Quotes About Unintended

Over my career, I'd watched senior leader visits have unintended negative consequences. Typically, schedules were unrealistically overloaded and were modified during the visit to cancel parts of the plan.

A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that's how it turned out.

History is a record of effects the vast majority of which nobody intended to produce.

I've always been interested in the unintended side effects of technology. For instance, when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window to enjoy the scentscape generated by speed and wind?

I thought there might be some grand design I did not understand, but the government's policy clearly was not working, because India was still poor. I was determined to learn more, so I became interested in economics. This book is another unintended consequence of the government's policies.

... that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

It's hard to hear that your good intentions are making things worse and tragic.

Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

It is one of the ironies of history that reformers so often misjudge the consequences of their reforms.

Adding kidney beans to his cottage cheese and pineapple was an act of bravery Dave had not intended.

The research suggests that praise may have [a negative, unintended] effect, directing attention away from the task [at hand] and toward your reaction.

The law of unintended consequences rules, often with deadly silence.

aim at success,'" he read. "'The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue … as the unintended side effect of one's dedication to a course greater than oneself.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.

Unintended consequences, he thought miserably. He was angry at his anger, the way it surged up and took over.

The bigger we get, I think the more it's changing things, which is great, but we didn't set out to do that. We just wanted to be as big as we possibly could be.

More things in politics happen by accident or exhaustion than happen by conspiracy.

Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.

No one intended to leave Martha alone that afternoon, but it happened that everyone was called away, for one reason or another.

And so it happens oft in many instances; more good is done without our knowledge than by us intended. [Lat., Itidemque ut saepe jam in multis locis, Plus insciens quis fecit quam prodens boni.]

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.

The contribution of the Western democracies to the awakening of the East has been indirect and certainly unintended. They have kindled an enthusiasm of resentment against the West; and it is this anti-Western fervor which is at present rousing the Orient from its stagnation of centuries.2