Quotes About Loyalties

“This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.”

— Thornton Wilder

“War is an infidel; it holds no loyalties, neither to king nor countryman. She is a whore, selling herself to the highest bidder. Victory is bought in blood and steel.”

— Brian A. McBride

“In German one of the terms for imagination is the compound word Einbildungskraft: literally, the "power ( Kraft)" of "forming ( Bildung)" into "one (Ein)." Here I want us to reflect about faith as a kind of imagination. Faith forms a way of seeing our everyday life in relation to holistic images of what we may call the ultimate environment. Human action always involves responses and initiatives. We shape our action ( our responses and initiatives) in accordance with what we see to be going on. We seek to fit our actions into, or oppose them to , larger patterns of action and meaning. Faith, in its binding us to centers of value and power and in its triadic joining of us into communities of shared trusts and loyalties, gives forms and content to our imaging of an ultimate environment.”

— James W. Fowler

“I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered gargoyle.”

— Russell Kirk

“He sells his loyalties to the highest bidder. Shouldn't even a mercenary have morals? That's the textbook definition of a whore!”

— Nadia Scrieva

“I have had such a sickening of men in masses, and of causes, that I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium. I speak only for myself, mind - it is my own truth alone - but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have - for what they are - are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.”

— Patrick O'Brian

“I suspect that on some level, life is a matter of indefensible loyalties.”

— Mark Slouka

“Was this how a mutiny was sparked? In a moment of heedlessness, so that one became a stranger to the person one had been a moment before? Or was it the other way around? That this was when one recognized the stranger that one had always been to oneself; that all one's loyalties and beliefs had been misplaced?”

— Amitav Ghosh

“That's what's so great about the story. It's real. What I mean is, even if it didn't actually happen-and there's debate about the Legends and Greivances section, and whether it's historically accurate-it shows the world truthfully. I remember feeling just like that baby: torn apart by feeling, split in two caught between loyalties and desires.
That's how the diseased world is.
That's how it was for me, before I was cured.”

— Lauren Oliver

“Being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain.”

— Jeff Lindsay

“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

— Carl Sagan

“All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.”

— Atul Gawande

“Global capital is agnostic - it has no loyalties. There's an overhang of capital in the U.S., and the key is yield pickup. What Africa is providing is a diversification play and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing.”

— Euvin Naidoo

“Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.”

— Robert Jackson

“The fan is the one who suffers. He cheers a guy to a .350 season then watches that player sign with another team. When you destroy fan loyalties, you destroy everything.”

— Frank Robinson

“Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you. ... You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.”

— Anonymous.

“The Crown Prince of Adarlan stared him down. "And consider where your true loyalties lie."
Once, Chaol might have argued. Once, he might have protested that his loyalty to the crown was his greatest asset. But that blind loyalty and obedience had started this descent.
And it had destroyed everything.”

— Sarah J. Maas

“More than half the world's largest 100 economies are corporations. They have no loyalties to place or citizens.”

— Zac Goldsmith

“Yes, for a long time but I admired her and respected everything that I could sort of see in her from a distance, the pillars of her life, the loyalties, the relationships. It all got my interest and also the looks.”

— Andre Agassi

“The opposing barristers were in tactical agreement (because it was plainly the judge's view) that the issue was not merely a matter of education. The court must choose, on behalf of the children, between total religion and something a little less. Between cultures, identities, states of mind, aspirations, sets of family relations, fundamental definitions, basic loyalties, unknowable futures. In such matters there lurked an innate predisposition in favor of the status quo, as long as it appeared benign.”

— Ian McEwan

“I made one mistake. Who doesn't? But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands. Of course it left me deformed and unserviceable, defective and dangerous to associate with. ... But what in God's name has happened to charity? ... Self-interest guides me like the next man but not invariably; not all the time. I use compassion more than you do; I have loyalties and I keep by them; I serve honesty in a crooked way, but as best I can; and I don't plague my debtors or even make them aware of their debt. ... Why is it so impossible to trust me?”

— Dorothy Dunnett

“They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself”

— George Orwell

“"But love ? Is that what you feel for Morpheus?"
I swallow hard. "I'm not sure. It's all wrapped up in my loyalties to Wonderland. But there's something real between us. Something powerful." I sink further into my seat. "It's complicated."”

— A.G. Howard

“My loyalties will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation's history, or limited in the spiritual dimension by one language and culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”

— Edward Abbey

“The wealth of America isn't an inventory of goods; it's an organic,
living entity, a fragile, pulsing fabric of ideas, expectations, loyalties,
moral commitments, visions, and people. To slice it up like an apple
pie and redistribute it would destroy it just as surely as trying to share
Stephen Hawking's intellect by sharing slices of his brain would surely
kill him.”

— Ziad K. Abdelnour

“That's why I like you, he would say. You're unpredictable. You have no code. Really, Henry-and he would give a hearty guffaw-you're essentially treacherous. If we ever make a new world you'll have no place in it. You don't seem to understand what it means to give and take. You're an intellectual hobo ... At times I don't understand you at all. You're always gay and affable, almost sociable, and yet ... well, you have no loyalties. I try to be friends with you ... we were friends once, you remember ... but you've changed ... you're hard inside ... you're untouchable. God, you think I'm hard ... I'm just cocky, pugnacious, full of spirits. You're the one who's hard. You're a gangster, do you know that? He chuckled. Yes, Henry, that's what you are-you're a spiritual gangster. I don't trust you.”

— Henry Miller

“I accept that it was a mistake to allow distinctions to be blurred between my professional responsibilities and my personal loyalties to a friend. Mr Speaker, I am sorry for this. I have apologised to the prime minister, to the public, and, at the first opportunity available, to the House.”

— Liam Fox

“The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect." Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. "This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.”

— Neal Stephenson

“Isaac didn't understand heartache. Or regret or longing or divided loyalties. Or anger or shattered trust or betrayal. Such things had no clarity. They involved expectations of another's behavior, and Isaac had no such expectations.”

— Mary Doria Russell

“One Choice
One Choice, decided your friends.
One Choice, defines your beliefs.
One Choice, determines your loyalties - Forever.
ONCE CHOICE CAN TRANSFORM YOU”

— Veronica Roth

“This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries' domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.”

— Henry Kissinger

“More than a needed biography of Ehrenburg ... Tangled Loyalties is a contribution of much significance to our understanding of the history of Russia in Stalin's time and of her relations with the West.”

— Robert C. Tucker

“When I speak about love and compassion, I do so not as a Buddhist, nor as a Tibetan, nor as the Dalai Lama. I do so as one human being speaking with another. I hope that you at this moment will think of yourself as a human being rather than as an American, Asian, European, African, or member of any particular country. These loyalties are secondary. If you and I find common ground as human beings, we will communicate on a basic level.”

— Dalai Lama XIV

“The International Criminal Court, like most international institutions, is a wonderful idea. A noble idea. All it needs to work is planetary government, worldwide democracy and the triumph of reason over tribal loyalties, political doctrines and individual ambition. In other words, it requires that we all live in the world described by the "Star Trek" television shows.”

— James Lileks

“What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses.”

— Frank Herbert

“Louis Brandeis started off by embracing the Theodore Roosevelt notion that hyphenated Americanism was unpatriotic. You couldn't have dual loyalties. But then he thinks and he reads and he becomes the head of the American Zionist movement after having previously been a secular Jew in this amazing intellectual evolution.”

— Jeffrey Rosen

“When will women begin to have the first glimmer that above all other loyalties is the loyalty toTruth, i.e., to yourself, that husband, children, friends and countryare as nothing to that.”

— Alice James

“We black women must forgive black men for not protecting us against slavery, racism, white men, our confusion, their doubts. And black men must forgive black women for our own sometimes dubious choices, divided loyalties, and lack of belief in their possibilities. Only when our sons and our daughters know that forgiveness is real, existent, and that those who love them practice it, can they form bonds as men and women that really can save and change our community.”

— Marita Golden

“Reconsidering Happiness captures all the contradictory impulses of falling in and out of love-the lust and wanderlust, the contentment and restlessness, the secret loyalties, the hard compromises. Sherrie Flick has written a wise and elegant novel.”

— John Dalton

“For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated. I adore few humans more than I love books. I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring. I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim. But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing.”

— Ben Ehrenreich

“Hey, White, you know where your loyalties are? Right here. The old pinstripes. No! You never wore them ... So you have a right to sing the blues.”

— Phil Rizzuto

“That loyalty to the country comes ahead of all other loyalties. And this is an absolute loyalty, since one cannot weight it in terms of what one receives.”

— Lal Bahadur Shastri

“No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal chage in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions.”

— Aldo Leopold

“The photographer's intentions do not determine the meaning of a photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.”

— Susan Sontag

“The [best] coaches ... know that the job is to win ... know that they must be decisive, that they must phase people through their organizations, and at the same time they are sensitive to the feelings, loyalties, and emotions that people have toward one another. If you don't have these feelings, I do not know how you can lead anyone. I have spent many sleepless nights trying to figure out how I was going to phase out certain players for whom I had strong feelings, but that was my job. I wasn't hired to do anything but win.”

— Bill Walsh

“For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, and who had no experience, such as a Catholic child might, of an awesome hierarchy that was real and felt, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best.”

— Philip Roth

“If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

“Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

“There are exceptional loyalties and there are old fashion ideas about how you get loyalties, and after all the auditorium is full of people who have co-owned shares with the managers for many decades, and in many cases they co-invested when everyone was young and obscure. Also when you come back to a place like that you are celebrating old loyalties, and of course the basic idea behind so much of Berkshire is the old fashioned idea that the best way to get loyalty is to deserve loyalty.”

— Charlie Munger

“I hope that at this moment you are thinking of yourself as a human being rather than as an American, Asian, European, African, or member of any particular country. These loyalties are secondary.”

— Dalai Lama