Quotes About Motive

The thinner the excuse, the fatter the reason for it.

This need for self-preservation is that part of human nature which needs satisfaction under all circumstances and therefore forms the primary motive of human behaviour.

We are most human when love is our motive.

Killing is a solution to a problem. Murder is something you do because you want to.

is always murder, regardless of motive or circumstance. Thus those who murder or who prepare to murder are malefactors and criminals, regardless of who they may be: kings, princes, marshals or judges. None who contemplates and commits violence has the right to consider himself better than an ordinary criminal. Because it is in the nature of all violence to lead inevitably to crime.

They observe the principle, Master Witcher, that since the end is justified, the means must be found.

Education and health were always matters of charity. You educated children and you helped the sick because they were good things to do, not because you were going to make money out of them. If you let the money-making principle, the profit-seeking motive, anywhere near education and health, things go bad.

He had laid out a highly plausible scenario that included a motive, a weapon, opportunity, and perhaps most important, a seemingly false alibi that would cause the jurors to immediately question what Sloane was about to stand and tell them.

Laymen, in Strike's experience, were obsessed with motive: opportunity topped the professional's list.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition.

Servant-leadership holds that the primary purpose of a business should be to create a positive impact on its employees and community, rather than using profit as the sole motive.

When the judge asks me why I put poison in my wife's tea, he will not be satisfied by my saying 'Because electrical impulses from my brain caused my hand to reach for the bottle of arsenic and tip it into the waiting teacup'...

This is how Kant explains the moral motive. When I ask myself not what I want to do, but what I ought to do, then I stand back from myself, and put myself in the position of an impartial judge.

The moral motive comes from setting all my interests aside, and addressing the question before me by appealing to reason alone—and that means appealing to considerations that any rational being would be equally able to accept. From that posture of disinterested enquiry we are led inexorably, Kant thought, to the categorical imperative, which tells us to act only on that maxim which we can will as a law for all rational beings.

Rockefeller never had a single motive for any action and was surely motivated by more than altruism in championing cheap kerosene.

Then we could collate all the possibles and go to work with the holy trinity of detectives everywhere: means, motive, opportunity. Means and opportunity wouldn't signify much. By definition nobody would be on the possibles list unless they had been proved to have opportunity. And everybody in the army was physically capable of swinging a tire iron or a crowbar against the back of an unsuspecting victim's head. It was probably a rough equivalent of the most basic entry requirement.

Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, crimes come down to love, hate, or money, and unlike what it says in the bible, the greatest of these is money.

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

because there may be a few coincidences in life, but none in crime. Everything has a motive.

Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.

Conviction is a good motive, but a bad judge.

When we feel ourselves to be sole heirs of the universe, when the sea flows in our veins...and the stars are our jewels, when all things are perceived as infinite and holy, what motive can we have for covetousness or self-assertion, for the pursuit of power or the drearier forms of pleasure?

Who hath the how is careless of the why