Quotes About Consequences

Little crimes breed big crimes. You smile at little crimes and then big crimes blow your head off.

He wanted one drink, and understood precisely why he wasn't going to have one. One drink ended up arriving in a dozen glasses.

This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever I saw one.

It was a little like stealing. It was exactly like stealing. It was, in fact, stealing. But there was no law against it because no one knew the crime existed, so is it really stealing if what's stolen isn't missed? And is it stealing if you're stealing from thieves? Anyway, all property is theft, except mine.

IN MY EXPERIENCE, SUSAN, WITHIN THEIR HEADS TOO MANY HUMANS SPEND A LOT OF TIME IN THE MIDDLE OF WARS THAT HAPPENED CENTURIES AGO.

There were a lot of things he could say. Son of a bitch! would have been a good one. Or he could say, Welcome to civilization! He could have said, Laugh this one off! He might have said, Fetch! But he didn't, because if he had said any of those things then he'd have known that what he had just done was murder.

a man needs no camel to ride to hell, yea, nor horse, nor mule; a man may ride into hell on his tongue...

We ain't going to curse anyone," said Granny firmly. "It hardly ever works if they don't know you've done it.

While evidence says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they're probably all on first steps.

Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot one, and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years', thirty years', ten years' time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.

I mean, doesn't it change history even if you just tread on an ant?' 'For the ant, certainly,' said Qu.

There's nothing more terrible than someone out to do the world a favor.

And it be well for a knowlessman that he should not be here, for he would be taken from this place and his gaskin slit, his moules shown to the four winds, his welchet torn asunder with many hooks and his figgin placed upon a spike (...)

A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.

Haven't you noticed that by running away you end up in more trouble?" "Yes, but, you see, you can run away from that, too," said Rincewind. "That's the beauty of the system. Dead is only for once, but running away is for ever.

Most people will shy away from killing people they haven't been introduced to.

Pray you never face a good man, Vimes thought. He'll kill you with hardly a word.

Yes. So what? Lots of people in history have only done their jobs and look at the trouble they caused.

They couldn't do anything worse to him than he had coming to him already. He felt free at last.

In other words, it's the familiar hot sinking feeling experienced by everyone who has let the waves of their own anger throw them far up on the beach of retribution, leaving them, in the poetic language of the everyday, up shit creek.

People are what they do, and what they leave behind

How can you be the good guys if you're dropping clever bombs right down people's chimneys? And blowing people up just because they're being bossed around by a loony?

It wasn't easy, living in the past. You couldn't whack someone for what they were going to do, or what the world was going to find out later. You couldn't warn people, either. You didn't know what could change the future, but if he understood things right, history tended to spring back into shape.