Quotes About Motives

It's just that, in the modern era, we're supposed to believe that human motives and emotions can be explained by psychological theories.

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.

I always look at the motives behind each scene. You can play that out tonally with how you express yourself or you can do that with your physical expression, your physical presence. So I always think about what physical presence I want to embody in each scene.

I did not expect to encounter what has beset me since my elevation to the presidency. God knows, I have endeavored to fulfill what I considered to be an honest duty, but I have been mistaken; my motives have been misconstrued and my feelings grossly betrayed.

Everybody has their own agenda, and that makes 'Power' a dark world. There aren't any really clean characters.

The more that is learned about Comey's involvement in the deep state's illicit targeting of President Trump, the more reason the American people must question both Comey's motives and his management as director of the FBI, the now-disgraced agency he headed before Trump fired him.

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.

The American penchant for subjugating those deemed in need of deliverance was hardly extinguished by the calamity in Canada. As the historian Eliot A. Cohen has observed, that impulse would recur often in the centuries to come, "with mixed motives and uncertain outcomes." Canada proved a foreshadow.

Both Caligula and Abraham Lincoln sought power, yet it is highly implausible to suppose that Caligula and Lincoln were driven by the same motives.

Be careful of selfish motives. You can mistake them for principles and end up dying for them.

The trouble with selfish motives is that they harden into principles, and you end up sending your kids to war for them.

correcting errors is a waste of time if the one you are correcting attributes his own beliefs to principled, unprejudiced inquiry, while attributing the beliefs of those who disagree with him to bias and ulterior motives.

Play the psychoanalyst: make cutting comments concerning their unconscious motives (you are only being truthful), then sit back and listen. Your silence will goad them into embarrassing admissions. Leaven your judgments with occasional praise and they will strive to please you, like dogs.

What does it matter if another player, your friend or rival, intended good things and had only your interests at heart, if the effects of his action lead to so much ruin and confusion?

An understanding of people's hidden motives is the single greatest piece of knowledge you can have in acquiring power.

O caminho falso na vida é, em geral, algo a que somos atraídos por motivos equivocados – dinheiro, fama, atenção, e assim por diante. Se é de atenção que precisamos, em geral experimentamos uma espécie de vazio interior, que esperamos preencher com o falso amor

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as empty, meaningless, or dishonest, and scorn to use them. No matter how pure their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

People who claimed they were collecting money to help others often had a way of letting a good bit stick in their own pockets, or else they liked the power that spreading it about gave them, liked it far too much.

A corruption of intentions.

Tous les hommes honnêtes sont dangereux. Seules, les canailles sont inoffensives... Parce que les canailles n'agissent que par intérêt, c'est-à-dire petitement.

Now that the crisis had come she found herself able to confront it coolly - nay, more, to take a curious interest in it under all her secret fear and shame, as if some part of her had detached itself from the rest and was interestingly absorbing impressions and analyzing motives and describing settings.

He'd kill you all right. No sweat. But for the wrong reasons. Amateur's reasons. Of course, you'll be just as dead.

Most people spend their lives avoiding things they fear. You run after them. That's crazy." He had a point. I closed the door and left him standing in the hot dark. I raised the dead and laid the undead to rest. It was what I did. Who I was. If I ever started questioning my motives, I would stop killing vampires. Simple as that. I wasn't questioning my motives tonight, so I was still a vampire slayer, still the name they had given me. I was The Executioner.

Everyone has a hidden agenda. Except me!