Quotes About Consequences

Nothing had worked out the way he'd hoped. He should've expected it by now, maybe. After all, things never had before. And yet he kept on pissing into the wind. He was like a man whose door's too low, but instead of working out how to duck, keeps on smacking his head into the lintel every day of his miserable life. He wanted to feel sorry for himself, but he knew he deserved no better. A man can't do the things he'd done, and hope for happy endings.

I never saw men act with such ignorance, violence and self-serving malice as when energised by a just cause.

Don't deceive yourself. Everyone is guilty of something, and even the innocent can be a threat. Perhaps it takes small crimes to prevent bigger ones, Colonel West, but it's up to bigger men than us to decide.

One act presses upon another, on a path we have no choice but to follow, and each time there are reasons. We do what we must, we do what we are told, we do what is easiest. What else can we do but solve one sordid problem at a time? Then we look up and find... this.

She never saw more damage done than by folk acting on high principle.

The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present,

That's what an idiot does when he gets angry. He destroys whatever's nearest, even if it's his own house!

Friends with benefits? More than friends? Don't sample the goodies unless you're willing to risk addiction and withdrawal.

How one chooses to address imperial duress depends in part on where and among whom it is sought, how it is imagined to manifest, the temporalities in which it is lodged, and the sensory regimes on which it weighs. As an object of inquiry, it demands that we ask how we know it and what the political consequences are of knowing in certain ways.

Meaning bad isn't the issue. Meaning you do what you do. Not without consequences for other people, of course, sometimes very grave ones. But it's not very helpful to regard your choices as a series of right or wrong moves. They don't define you as much as you define them

Why, that is just what he would say, Signor; but bad deeds will out, whether people like them to be known or not. This man comes to our town sometimes to market, and nobody knew where he came from for a long while; so they set themselves to work and found it out at last.

Let me say the good are often punished unfairly.

Words said can never be recalled. So it is best, oftimes, not to speak too quickly. Yet words left unsaid are worse. We wear them like weights around our hearts.

Choices are like dominoes, one tumbling against the next and then the next until events go out of human control.

Looking back, we see it is often casual choices which chart a path to tragedy.

Dostoyevsky knew a lot but not everything. He, for instance, thought that if you kill a human you'll turn into Raskolnikov. But we know now that one can kill five - ten, one hundred people - and go to the theatre in the evening.

If only I'd done such and such instead of such and such, gone there instead of there, said that and not that, or looked different, or hadn't gone out that day with Ivanhoe or that night or that week or anytime during the last two months

Lydia finally found it in herself to forgive her mother for seizing what small joy she could, whatever the consequences. Love, it seemed, had its own imperatives.

Tutto quello che abbiamo visto e tutti quelli che abbiamo conosciuto entrano in noi e ci costituiscono, che ci piaccia o no. Siamo collegati in un disegno che non possiamo vedere e di cui non possiamo conoscere le conseguenze. Un'imperfezione qui, un punto saltato là, una bozza tra le fibre, e l'intera stoffa sarà diversa una volta che è intessuta.

it wouldn't take much for the sorrow she felt at the sorrow she caused to drown her again

On peut rater sa vie par politesse

Only ignorance! only ignorance! how can you talk about only ignorance? Don't you know that it is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness? -- and which does the most mischief heaven only knows. If people can say, 'Oh! I did not know, I did not mean any harm,' they think it is all right.

Totalitarian ideologies never die, and neither do their appeal, and so their consequences must be carefully re-explained for each generation. (...) Mass movements offer confidence and safety. History is always available for rewriting.

Do any of them realize that Simon Wolfgard is falling in love with Meg Corbyn? Monty wondered. Does Wolfgard understand his own response to the girl? What about Meg? How does she feel? What would the rest of the Others do if one of their kind did fall in love with a human?