What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
~By George Eliot ~
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.
~By Robert A. Heinlein ~
Do not ever say that the desire to "do good" by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.
~By Ayn Rand ~
Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.
~By George Oppen ~
I think the motive is to establish in federal law the personhood from conception forward and try and alter the Constitution through statute.
~By Zoe Lofgren ~
Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.
~By Karl Rove ~
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
~By Charles Darwin ~
Some people are born with a vital and responsive energy. It not only enables them to keep abreast of the times; it qualifies them to furnish in their own personality a good bit of the motive power to the mad pace.
~By Kate Chopin ~
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
~By William James ~
This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time ignoring his fundamental ones.
~By Desmond Morris ~
It is a good motive, fame and money, as it is tangible and measurable. Being an artist is neither measurable nor tangible and certainly not a way to become rich.
~By Dirk Benedict ~
When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
~By Miguel de Cervantes ~
My great crime in the world is blunder I will get into scrapes without intention or any bad motive.
~By Stand Watie ~
It's motive alone which gives character to the actions of men.
~By Jean de la Bruyere ~
Mankind are divided into sects, and individuals think very differently on religious subjects, from the purest motives; and that gracious common Parent, who loves all his children alike, beholds with approbation every one who worships him in sincerity.
~By Joseph Lancaster ~
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
~By Mao Zedong ~
Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war.
~By Robert Higgs ~
Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages.
~By William J. Brennan, Jr. ~
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
~By George Eliot ~
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
~By Ernest Hemingway ~
Apple's market share is bigger than BMW's or Mercedes's or Porsche's in the automotive market. What's wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?
~By Steve Jobs ~
But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.
~By Abraham Maslow ~
Individual ambition is undoubtedly a strong motive in student work, but there is such a thing among students everywhere as ambition for others, call it class spirit, esprit de corps, good fellowship, or good will to men.
~By Herbert Baxter Adams ~
The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
~By Elizabeth Cady Stanton ~
Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more livable world.
~By Tom Scholz ~
What appeared to the earlier physicists to be the constant quantity of heat is nothing more than the whole motive power of the motion of heat, which remains constant so long as it is not transformed into other forms of work, or results afresh from them.
~By Hermann von Helmholtz ~
Truth gets well if she is run over by a locomotive, while error dies of lockjaw if she scratches her finger.
~By William C. Bryant ~
Even in political considerations, now-a-days, you have stronger motives to feel interested in the fate of Europe than in the fate of the Central or Southern parts of America.
~By Lajos Kossuth ~
No one does anything from a single motive.
~By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
The motives of these parents vary, many parents don't like the curriculum being taught to their kids, or are wary of the threat of peer pressure or the presence of drugs or violence lurking in too many of our schools today.
~By Ernest Istook ~
We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.
~By Edward Dahlberg ~
People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.
~By Albert Ellis ~
Desire is poverty. Desire is the greatest impurity of the mind. Desire is the motive force for action. Desire in the mind is the real impurity. Even a spark of desire is a very great evil.
~By Swami Sivananda ~
Every diminution of the public burdens arising from taxation gives to individual enterprise increased power and furnishes to all the members of our happy confederacy new motives for patriotic affection and support.
~By Andrew Jackson ~
All governments in all wars have used all the means at their disposal to put their own motives, decisions and actions, and the actions of their military forces, in the best possible light.
~By Bruce Jackson ~
It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.
~By Ferdinand Christian Baur ~
No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined.
~By Paul Gallico ~
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
~By Lord Byron ~
Men killing other men really is an extraordinary phenomenon. Why does it happen? And how long has it gone on? And have the motives changed?
~By John Keegan ~
Phrenology taught us that the mind thinks by means of the brain, is liable to become fatigued by too long attention, as the locomotive muscles are by too much walking; and I therefore proposed to them to take a brief rest.
~By George Combe ~
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
~By Oscar Wilde ~
We have nothing less to do than to get inside of whole peoples and change their motives and dispositions.
~By John Raleigh Mott ~
It's the millenium, motives are incidental.
~By Jamie Kennedy ~
Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive.
~By Bernard de Mandeville ~
I, Alexander B. Campbell, make this statement of the cause of my death to relieve the coroner of the necessity of an inquest, and also let my friends know the motive that led me to take my own life.
~By Alex Campbell ~
Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.
~By Philip Zimbardo ~
Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
~By Claud-Adrian Helvetius ~
The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted.
~By Mohandas Gandhi ~
I have always examined closely the motives of any group for which I am asked to raise money.
~By Kate Smith ~
I really have no ulterior motive in taking on certain roles. I have no larger issue that I really want to show people. I'm an actor, that's all. I just do what I do.
~By Sally Field ~
We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
When I consider what it was that moved me to join the Communist Party, I have to cast my mind back for more than a quarter of a century to try and ascertain what precisely my motives at that time were.
~By Bram Fischer ~
It is one of the primary motives of modern art that it wants to abolish the distance which the viewer, the consumer, the audience maintain vis-a-vis a work of art.
~By Hans-Georg Gadamer ~
And then there's Israel - a lot of people support Israel, and it's important to Israel to take out Iraq. So it's all mixed together. It's a combination of motives.
~By Chris Matthews ~
Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.
~By Steven Spielberg ~
Those who joined us for selfish personal reasons, for a career or other motives will be the ones to leave.
~By Janos Kadar ~
The pains of disconcerted or frustrated habits, and the inherent pleasure there is in following them, are motives which nature has put into our wills without generally caring to inform us why; and she sometimes decrees, indeed, that her reasons shall not be ours.
~By Chauncey Wright ~
From a moral point of view, there is no excuse for terrorist acts, regardless of the motive or the situation under which they are carried out.
~By Jurgen Habermas ~
No man can be ideally successful until he has found his place. Like a locomotive he is strong on the track, but weak anywhere else.
~By Orison Swett Marden ~
What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.
~By Miguel de Unamuno ~
America - a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.
~By Herbert Hoover ~
It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming.
~By John Coleman ~
By annihilating the desires, you annihilate the mind. Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
~By Claude Adrien Helvetius ~
I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.
~By Laurence Housman ~
The motive power of democracy is love.
~By Henri Bergson ~
Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.
~By Denis Diderot ~
A lot of times people's main motives and plan in life is to hurt as many people as they can, but I think there's enough good people that help make the world a good place.
~By Tina Yothers ~
Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
~By Sidney Hook ~
I started to call myself a rational therapist in 1955; later I used the term rational emotive. Now I call myself a rational emotive behavior therapist.
~By Albert Ellis ~
First of all; Frank was the BOSS. We didn't question any of his motives or decisions at the time.
~By Jimmy Carl Black ~
Cruel and cold is the judgment of man, Cruel as winter, and cold as the snow; But by-and-by will the deed and the plan Be judged by the motive that lieth below.
~By Lewis J. Bates ~
Previously people were treated anonymously particular on a drugs situation which is obviously highly emotive. They have been treated anonymously even after the verdict had been reached.
~By David Gill ~
Just because scientists have the knowledge to do it, the technology to do it, and some may even have a financial motive or other incentive to do it, does not make it right.
~By Nathan Deal ~
Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive.
~By John Moody ~
For the life of me, I don't understand what honest motive there is in putting this in front of this body to philosophically debate marriage on a constitutional amendment that is not going to happen, and which is enormously divisive in all of our communities.
~By Dianne Feinstein ~
Sometimes, his methods and his motives are questionable and even his morals are questionable in the way he does things. But I think his intention is always to protect his daughter.
~By Victor Garber ~
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
~By Quentin Crisp ~
Mode of providing steam power to locomotives.
~By John Ericsson ~
In my opinion, the form of Government may be different in different countries, according to their circumstances, their wishes, their wants. England loves her Queen, and has full motive to do so.
~By Lajos Kossuth ~
We acknowledge but one motive - to follow the truth as we know it, whithersoever it may lead us; but in our heart of hearts we are well assured that the truth which has made us free, will in the end make us glad also.
~By Mortimer Adler ~
This part of being a man, changing the way we parent, happens only when we want it to. It changes because we are determined for it to change; and the motive for changing often comes out of wanting to be the kind of parent we didn't have.
~By Augustus Y. Napier ~
I don't know why they're doing it. I have to assume that their motives are positive, not negative. But they don't understand the severity of the problem in this state.
~By Gray Davis ~
This kind of charge reveals a good deal about the personality of the people who make it; to impute such motives to another man is to imply you're harboring them yourself.
~By Jim Garrison ~
Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.
~By William Howard Taft ~
I always thought it hadn't influenced me very much, but I heard from many people from England that many motives from German fairytales are to be found in my books.
~By Cornelia Funke ~
People do not always understand the motives of sublime conduct, and when they are astonished they are very apt to think they ought to be alarmed. The truth is none are fit judges of greatness but those who are capable of it.
~By Jane Porter ~
My head can get to murder and rape for profit because I can understand greed as a human motive, but I cannot understand the voyeuristic desire to watch such a film. I can comprehend one and I cannot comprehend the other.
~By Donna Leon ~
We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men. But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends.
~By Robert Byrd ~
But I have the satisfaction, at the same time, to reflect that the impression to be made depends upon the consistency of the charge and the motives of the prosecutors.
~By Robert Walpole ~
As a guitar player, you can gravitate to the blues because you can play it easily. It's not a style that's difficult to pick up. It's purely emotive and dead easy to get a start with.
~By Boz Scaggs ~
If interstellar travel is as time- or energy- demanding as the above figures indicate, it is far from obvious what the motive for colonization might be.
~By Barney Oliver ~
I couldn't be happier that President Bush has stood up for having served in the National Guard, because I can finally put an end to all those who questioned my motives for enlisting in the Army Reserve at the height of the Vietnam War.
~By Larry David ~
I first came to think about media and politics in the late 1960s, having observed some distortions up close, but since then I wouldn't say that my personal experience has remained an important motive for my writing about media.
~By Todd Gitlin ~
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.
~By Walter Scott ~
CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in discussing what are its real motives.
~By Paul Weyrich ~
Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.
~By Ella Maillart ~
We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action.
~By Sarojini Naidu ~
In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.
~By P. D. James ~
Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.
~By Jean Philippe Rameau ~
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
~By Alfred North Whitehead ~
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