35 Quotes About Compromise

In the dance of life, compromise often plays a starring role. Whether in relationships, professional settings, or personal decisions, the ability to find middle ground can bring peace and progress in moments of conflict or indecision. It’s a balancing act that requires understanding, patience, and wisdom. To celebrate this essential skill, we've curated a collection of the top 35 quotes about compromise, offering insights from thinkers, leaders, and artists across time. These quotes reflect the nuances of compromise, presenting it as both an art and a necessity in our interconnected world. As you explore these words of wisdom, may they inspire you to approach your next negotiation with an open mind and a compassionate heart.

1. “Still it might be nice, once in a while, not to have to choose between evils. Just once, couldn't I choose the lesser good?” - Laurell K. Hamilton

2. “Compromise is a stalling between two fools.” - Stephen Fry

3. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.” - C.S. Lewis

4. “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.[Inaugural Address, January 20 1961]” - John Fitzgerald Kennedy

5. “Come a day there won’t be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don’t push me, and I won’t push you. Dong le ma?” - Joss Whedon

6. “The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.” - Jeanette Winterson

7. “The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.” - Terry Tempest Williams

8. “The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.” - Ayn Rand

9. “To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?” - Ayn Rand

10. “Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.” - Annie Dillard

11. “[W]hat possible purpose does this lashing-out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his left? It was pure self-indulgence; even if he feels aggrieved, he has to judge his words by their usefulness, not by his desire to vent. This isn't about him.” - Paul Krugman

12. “It is hard to talk about a middle ground for something that is a fundamental right.” - Teri Reynolds

13. “I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.” - Ayn Rand

14. “Too often, we say we are defeated by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated. We are simply disobedient. It might be good if we stop using the terms victory and defeat to describe our progress in holiness. Rather, we should use the terms obedience and disobedience. When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility. I am saying something outside of me has defeated me. But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me. We may in fact be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey. We need to brace ourselves up and to realize that we are responsible for thoughts, attitudes, and actions. We need to reckon on the fact that we died to sin's reign, that it no longer has any dominion over us, that God has united us with the risen Christ in all His power and has given us the Holy Spirit to work in us. Only as we accept our responsibility and appropriate God's provisions will we make any progress in our pursuit of holiness.” - Jerry Bridges

15. “Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.” - Criss Jami

16. “In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.” - Julian Barnes

17. “I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.” - Julian Barnes

18. “In what we call "real life"--if you want to be successful, if you want to get on in the longterm--you always have to come to some kind of compromise with your own emotions: I can't overreact NOW! I have to accept THIS! I have to ignore THAT!--You're forever having to tailor your emotions to the circumstances, you go easy on the people you love, you slip into your hundred little daily roles, you juggle, you balance, you weigh things up so as not to jeopardize the entire structure, because you yourself have a stake in it.” - Daniel Glattauer

19. “Nothing will bind the eyes of man quicker than the touch of compromise. A principle not compromised is a principle worth dying for. A dream not compromised is a dream worth living for.” - Ogwo David Emenike

20. “How wonderful it would be if everything could always be as clear and simple as it used to be when you were twelve years old, or twenty years old. If there really were only two colors in the world: black and white. But even the most honest and ingenuous cop, raised on the resounding ideal of the stars and stripes, has to understand sooner or later that there's more than just Darkness and Light out on the streets. There are understandings, concessions, agreements. Informers, traps, provocations. Sooner or later the time comes when you have to betray your own side, plant bags of heroin in pockets, and beat people on the kidneys—carefully, so there are no marks.” - Sergei Lukyanenko

21. “Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.” - Steven Erikson

22. “Compromise, if not the spice of life, is its solidity. It is what makes nations great and marriages happy” - Phyllis McGinley

23. “When the final result is expected to be a compromise, it is often prudent to start from an extreme position.” - John Maynard Keynes

24. “...Sometimes I suspect that what had really happened was that we became more resigned, more cynical, raised our pain thresholds as we lowered our expectations. All in all, settled for less.” - Emma Donoghue

25. “There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.” - Margaret Atwood

26. “Marriage is about compromise; it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to.” - Nicholas Sparks

27. “It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

28. “When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.” - Criss Jami

29. “Love without sacrifice is like theft” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

30. “The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.” - Paul Murray

31. “You gave me two alternatives that you could live with, and I chose the one that I could live with. That's how compromise is supposed to work.” - Stephenie Meyer

32. “You make the world come alive. You make the world colorful. You are the inspiration behind all that happens. You are the pillar of strength to many around you, the centrifugal force of your own little world, called family. I love being a women and celebrate being one everyday, hope you all do too!! And to all those who battle their various circumstances, the hurdles, the sacrifices and the compromises they make, wish them all inner strength! Happy Women's Day!” - Deeba Salim Irfan

33. “I have leveled with the girls - from Anchorage to Amarillo.I tell them that all marriages are happyIt's the living together afterward that's tough.I tell them that a good marriage is not a gift,It's an achievement.that marriage is not for kids It takes guts and maturity.It separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.I tell them that marriage is tested dily by the ability to compromise.Its survival can depend on being smart enough to know what's worth fighting about.Or making an issue of or even mentioning.Marriage is giving - and more important, it's forgiving.And it is almost always the wife who must do these things.Then, as if that were not enough, she must be willing to forget what she forgave.Often that is the hardest part.Oh, I have leveled all right.If they don't get my message, Buster,It's because they don't want to get it.Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocalsBecause nobody wants to red the small print in dreams.” - Ann Landers

34. “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” - Barry Goldwater

35. “Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: "He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.” - Doris Kearns Goodwin