Prudential Quotes

Religion in most countries, more or less in every country, is no longer what it was, and should be,-a thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of Man to his invisible Father, the fountain of all Goodness, Beauty, Truth, and revealed in every revelation of these; but for the most part, a wise prudential feeling grounded on mere calculation; a matter, as all others now are, of Expediency and Utility; whereby some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a far larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. Thus Religion too is Profit, a working for wages; not Reverence, but vulgar Hope or Fear. (Thomas Carlyle)

Arrogance is inimical to prudential reasoning, to accepting that for all we know and learn we also accumulate ignorance of the questions we do not ask, the risks we do not and cannot comprehend. In short, arrogance is what causes us to ignore our fallibilities.

Ziauddin Sardar

I don't want to tell you how much insurance I carry with the Prudential, but all I can say is: when I go, they go too.

Jack Benny

There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Doing something because God has said to do it does not make a person moral: it merely tells us that person is a prudential believer, akin to the person who obeys the command of an all-powerful secular king.

Alan Dershowitz

Proverbs are for the most part rules of moral, or, still more properly, of prudential conduct.

Dorothea Brande

A man acting for himself may indulge his own caprices, and consider what is convenient or agreeable to himself, as well as what is strictly prudent, and his prudential motives cannot afterwards be separated from the others which may have governed him.

Henry Bickersteth, 1st Baron Langdale

I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity. Extravagant ambitions will have to be replaced by reasonable claims, and nations must make common cause against them.

William James