Quotes About Consequences

When morality is reduced to personal preferences and when no one can be held morally accountable, society quickly falls into disorder.

The Bible teaches that there is a holy God whose law constitutes a transcendent, universally valid standard of right and wrong. Our choice has no effect at all on this standard; our choice simply determines whether we accept it, or reject it and suffer the consequences.

The greatest risks are never the ones you can see and measure, but the ones you can't see and therefore can never measure. The ones that seem so far outside the boundary of normal probability that you can't imagine they could happen in your lifetime—even though, of course, they do happen, more often than you care to realize.

Economics is like gravity: Ignore it and you will be in for some rude surprises.

Here is one of the most important things to remember when doing research that involves regression analysis: Try not to kill anyone. You can even put a little Post-it note on your computer monitor: "Do not kill people with your research." Because some very smart people have inadvertently violated that rule.

There is, it seems, a law in things that if a man is compelled to choose between two good actions, mutually exclusive, the one which he chooses to neglect will in course of time avenge itself on him. Rightly considered, this is a comfortable if chastening thought, for it implies that the nature of good is such that it can never, not even for some other mode of itself, be neglected. If ever it is, for whatever admirable reasons, set on one side it will certainly return.

Ever catch yourself in the middle of saying something you know you'll regret? Something so mean you know you should stop immediately but some part of your brain kicks in and won't let you stop?

The problem with unintended consequences isn't with the consequences, it's with the unintended. Just because you didn't' intend for something to happen doesn't mean you didn't want it to.

People rent time machines. They think they can change the past. Then they get there and find out causality doesn't work the way they thought it did. They get stuck, stuck in places they didn't mean to go, in places they did mean to go, in places they shouldn't have tried to go. They get into trouble. Logical, metaphysical, etc.

If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang.

He was a different person now, and not a better one, Oh, he could fight, he could swat sickos like flies; he was a bloody hero, wasn't he? He was Death himself. Riding a bike. But in the end, all he was doing was adding to the score of the dead. Was that all a hero was, then? A killing machine without a heart?

If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust; the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should -- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

A man hits me--I hit the man a little harder--then he won't do it again.' Unfortunately he did do it again--a little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious cities to the ground.

Crime does not decrease in proportion to the severest punishment.

I don't know why I did the things I did I don't know why I said the things I said Pride's like a knife, it can cut deep inside Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes

We need him dead or in jail, and I'm probably a crappy murderer. – Libby

Adam Birmingham, whose family is the richest in Britain, decides to get very drunk.

Bad things happen when good people do nothing.

I love her more than my life. What were you thinking, harming her? Didn't you understand that I'd have to kill you for it?

The antagonists who evoke the most emotion are the ones who could have been heroes if they'd made better choices.

They realized that, in fact, the lie wasn't safe. That it threatened their existence more profoundly than the truth did.

There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.

People die because they want who they want. They do all kinds of crazy, stupid, sweet, tender, amazing, self-destructive things. You aren't going to make anyone "see the light and realize that what they're doing is wrong." You just aren't.

I don't think there's a single dumbass thing I've done in my adult life that I didn't know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always.