created it. View quote
William R. Alger