Politics & Power Quote by David Trimble

Trimble’s line is the kind of cool-headed realism that sounds almost bland until you remember where he’s coming from: a Northern Irish unionist who helped sell a peace settlement to people trained by history to distrust abstractions. The sentence works because it punctures the comforting fantasy that “principles” arrive in politics already purified and self-justifying. For Trimble, principles don’t travel alone; they show up wearing the local weather.

The key move is his insistence on “distinguishing colour” and “discriminating effect.” It’s not just that context matters - it’s that context actively dyes a principle, changes what it signals, who it protects, and who it threatens. A policy marketed as fairness can land as revenge; a demand for sovereignty can be felt as safety by one group and erasure by another. Trimble is warning that political language is promiscuous: the same vocabulary can serve liberation or domination depending on the surrounding conditions.

The subtext is a rebuke to absolutists on all sides: ideologues who treat constitutional formulas, rights talk, or historical claims as trump cards. In the Good Friday Agreement era, that’s a pointed message. Power-sharing, consent, parity of esteem - these are “principles” that become either “beneficial or noxious” based on whether institutions are trusted, whether violence is credibly retired, and whether symbolic concessions are matched by lived security.

He’s also quietly defending compromise. If circumstances determine moral valence, then flexibility isn’t weakness; it’s the price of preventing principles from becoming weapons.