compromise quotes

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

- Edmund Burke
  On Conciliation with  America.

The laws of cricket tell of the English love of compromise between a particular freedom and a general orderliness, or legality.

- Sir Neville Cardus
Quoted in Sir Rupert Hart-Davis Cardus on Cricket (1977).

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen, it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.

- G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton
  What's Wrong with the World, ch.3.

The Soviets sought not a place in the sun, but the sun itself. Their objective was the world. They would not tolerate compromise on goals, only on tactics.

-John Foster Dulles
Comment to his brother Allen. Quoted in Peter Grose Gentleman Spy (1994).

He never wants anything but what's right and fair, only when you come to settle what's right and fair, it's everything that hewantsandnothing that youwant. And that's his idea of a compromise.Give me the Brown compromise when I'm on his side.

-Ted (Edward James) Hughes
  Tom Brown's Schooldays, pt.2, ch.2.

Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof.

-James Russell Lowell
  'On Democracy', speech in Birmingham, 6 Oct.