"Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another - too often ending in the loss of both"
About this Quote
Compromise, in Tryon Edwards's framing, isn’t a civic virtue; it’s a wager with your conscience as collateral. The line is built like a moral trapdoor: it starts with a familiar, almost respectable idea (trading something to keep something) and then yanks it into tragedy - “too often” turning prudence into self-betrayal. Edwards isn’t attacking negotiation as a technique so much as the spiritual psychology behind it: the moment you treat “right” and “good” as bargaining chips, you’ve already conceded that they’re optional.
The subtext is distinctly 19th-century Protestant: moral truths are not commodities. A theologian writing in a century of American fracture - slavery, revivalism, sectional politics, temperance, women’s rights - would have watched “compromise” become a polished word for postponing accountability. The Missouri Compromise and later legislative bargains weren’t merely policy; to many religious reformers they were public rituals of evasion, offering a temporary feeling of stability while letting injustice metastasize.
What makes the sentence work is its quiet double-bind. If you compromise, you risk losing both goods; if you refuse, you risk being labeled rigid, fanatical, impractical. Edwards anticipates that critique and shrugs it off with “too often,” a pastor’s observational authority rather than a logician’s certainty. It’s less a universal rule than a warning about asymmetry: when one side is anchored in “right” and the other in interest, compromise doesn’t meet in the middle - it slides downhill.
The subtext is distinctly 19th-century Protestant: moral truths are not commodities. A theologian writing in a century of American fracture - slavery, revivalism, sectional politics, temperance, women’s rights - would have watched “compromise” become a polished word for postponing accountability. The Missouri Compromise and later legislative bargains weren’t merely policy; to many religious reformers they were public rituals of evasion, offering a temporary feeling of stability while letting injustice metastasize.
What makes the sentence work is its quiet double-bind. If you compromise, you risk losing both goods; if you refuse, you risk being labeled rigid, fanatical, impractical. Edwards anticipates that critique and shrugs it off with “too often,” a pastor’s observational authority rather than a logician’s certainty. It’s less a universal rule than a warning about asymmetry: when one side is anchored in “right” and the other in interest, compromise doesn’t meet in the middle - it slides downhill.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Tryon Edwards, A Dictionary of Thoughts (collection of laconic quotations); entry commonly cited as the source of the line on 'Compromise' |
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