Quotes About Motives

I can't say why people lie; they just do. Everyone has their own reasons for not telling the truth.

I know how easy it is for some minds to glide along with the current of popular opinion, where influence, respectability, and all those motives which tend to seduce the human heart are brought to bear.

Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions.

Naturally, it is a terrible, despicable crime when, as in Munich, people are taken hostage, people are killed. But probing the motives of those responsible and showing that they are also individuals with families and have their own story does not excuse what they did.

CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in discussing what are its real motives.

I have given up the idea that there is an opposition-free church out there. But I have gained something else - an appreciation for the gift of opposition. When it comes, I learn something about my motives. When it comes, I get to test my courage.

The Professor shook his head. 'On the contrary, my motives are most simple, to advance science and to combat evil.

What a waste to attempt to change behavior without truly understanding the driving needs that cause such behavior!

I don't have a hostile disposition toward humankind per se. In fact, I feel quite warmly toward humankind. It's individual humans I have trouble with. I'm prone to a certain skepticism about people's motives and character, and this critical appraisal can harden into enduringly harsh judgment.

When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.

Take some advice, and you may survive this trip. When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.

more to curry favor than to educate.

When considering a man's motives, remember you must not measure his wheat with your bushel. He may not be using the same standard at all.

There are more colors in the crayon box than black and white, hotshot," she countered. "Everyone's got their own agenda, and I do mean everyone. And it's rarely the one they let you see. But

Quand la haine des hommes ne comporte aucun risque, leur bêtise est vite convaincue, les motifs viennent tout seuls.

Or was it simply that something deep inside me still longed for the sea, something inherited, something only half held, some unnamed yearning? What man truly understands his motives?

It was too easy to camouflage selfish impulses by invoking a higher cause as the real cause.

My experience has been that altruism is invariably a means to conceal one's personal failures.

All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations and act only from motives of pure patriotism, and for the general good of the public has been destroyed. An inside view proves too truly very much the reverse. —ULYSSES S. GRANT to WILLIAM T. SHERMAN, September 18, 1867

Fixing motives is like fixing blame-the further away from the act you get, the harder it is to single out one thing as having caused it.

If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behaviour is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture.

It is the situation, the circumstances, the context, that decide whether we see a person as enemy or as partner at any given moment. The Other can be both of these, and that is the basis of his changeable, elusive nature, his contradictory behaviour, whose motives he himself is sometimes incapable of understanding.

on war and conquest: in the realm of human affairs one also needs a pretext. it is important to give it the rank of a universal imperative or of a divine commandment. The range of choices is not great; either it is that we must defend ourselves, or that we have an obligation to help others, or that we are fulfilling heaven's will. the optimal pretext would link all three of the motives.

I also hoped that my own track record, the things I'd written, the work I'd done, the person I had been, would be my best defense against the demonization of my character and motives that was taking place. But those were thoughts from before the time in which we all became too frightened of religion in general and one particular religion in particular—religion redefined as the capacity of religionists to commit earthly violence in the name of their unearthly sky god.