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 ~
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 ~
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
~By Eric Hoffer ~
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 ~
The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.
~By Mason Cooley ~
In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
~By Anna Jameson ~
The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.
~By Samuel Johnson ~
In a world full of competing emergencies and disasters, it really helps if there is an international locomotive that can help us bring attention - help us bring resources.
~By Jan Egeland ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
It's the millenium, motives are incidental.
~By Jamie Kennedy ~
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 ~
If you want to be in the automotive business, you go to Detroit, and you figure it out. If you want to be in entertainment, go to where it's at. Go to Hollywood, go to New York.
~By Nick Cannon ~
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
~By George Eliot ~
No one does anything from a single motive.
~By Samuel Taylor Coleridge ~
We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action.
~By Sarojini Naidu ~
It's motive alone which gives character to the actions of men.
~By Jean de la Bruyere ~
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 ~
The atmosphere is much too near for dreams. It forces us to action. It is close to us. We are in it and of it. It rouses us both to study and to do. We must know its moods and also its motive forces.
~By Cleveland Abbe ~
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 ~
We should often blush for our very best actions, if the world did but see all the motives upon which they were done.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
First of all; Frank was the BOSS. We didn't question any of his motives or decisions at the time.
~By Jimmy Carl Black ~
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 ~
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 ~
That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?
~By Joseph Addison ~
Mode of providing steam power to locomotives.
~By John Ericsson ~
The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
~By Havelock Ellis ~
The automobile is technologically more sophisticated than the bundling board, but the human motives in their uses are sometimes the same.
~By Charles M. Allen ~
America - a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.
~By Herbert Hoover ~
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 ~
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 ~
Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives.
~By Saint Teresa ~
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 ~
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 ~
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
~By Quentin Crisp ~
Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
~By Eric Hoffer ~
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 ~
Horses and mules, and even sail cars, made more rapid progress than did the earliest locomotive.
~By John Moody ~
When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.
~By Miguel de Cervantes ~
The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted.
~By Mohandas Gandhi ~
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 ~
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 ~
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
~By James M. Barrie ~
The motive power of democracy is love.
~By Henri Bergson ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
You listen to a piece of music and it will remind you of something-it might make you happy, it might make you sad, but it is very emotive. And I think that Duran Duran have always understood that.
~By Nick Rhodes ~
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 ~
There are a lot of people who are doing wonderful things, quietly, with no motive of greed, or hostility toward other people, or delusions of superiority.
~By Charles Kuralt ~
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 ~
Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!
~By Confucius ~
Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more livable world.
~By Tom Scholz ~
Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
~By Sidney Hook ~
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 ~
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 ~
You should be careful what you wish for, as the reasons for war get confused. One person can be very clear in their motives, but others can have different agendas.
~By Dougray Scott ~
Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.
~By Denis Diderot ~
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
~By George Eliot ~
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 ~
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 ~
For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.
~By Ernest Hemingway ~
I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.
~By Laurence Housman ~
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 ~
Men are more accountable for their motives, than for anything else; and primarily, morality consists in the motives, that is in the affections.
~By Archibald Alexander ~
You will find in politics that you are much exposed to the attribution of false motive. Never complain and never explain.
~By Stanley Baldwin ~
Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.
~By Ella Maillart ~
Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil's spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.
~By Eric Massa ~
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 ~
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
~By Oscar Wilde ~
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 ~
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 ~
God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.
~By Henry Ward Beecher ~
We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
I have always examined closely the motives of any group for which I am asked to raise money.
~By Kate Smith ~
Those who joined us for selfish personal reasons, for a career or other motives will be the ones to leave.
~By Janos Kadar ~
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 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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
It is a question of fact, whether the influence of motives be fixed by laws of nature, so that they shall always have the same effect in the same circumstances.
~By Thomas Reid ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
~By Thomas Mann ~
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.
~By Mao Zedong ~
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 ~
To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.
~By Lord Byron ~
I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.
~By Benjamin F. Wade ~
In this respect I suppose I'm the total opposite of Garry. With his very emotive body language at the board he shows and displays all his emotions. I don't.
~By Vladimir Kramnik ~
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 ~
Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
~By Claud-Adrian Helvetius ~
It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
~By Eric Hoffer ~
The inner thought coming from the heart represents the real motives and desires. These are the cause of action.
~By Raymond Holliwell ~
My actions to promote peace, the mediation missions which I carried out during many conflicts, which very often occurred between brothers of the same country, are not driven by any ulterior motives or any calculations based on personal ambitions.
~By Omar Bongo ~
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 ~
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 ~
|