Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments.
~By Sidney Hook ~
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 ~
People have motives and thoughts of which they are unaware.
~By Albert Ellis ~
I have always examined closely the motives of any group for which I am asked to raise money.
~By Kate Smith ~
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 ~
Look at the means which a man employs, consider his motives, observe his pleasures. A man simply cannot conceal himself!
~By Confucius ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
The moment there is suspicion about a person's motives, everything he does becomes tainted.
~By Mohandas Gandhi ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
It's the millenium, motives are incidental.
~By Jamie Kennedy ~
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 ~
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
~By James M. Barrie ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
The vanity of being known to be trusted with a secret is generally one of the chief motives to disclose it.
~By Samuel Johnson ~
I am convinced that the majority of people would be generous from selfish motives, if they had the opportunity.
~By Charles Dudley Warner ~
The beginning of self-knowledge: recognizing that your motives are the same as other people's.
~By Mason Cooley ~
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 ~
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
~By Thomas Mann ~
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 ~
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 ~
Mode of providing steam power to locomotives.
~By John Ericsson ~
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 ~
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
~By Oscar Wilde ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
Living en famille provides the strongest motives for rudeness combined with the maximum opportunity for displaying it.
~By Quentin Crisp ~
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 ~
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 ~
We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
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 have nothing less to do than to get inside of whole peoples and change their motives and dispositions.
~By John Raleigh Mott ~
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 ~
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 ~
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
~By Karl Marx ~
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 ~
The inner thought coming from the heart represents the real motives and desires. These are the cause of action.
~By Raymond Holliwell ~
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 ~
Those who joined us for selfish personal reasons, for a career or other motives will be the ones to leave.
~By Janos Kadar ~
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
~By Eric Hoffer ~
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 ~
Actions are visible, though motives are secret.
~By Samuel Johnson ~
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 ~
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
~By George Eliot ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
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 ~
First of all; Frank was the BOSS. We didn't question any of his motives or decisions at the time.
~By Jimmy Carl Black ~
Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.
~By Ella Maillart ~
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 ~
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 ~
There is no music that can't be used politically, but the motives behind the creation of that music can be non-political.
~By Earle Brown ~
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 ~
What we believe to be the motives of our conduct are usually but the pretexts for it.
~By Miguel de Unamuno ~
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 ~
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 ~
|