Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.
It is expedient that there should be gods, and, since it is expedient, let us believe that gods exist.
Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
Some think of Islam as an expedient jobs program that moves the female half of the population out of the way.
A good and faithful judge ever prefers the honorable to the expedient.
I came into office to do what was correct, not to see what was politically expedient to get re-elected.
We stand for the maintenance of private property. . . We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.
People who wish to numb our caution in dealing with them by means of flattery are employing a dangerous expedient, like a sleeping draught, which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us all the more awake.
There is a certain flimsiness of poetry which seems expedient in a song.
As so often happens in politics, what appears to be politically expedient for those in power rarely overlaps with the public interest. The lesser evils of the regime become entrenched, while the greater good is never realized.
It is expedient to have acquaintance with those who have looked into the world, who know men, understand business, and can give you good intelligence and good advice when they are wanted.
It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.
I will not stagger from expedient to expedient.
Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality,--that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate,--who is invariably the devil,--and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity,--who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.
Free trade is not a principle, it is an expedient.
The most sure, but at the same time the most difficult expedient to mend the morals of the people, is a perfect system of education.
It is expedient for the victor to wish for peace restored; for the vanquished it is necessary.
I must conclude that Conscience, if that be the name of it, was not given us for no purpose, or for a hindrance. However flattering order and expediency may look, it is but the repose of a lethargy, and we will choose rather to be awake, though it be stormy, and maintain ourselves on this earth, and in this life, as we may, without signing our death-warrant. Let us see if we cannot stay here, where He has put us, on his own conditions. Does not his law reach as far as his light? The expedients of the nations clash with one another: only the absolutely right is expedient for all.
Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control.
There are three things that are the motives of choice and three that are the motives of avoidance; namely, the noble, the expedient, and the pleasant, and their opposites, the base, the harmful, and the painful. Now in respect of all these the good man is likely to go right and the bad to go wrong, but especially in respect of pleasure; for pleasure is common to man with the lower animals, and also it is a concomitant of all the objects of choice, since both the noble and the expedient appear to us pleasant.
