Quotes About Consequence

If Cleopatra's nose, said Pascal, had been an inch longer or shorter, all history would have been changed.

Fools live to regret their words, wise men to regret their silence.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

But Raynor wondered, should evil go unpunished just because it's wielded by someone in power? Was

Birch fallacy is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists.

A mule will labor ten years willingly and patiently for you, for the privilege of kicking you once.

Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to.

What sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury he can efface by destroying the victim and the witness but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter.

I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn.

Y son los buenos los que no pueden rechazar la cuenta cuando se la presentan. Por la sencilla razón de que les pueden obligar a pagarla

A man's damnation is his own damned business.

You're from the future, Mr Netherton? Not exactly, he said. I'm in the future that would result from my not being here. But since I am, it isn't your future. Here.

The future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did.

I want to have my cake and eat it too.

Know what 'collateral damage' means?" "People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

Tú lo sabías, verdad? ¿Que soy parte de ti? ¡Caliente, caliente, caliente! ¿Que soy la causa de que todo salga mal? ¿De que las cosas sean como son?

Has it occurred to you that I have gone to great effort and expense, as well as personal sacrifice, to reach this point, the man in black replied. And that if I fail now, I might get very angry. And if she stops breathing in the very near future, it is entirely possible that you will catch the same fatal illness?

Soy tu príncipe y te casarás conmigo —le dijo Humperdinck. —Soy vuestra sierva y me niego —susurró Buttercup. —Soy tu príncipe y no puedes negarte. —Soy vuestra sierva fiel y acabo de hacerlo. —Negarte significa la muerte. —Matadme entonces.

The advantage of some is won by an equivalent loss of others.

A Princeton student being interviewed by a reporter was questioned about the prospect of American troops going to Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded there. "There's nothing worth dying for," was her response. Which means of course that one day she shall have the unpleasant task of dying for nothing.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.

The means have murdered the end.

It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.