Quotes About Consequences

You reap what you sow.

gave up her child without so much as a note or a dollar, and what excuse did she have? None. She was not poor. She was not the victim of brutality. And the child, whatever else his circumstances, had been conceived in love. That much was true. How could she have so easily given the child away? Olympia

Carmen hated the 'life is too short rationalization. She thought it was one of the lamer excuses in the history of excuse-making. Whenever you did something because life is too short not to, you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.

Could she kiss him? Would he allow her that? Was that something he could pretend was nothing? What about making love? Could she just open up her legs and pull him inside her and have him all she wanted and later give her assent that it was nothing?

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. —Winston Churchill

Whenever you did something because "life is too short not to," you could be sure life would be just long enough to punish you for it.

A person had to live with his lies. That was what they cost.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Burke cautioned that "criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.

You are going to love some of your characters, because they are you or some facet of you, and you are going to hate some of your characters for the same reason. But no matter what, you are probably going to have to let bad things happen to some of the characters you love or you won't have much of a story. Bad things happen to good characters, because our actions have consequences, and we do not all behave perfectly all the time.

Don't do it, I said. Please? I mean, I understand that you want revenge, but two wrongs don't make a right. I didn't mean to sound like a teacher; the words just popped out.

I knew when we changed our schedule, something like this would happen. Stacey rolled her eyes. Kristy, one thing has nothing to do with the other. Remember when Monday, Wednesday and Friday used to be untouchable? I asked. We set up our appointmnets and stuff around meeting times. Gladly. Because we knew we had to. That was why I didn't want to change Fridays. Once you do something like that, you're saying the club isn't that important. Now look what's happening: a chain reaction.

Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.

toda mentira nos persigue en el futuro.

Within the House of Islam, the penalty for learning too much about the world—so as to call the tenets of the faith into question—is death.

Las mentiras son el equivalente social de los residuos tóxicos: todo el mundo es un potencial damnificado por su propagación.

Unless one commits to telling the truth in situations like this, however, one finds that the edges creep inward, and exceptions to the principle of honesty begin to multiply.

If lying seems the only option, given your fear or physical limitations, it clearly shifts the burden of combating evil onto others.

But this is not the faith that has given us religion. It would be rather remarkable if a positive attitude in the face of uncertainty led inevitably to ludicrous convictions about the divine origin of certain books, to bizarre cultural taboos, to the abject hatred of homosexuals, and to the diminished status of women. Adopt too positive an outlook, and the next thing you know architects and engineers may start flying planes into buildings.

It is simply astonishing how people destroy their marriages, careers, and reputations by saying one thing and doing another.

One of the worst things about breaking the law is that it puts you at odds with an indeterminate number of other people. This is among the many corrosive effects of unjust laws: They tempt peaceful and (otherwise) honest people to lie so as to avoid being punished for behavior that is ethically blameless.

Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything.

If you believe anything like what the Koran says you must believe in order to escape the fires of hell, you will, at the very least, be sympathetic with the actions of Osama bin Laden.

By lying, we deny our friends access to reality9—and their resulting ignorance often harms them in ways we did not anticipate. Our friends may act on our falsehoods, or fail to solve problems that could have been solved only on the basis of good information. Rather often, to lie is to infringe on the freedom of those we care about.

He goes so far as to suggest that we were secretly hoping that such devastation would be visited upon us: