A Quote by Gerald R. Ford

In the age-old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity's approval.

Gerald R. Ford

Quote Topics

Age Approval Between Contest Convictions Deserving Lose Old Only Popularity Posterity Principle Those Willing

Quote Author

Gerald R. Ford
American - President
July 14, 1913 - December 26, 2006

To know John Kennedy, as I did, was to understand the true meaning of the word. He understood that courage is not something to be gauged in a poll or located in a focus group. No adviser can spin it. No historian can backdate it. For, in the age old contest between popularity and principle, only those willing to lose for their convictions are deserving of posterity's approval.

Gerald R. Ford

I'm not in this business to win a popularity contest, I just want to be a good actor. Well, you've failed at being a good actor. Why not try for the popularity contest?

Roger Moore

A meaningful life is not a popularity contest. Do what in your heart you believe to be the right thing, and you may or may not get immediate approval from the world. Do it anyway.

Marianne Williamson

That contest between bat and ball, we don't want to lose that or get further away from that even contest.

Mitchell Starc

The Lok Sabha election is not a contest between political parties. It is a fight between Modi-Shah, and the country. Only when these two people are removed, will it be a proper contest between parties.

Raj Thackeray

It is the privilege of posterity to set matters right between those antagonists who, by their rivalry for greatness, divided a whole age.

Joseph Addison

Today age segregation has passed all sane limits. Not only are fifteen-year-olds isolated from seventy-year-olds but social groups divide those in high school from those in junior high, and those who are twenty from those who are twenty-five. There are middle-middle-age groups, late-middle-age groups, and old-age groups - as though people with five years between them could not possibly have anything in common.

Suzanne Gordon

That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy will be at last bestowed by time.

Ben Jonson

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it's a catch-22: all of those things you're willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.

Jodi Picoult

I play guys who are willing to go really far. If the dung really hits the fan, I don't know if I could walk the talk. But anyone who isn't willing to die for his convictions isn't worth living. My characters, no matter how demented they are, they have their convictions.

Elias Koteas

In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)

Wendell Berry

Approval is overrated...Approval and disapproval alike satisfy those who deliver it more than those who receive it. I don't care for approval, and I don't mind doing without.

Gregory Maguire

I think politics in general are just like a popularity contest but McCain is just... old.

D. L. Hughley

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

Saul Bellow

There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice.