Loyalty Quotes

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The merits of loyalty are often debated – anyone who has ever been hurt by someone they considered a true friend can attest to the fact that loyalty is a double edged sword. But no one who has ever found himself in need of a true friend can deny it is one of the most valuable gifts in the world. But as valuable it is, it can also be exceedingly rare.

Perhaps one of the reasons that it is such a rare quality these days, is that loyalty is so easy to misplaced. How many times have you given your loyalty to a person or a cause only to realize that your trust has been betrayed and your faith has been broken? But without loyalty, families are broken and friendships are empty. These loyalty quotes come from authors, politicians, businesspersons and others who have thought long and hard about the merits and consequences of loyalty. These quotes about loyalty encompass loyalty between spouses and friends, as well as the commitments made within military forces, companies, and nations.

Here you will find quotes to inspire you to seek and create the best in your own relationships, to lead others with generosity and grace, and to provide the best service to those who deserve it.

Quotes About Loyalty

A path through dark woods at night as a metaphor for loyalty
“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.” – J.R.R.Tolkien

I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me- they, and the love and loyaty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could.

Veronica Roth

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

Mark Twain

Love is friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual confidence, sharing and forgiving. It is loyalty through good and bad times. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowances for human weaknesses.

Ann Landers

Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.

Confucius

The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, is in its loyalty to each other.

Mario Puzo
A bunch of freshly picked Florida oranges with bright orange peels and leaves
“A man is not an orange. You can’t eat the fruit and throw the peel away.” – Arthur Miller

I look for these qualities and characteristics in people. Honesty is number one, respect, and absolutely the third would have to be loyalty.

Summer Altice

Better to have one woman on your side than ten men.

Robert Jordan

I’ll take fifty percent efficiency to get one hundred percent loyalty.

Samuel Goldwyn

If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.

Elbert Hubbard

Loyalty will not permit envy, hate, and uncharitableness to creep into our public thinking.

Bainbridge Colby

I don’t like to give up on people when they need someone not to give up on them.

Carrol Bryant

Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved.

Martin Luther
A white terrier and black lab looking loyally up at their owner after a treat
“All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.” – John Barth

It isn’t an easy thing to give your loyalty to someone you don’t know, especially when that person chooses to reveal nothing of himself.

Megan Whaler Turner

I have a loyalty that runs in my bloodstream, when I lock into someone or something, you can’t get me away from it because I commit that thoroughly. That’s in friendship, that’s a deal, that’s a commitment. Don’t give me paper – I can get the same lawyer who drew it up to break it. But if you shake my hand, that’s for life.

Jerry Lewis

A person is born with feelings of envy and hate. If he gives way to them, they will lead him to violence and crime, and any sense of loyalty and good faith will be abandoned.

Xun Zi

If you will not die for us, you cannot ask us to die for you.

Jacqueline Carey
Six friends playing ice hockey on a frozen lake in Calgary during winter
“Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.” – Thomas Hudson Jones

As you read my stories of long ago I hope you will remember that the things that are truly worthwhile and that will give you happiness are the same now as they were then. Courage and kindness, loyalty, truth, and helpfulness are always the same and always needed.

Laura Ingles Wilder

If you cant value a commitment made by someone else, your own commitments lose their value too.

Ram Mohan

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Albert Schweitzer

My dear boy, the people who only love once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

Oscar Wilde
quotes-about-loyalty
“A person who deserves my loyalty receives it.” – Joyce Maynard

Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue – perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.

Milan Kundera

Loyalty to an unjust cause is a perversion of honor.

Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Loyalty is dead, the experts proclaim, and the statistics seem to bear them out. On average, U.S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years, half their employees in four, and half their investors in less than one. We seem to face a future in which the only business relationships will be opportunistic transactions between virtual strangers.

Frederick R. Reichheld

A friend is someone who walks into a room when everyone else is walking out.

Gary Moore

Together we shared a bond not even death would violate.

Dee Remy
A man waiting for a friend in a red leather booth in a diner in Newark
“Loyalty and friendship, which is to me the same, created all the wealth that I’ve ever thought I’d have.” – Ernie Banks

Loyalty cannot be blueprinted. It cannot be produced on an assembly line. In fact, it cannot be manufactured at all, for its origin is the human heart — the center of self-respect and human dignity. It is a force which leaps into being only when conditions are exactly right for it — and it is a force very sensitive to betrayal.

Maurice Franks

Sometimes it was worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world.

Erica Jong

I think a good friend, to me, is all about trust and loyalty. You don’t ever want to second-guess whether you can tell your friend something.

Lauren Conrad

I place an enormous premium on loyalty. If someone betrays me, I can forgive them rationally, but emotionally I have found it impossible to do so.

Richard E. Grant

Fidelity purchased with money, money can destroy.

Seneca
A woman taking a man's hand and leading him down a path in Central Park
“You don’t earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day.” – Jeffrey Gitomer

My first language, the true language of the soul spoken only on our planet of origin, had no word for betrayal or traitor. Or even loyalty- because without the opposite, the concept had no meaning.

Stephanie Meyer

A true friendship is one in which everything can be told, and nothing will be judged.

Unknown

Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Never befriend the oppressed unless you are prepared to take on the oppressor.

Ogden Nash

…it isn’t things and proximity, or even blood that holds us all together. What makes a family is love and loyalty.

Genevieve Dewey
Several apartments in Manila with a large tree in front of them
“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” – Goethe

Loyalty publicly results in leverage privately.

Andy Stanley

Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antidote for creeping despair.

Dean Koontz

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is – “Let there be truth between us two for evermore.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An onion shared with a friend tastes like roast lamb.

Egyptian Proverb

The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and will to carry on.

Walter Lippmann

Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.

Marcus Aurelius
Three loyal friends walking through Joshua Tree National Park in California
“New friends are silver, but old friends are gold.” – Unknown

We hope you found these quotes on loyalty inspiring. Next time you have to make a difficult choice, or evaluate a relationship you are in, remembering some of these words of wisdom may help you to see and choose the best.

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Quincy Seale

Quincy is KIM's lead editor and content writer, and has collected and shared inspiring quotes and stories since 2005. Quincy holds an MBA from the University of Dundee and an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, and lives in San Antonio with his wife Natalie, son Alex, and his dog Oban.