A Quote by Eric Felten

The only true test of loyalty is fidelity in the face of ruin and despair.

Eric Felten

Quote Topics

Despair Face Fidelity Loyalty Only Ruin Test True

Quote Author

Eric Felten
Author
Born: 1964

For most of us, fidelity is faithfulness to an obligation, trust, or duty. For the men and women of the FBI, fidelity also means fidelity to country. It means fidelity to justice and the law, fidelity to the Constitution, fidelity to equality and liberty.

Robert Mueller

Collective unity is not the result of the brotherly love of the faithful for each other. The loyalty of the true believer is to the whole the church, party, nation and not to his fellow true believer. True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society .

Eric Hoffer

Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.

Hannah Arendt

Loyalty to the true, core values and roots of democracy is what makes a true patriot, not loyalty to a symbol of the country.

Cindy Sheehan

The modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

Mark Twain

People who love only once in their lives are shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom, or their lack of imagination

Sydney Smith

Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

Mark Twain

Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy. Those who do not want mercy never seek it. It is better to find God on the threshold of despair than to risk our lives in a complacency that has never felt the need of forgiveness. A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair.

Thomas Merton

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.

David Hare

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value - a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.

T. S. Eliot

Our modern, rootless times do seem to be a particularly inhospitable environment for loyalty. We come and go so relentlessly that our friendships can't but come and go too. What sort of loyalty is there in the age of Facebook, when friendship is a costless transaction, a business of flip reciprocity.... Friendship held together by nothing more permanent than hyperlinks is hardly the stuff of selfless fidelity.

Eric Felten

Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.

W. H. Auden

If loyalty is, and always has been, perceived as obsolete, why do we continue to praise it? Because loyalty is essential to the most basic things that make life livable. Without loyalty there can be no love. Without loyalty there can be no family. Without loyalty there can be no friendship. Without loyalty there can be no commitment to community or country. And without those things, there can be no society.

Eric Felten

The true test of a character is to face hard conditions with the determination to make them better.

Helen Keller

When I consider the state of things in our fief, I find that those who hold positions and receive official stipends are incapable of the utmost in loyalty and patriotic service. Loyalty of the usual sort-perhaps, but if it is true loyalty and service you seek, then you must abandon this fief and plan a grass-roots uprising.