Quotes about consequence
page 4

“You can't blame anyone else,…, no one but yourself. You have to make your own choices and live every agonizing day with the consequences of those choices.”

Max Brooks book World War Z

Source: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

“And here's my advice to you. If you get the chance of the mad kind of love, grab it with both hands, and to hell with the consequences.”

Ken Follett book Winter of the World

Source: Winter of the World

Love, Hell, Chance, Madness

“Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Happiness, Suffering

“Harmless as a setting dove," he agreed. "I'm too hungry to be a threat to anything but breakfast. Let a stray bannock come within reach, though, and I'll no answer for the consequences.”

Diana Gabaldon (1952) American author

“Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.”

J.M. Coetzee book Disgrace

Source: Disgrace

“Elections have consequences”

Daniel Silva

House of Spies

“A thing of nature.
For every Push, there is a Pull. A consequence.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Hero of Ages

Nature

“She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.”

Jane Austen book Pride and Prejudice

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Men

“Actions always have consequences!”

Joel Coen (1954) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Source: A Serious Man

“If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.”

David Suzuki (1936) Canadian popular scientist and environmental activist

Idea, Thinking

“And then there is Darcy. She is a woman who believes that things should fall into her lap, and, consequently, they do. They always have. She wins because she expects to win. I do not expect what I want, so I dont. And I dont even try.”

Emily Giffin Something Borrowed

Source: Something Borrowed

“Who you get, and how it works out - there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your unconscious choice of mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily.”

Ian McEwan book Enduring Love

Page 82.
Source: Enduring Love (1997)

“… it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: The Woman in White

Nature, Suffering

“Make your choice and accept the consequences.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Blue-Eyed Devil

“Ideas do matter and do have consequences.”

Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014) Canadian–American psychotherapist and writer

Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

Idea

“Measured against eternity, our time on earth is just a blink of an eye, but the consequences of it will last forever.”

Rick Warren (1954) Christian religious leader

Source: The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

Time

“My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Understanding Our Mind: 50 Verses on Buddhist Psychology

“The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.”

John Berger (1926–2017) British painter, writer and art critic

Change, Past

“We are all mistaken sometimes; sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward.”

Alison Croggon (1962) contemporary Australian poet, playwright and fantasy novelist

Evil

“Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.”

Dave Eggers book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Source: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“To adapt a phrase, idols have consequences.”

Nancy Pearcey (1952) American philosopher

Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes

“I am sorry my decisions do not meet with your approval, but nevertheless, they are mine, and the consequences are also mine.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: The Dead Girls' Dance

Decision

“Who are you?"
"No one of consequence."
"I must know."
"Get used to disappointment.”

William Goldman book The Princess Bride

Source: The Princess Bride

Disappointment

“To refuse has so many more consequences than submitting.”

Gillian Flynn book Sharp Objects

Source: Sharp Objects

“The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.”

Tess Gerritsen (1953) Chinese-American novelist

Source: Keeping The Dead

Heart, Night

“A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

World

“A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

“I've made a decision and now I must face the consequences.”

J. Michael Straczynski (1954) American writer and television producer

Decision

“Does one deserve to have evil done to her by consequence of putting herself where evil can reach her?”

Brandon Sanderson book The Way of Kings

Source: The Way of Kings

Evil

“The essence of training is to allow error without consequence.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Error, Training

“He [Brian Fraser] told me that a man must be responsible for any see he sows, for it's his duty to take care of a woman and protect her. And if I wasna prepared to do that, then I'd no right to burden a woman with the consequences of my own actions.”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

“All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung.”

Megan Whalen Turner book A Conspiracy of Kings

Source: A Conspiracy of Kings

Life, Loss

“Our actions are in our own hands, but the consequences of them are not. Remember that, my dear, and think twice before you do anything.”

Louisa May Alcott book Jack and Jill: A Village Story

Source: Jack and Jill

Thinking

“… every time you make a decision to be less than what God wants for you, you're denying yourself some of God's blessings. It's up to you. You can live a life with God's blessings, or just exist with all the consequences of choosing wrong.”

Terri Blackstock (1957) American writer

Source: Last Light

Life, God, Decision, Time

“Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Source: Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

Knowledge

“You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.”

Zadie Smith book White Teeth

Source: White Teeth

Life, Knowledge

“…the consequences of sex are often more memorable than the act itself.”

John Irving book A Widow for One Year

Source: A Widow for One Year

Sex

“To be a real man or woman, you've got to know what you believe in. You've got to understand that your actions have consequences and that they are connected to everything that you are.”

Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer

Understanding

“If we all were judged according to the consequences
Of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention
And beyond our limited understanding
Of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Understanding

“Women ought to be free - as free as we are,' he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.”

Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence

Source: The Age of Innocence

Women

“When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Memory

Source: Memory

“To get along with God,
Consider the consequences of your behavior.
Earthseed: The Books of the Living”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) American science fiction writer

God, Books, Behavior

“And I also know that loving someone—even when it’s scary, even when there are consequences—is never the wrong thing to do.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Pale Kings and Princes

Love

“They laugh at this, the idea that one might keep herds of friendly deer or elk that walk happily to their slaughter whenever it's time for the human to eat meat. Some ask openly if there aren't consequences of a life so easy to live.”

Joseph Boyden book The Orenda

Source: The Orenda

Life, Idea, Time

“The ultimate weapon isn't this plague out in Vegas, or any new super H-bomb. The ultimate weapon has always existed. Every man, every woman, and every child owns it. It's the ability to say No and take the consequences.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Leviathan

“Great tragedies have great consequences. They ripple through the fabric of this world and the next. When the loss is too great for either world to bear, Everlost absorbs the shock, like a cushion between the two.”

Neal Shusterman book Everwild

Source: Everwild

World, Loss

“For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.”

Elie Wiesel book Night

Source: Night

Memory

“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love (2006)
Context: Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

Happiness, Effort, Personality

“People are intimidated by a man who acts with no apparent regard for consequences. Behave as if you cannot be touched and no one will dare to touch you.”

Robin Hobb book Assassin's Apprentice

Source: Assassin's Apprentice

People

“I have learned that the consequences of our past actions are always interesting; I have learned to view the present with a forward-looking eye.”

John Irving book A Prayer for Owen Meany

Source: A Prayer for Owen Meany

Learning, Past

“The trouble with anger is, it gets hold of you. And then you aren't the master of yourself anymore. Anger is. And when anger is the boss, you get unintended consequences.”

Jeanne DuPrau The City of Ember

Source: The City of Ember

Anger

“It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) Scottish physician and author

“We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“We are free to choose our actions,… but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.”

Stephen R. Covey (1932–2012) American educator, author, businessman and motivational speaker

“From what I have observed, when the anesthesia of love wears off, there is always the pain of consequences. You don't have to be stupid to marry the wrong man.”

Amy Tan book Saving Fish from Drowning

Source: Saving Fish from Drowning

Love, Pain, Stupidity

“A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Personality, For Men

“This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.”

David Sedaris When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Source: When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Truth, World, Understanding

“One way to define wisdom is the ability to see, into the future, the consequences of your choices in the present. That ability can give you a completely different perspective on what the future might look like.”

Andy Andrews (1959) author and corporate speaker

Source: The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective

Wisdom, Way, Future

“It's a choice, Annabel. And if you make the wrong one, you have only yourself to blame when there are consequences.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

“Do not let your zeal for the cause of democracy deceive you as to the fact of the opaque ignorance in which the great bulk of the people of England are wrapt. If you write for the masses politically, and write soundly and honestly, they will not be able at present to appreciate you, and consequently will not support you…There is no remedy for all this but improved education. Such as the tail and the body are, such will be the character of the head. Nature does not produce such monsters as an ignorant or vicious community, and virtuous and wise leaders. In Scotland you are better off because you are better educated. The great body of the English peasants are not a jot advanced in intellect since the days of their Saxon ancestors. I hope you will join us in a cry for schoolmasters as a first step to Radicalism.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Letter to W. Tait (17 August 1838), quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), p. 127.
1830s

People, Education, Hope, Democracy

“The assertion that art may be good art and at the same time incomprehensible to a great number of people is extremely unjust, and its consequences are ruinous to art itself…it is the same as saying some kind of food is good but most people can't eat it.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

People, Food, Art, Time

“This situation [alienation] can therefore [according to Durkheim] be remedied by providing the individual with a moral awareness of the social importance of his particular role in the division of labour. He is then no longer an alienated automaton. but is a useful part of an organic whole: ‘from that time, as special and uniform as his activity may be, it is that of an intelligent being, for it has direction, and he is aware of it.’ This is entirely consistent with Durkheim’s general account of the growth of the division of labour, and its relationship to human freedom. It is only through moral acceptance in his particular role in the division of labour that the individual is able to achieve a high degree of autonomy as a self-conscious being, and can escape both the tyranny of rigid moral conformity demanded in undifferentiated societies on the one hand and the tyranny of unrealisable desires on the other.
Not the moral integration of the individual within a differentiated division of labour but the effective dissolution of the division of labour as an organising principle of human social intercourse, is the premise of Marx’s conception. Marx nowhere specifies in detail how this future society would be organised socially, but, at any rate,. this perspective differs decisively from that of Durkheim. The vision of a highly differentiated division of labour integrated upon the basis of moral norms of individual obligation and corporate solidarity. is quite at variance with Marx’s anticipation of the future form of society.
According to Durkheim’s standpoint. the criteria underlying Marx’s hopes for the elimination of technological alienation represent a reversion to moral principles which are no longer appropriate to the modern form of society. This is exactly the problem which Durkheim poses at the opening of The Division of Labour: ‘Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being. one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism?’ The analysis contained in the work, in Durkheim’s view, demonstrates conclusively that organic solidarity is the ‘normal’ type in modern societies, and consequently that the era of the ‘universal man’ is finished. The latter ideal, which predominated up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in western Europe is incompatible with the diversity of the contemporary order. In preserving this ideal. by contrast. Marx argues the obverse: that the tendencies which are leading to the destruction of capitalism are themselves capable of effecting a recovery of the ‘universal’ properties of man. which are shared by every individual.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 230-231.

Hope, Intelligence, Problem, Decision

“Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 28

Life, God, Water, Wine

“Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“We fight wars not to have peace, but to have a peace worth having. Slavery is peace. Tyranny is peace. For that matter, genocide is peace when you get right down to it. The historical consequences of a philosophy predicated on the notion of no war at any cost are families flying to the Super Bowl accompanied by three or four trusted slaves and a Europe devoid of a single living Jew.”

Bill Whittle (1959) author, director, screenwriter, editor

HISTORY https://web.archive.org/web/20030401221233/http://ejectejecteject.com/archives/000039.html (29 March 2003) 2000s

War, Family, Peace, Fight

“As he continued to talk to me, I realized one of the fundamental points about Islamism that so many people fail to understand. The way Osman was speaking wasn’t in the orthodox, religious way of the imam with a stick; he was talking about politics, about events that were happening now. That’s crucial to understanding what Islamism is all about: it isn’t a religious movement with political consequences, it is a political movement with religious consequences.”

Maajid Nawaz book Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism

Source: Radical: My Journey out of Islamist Extremism (2012), p. 62

People, Way, Understanding

“The philosophy of Kant, then, is the only philosophy with which a thorough acquaintance is directly presupposed in what we have to say here. But if, besides this, the reader has lingered in the school of the divine Plato, he will be so much the better prepared to hear me, and susceptible to what I say. And if, indeed, in addition to this he is a partaker of the benefit conferred by the Vedas, the access to which, opened to us through the Upanishads, is in my eyes the greatest advantage which this still young century enjoys over previous ones, because I believe that the influence of the Sanscrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century: if, I say, the reader has also already received and assimilated the sacred, primitive Indian wisdom, then is he best of all prepared to hear what I have to say to him. My work will not speak to him, as to many others, in a strange and even hostile tongue; for, if it does not sound too vain, I might express the opinion that each one of the individual and disconnected aphorisms which make up the Upanishads may be deduced as a consequence from the thought I am going to impart, though the converse, that my thought is to be found in the Upanishads, is by no means the case.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book The World as Will and Representation

:s:The World as Will and Representation/Preface to the First Edition Kants Philosophie also ist die einzige, mit welcher eine gründliche Bekanntschaft bei dem hier Vorzutragenden gradezu vorausgesetzt wird. — Wenn aber überdies noch der Leser in der Schule des göttlichen Platon geweilt hat; so wird er um so besser vorbereitet und empfänglicher seyn mich zu hören. Ist er aber gar noch der Wohllhat der Veda's theilhaft geworden, deren uns durch die Upanischaden eröfneter Zugang, in meinen Augen, der größte Vorzug ist, den dieses noch junge Jahrhundert vor den früheren aufzuweisen hat, indem ich vermuthe, daß der Einfluß der Samskrit-Litteratur nicht weniger tief eingreifen wird, als im 14ten Jahrhundert die Wiederbelebung der Griechischen: hat also, sage ich, der Leser auch schon die Weihe uralter Indischer Weisheit empfangen und empfänglich aufgenommen; dann ist er auf das allerbeste bereitet zu hören, was ich ihm vorzutragen habe. Ihn wird es dann nicht, wie manchen Andern fremd, ja feindlich ansprechen; da ich, wenn es nicht zu stolz klänge, behaupten möchte, daß jeder von den einzelnen und abgerissenen Aussprüchen, welche die Upanischaden ausmachen, sich als Folgesatz aus dem von mir mitzutheilenden Gedanken ableiten ließe, obgleich keineswegs auch umgekehrt dieser schon dort zu finden ist. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig 1819. Vorrede. pp.XII-XIII books.google https://books.google.de/books?id=0HsPAAAAQAAJ&pg=PR12 The World as Will and Representation (1819; 1844; 1859)

Wisdom, Hostility, School, Literature

“All sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

The Awakening (1899)

Life, Fate, Reality, Sense

“Like Christianity, Buddhism explained suffering. In forms that established themselves in China, Buddhism offered the same sort of comfort to bereaved survivors and victims of violence or of disease as Christian faith did in the Roman world. Buddhism of course originated in India, where disease incidence was probably always very high as compared with civilizations based in cooler climates; Christianity, too, took shape in the urban environments of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria where the incidence of infectious disease was certainly very high as compared to conditions in cooler and less crowded places. From their inception, therefore, both faiths had to deal with sudden death by disease as one of the conspicuous facts of human life. Consequently, it is not altogether surprising that both religions taught that death was a release from pain, and a blessed avenue of entry upon a delightful afterlife where loved ones would be reunited, and earthly injustices and pains amply compensated for.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.3.

Love, Life, Death, Pain

“One of the most helpful things I introduced (and of very considerable consequence to Canadians) was my ultimate success in persuading my colleagues (after continuing battle)to reduce the qualifying age for aged pensioners from seventy to sixty-five over a five year period.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 6, The crisis of Confederation, p. 119

Age, Success, Help

“No particular results then, so far, but only an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lecture II, What Pragmatism Means
1900s, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)

“That discipline which corrects the baseness of worldly passion, fortifies the heart with virtuous principles, enlightens the mind with useful knowledge, and furnishes it with enjoyment from within itself, is of more consequence to real felicity, than all the provision we can make of the goods of fortune.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 109.

Knowledge, Passion, Heart

“The experience was an exciting one for me. It illustrated that writing was about risk—about risking everything. And that the value of the writing is not in what you publish but in its consequences. If you set out to describe reality, then the influence of the writing is upon reality.”

Ryszard Kapuściński (1932–2007) Polish historian

A 1989 interview with Granta magazine founder Bill Buford. Reprinted in Adbusters Magazine #71.

Reality

“Man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.”

Alvin Toffler book Future Shock

Future Shock (1970), ch. 15

Change, Future

“Plato and his objectivistic successors … preserved the awareness of differences that pragmatism has been invented to deny—the difference between thinking in the laboratory and in philosophy, and consequently the difference between the destination of mankind and its present course.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 53.

Thinking

“Bottom trawls—large bag-shaped nets towed over the sea floor—account for more of the world's catch of fish, shrimp, squid, and other marine animals than any other fishing method. But trawling also disturbs the sea floor more than any other human activity, with increasingly devastating consequences for the world's fish population.”

Carl Safina (1955) American biologist

[Scorched-Earth Fishing, Issues in Science and Technology, 14, 3, Spring 1998, 33–36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43313863]

World, Fish, Animals, Sea

“If we reelect President Bush we are endorsing his policies and we shall have to live with the consequences. We are facing a vicious circle of escalating violence with no end in sight. If we reject him at the polls we shall have a better chance to regain the respect and support of the world and break the vicious circle. Our future depends on it.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Speech at the National Press Club (2004)

World, Support, Chance, Future

“People are often reproached because their desires are directed mainly to money and they are fonder of it than of anything else. Yet it is natural and even inevitable for them to love that which, as an untiring Proteus, is ready at any moment to convert itself into the particular object of our fickle desires and manifold needs. Thus every other blessing can satisfy only one desire and one need; for instance, food is good only to the hungry, wine only for the healthy, medicine for the sick, a fur coat for winter, women for youth, and so on. Consequently, all these are only … relatively good. Money alone is the absolutely good thing because it meets not merely one need in concreto, but needs generally in abstracto.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Love, Women, Money, People

“But, yesterday, the same man-made forms of law, declared it a crime punishable with $1,000 fine and six months' imprisonment, for you, or me, or any of us, to give a cup of cold water, a crust of bread, or a night's shelter to a panting fugitive as he was tracking his way to Canada. And every man or woman in whose veins coursed a drop of human sympathy violated that wicked law, reckless of consequences, and was justified in so doing.”

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) American women's rights activist

An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony on the Charge of Illegal Voting] (1874)
Trial on the charge of illegal voting (1874)

Law, Way, Water, Night

“Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of "eccentricity" it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearless or too indifferent to think of consequences.”

Dinah Craik (1826–1887) English novelist and poet

Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 9

Fools, Thinking, Indifference

“If the right hon. Baronet [Peel] chooses to retire from office in consequence of this vote, he carries with him the esteem and gratitude of a larger number of the population of this Empire than ever followed any Minister that was ever hurled from power…I am not misinterpreting the opinion of the people, not only of the electors, but especially of the working classes, when I tender the right hon. Baronet, in my own name, as I might do in theirs, my heartfelt thanks for the unwearied perseverance, the unswerving firmness, and the great ability with which he has during the last six months conducted one of the most magnificent reforms ever carried in any country, through this House of Commons.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1846/jun/25/protection-of-life-ireland-bill in the House of Commons (25 June 1846). 1840s

People, Housing, Perseverance, Country

“Nations are represented by their poets and their writers in the open competition for the Nobel Prize. Consequently the award of the Prize by the Academy glorifies not only the author but the people whose son he is, and it bears witness that that nation has a share in the universal achievement, that its efforts are fruitful, and that it has the right to live for the profit of mankind. If this honour is premous to all, it is infinitely more so to Poland. It has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph. Like Galileo, one is forced to think when before the eyes of the world homage has been rendered to the importance of Poland's achievement and her genius.”

Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) Polish journalist, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, and philanthropist

Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1905)

Life, People, World, Thinking

“For there have been some people, otherwise good and holy, who saw that intemperance and luxury time and again drive man to throw off all restraints unless he is curbed by the utmost severity. And in their desire to correct such a pernicious evil they have adopted the only method which they saw fit, namely to permit earthly blessings only insofar as they were an absolute necessity. This advice showed the best of intentions but was far too rigid. For they committed the very dangerous error of imposing on the consequence of others stricter rules than those laid down in the Word of the Lord. By restricting people within the demands of necessity, they meant abstinence from everything possible. On the other hand, there are many nowadays who seek a pretext to excuse intemperance in the use of the external things, and who desire to indulge the lusts of the flesh. Such people take for granted that liberty should not be restricted by any limitations at all; but to this we can never agree. We must grant, indeed, that it is not right or possible to bind the consciences of others with hard and fast rules.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Page 85.
Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life (1551)

People, Error, Evil, Time

“Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Failure, Thinking, Success

“After all, if you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe, in other words, that all art is morally trivial and that, consequently, all education is morally irrelevant. No one, not even a university professor, really believes that.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1971.
1970s

Books, Education, Art, Universe

“Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death's face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn introduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years. On each one of these days the soul suffers violence. Regularly, each morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way. Thus war effaces all conceptions of purpose or goal, including even its own "war aims." It effaces the very notion of war's being brought to an end. Consequently, nobody does anything to bring this end about. In the presence of an armed enemy, what hand can relinquish its weapon? The mind ought to find a way out, but the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence. Always in human life, whether war or slavery is in question, intolerable sufferings continue, as it were, by the force of their own specific gravity, and so look to the outsider as though they deprived the sufferer of the resources which might serve to extricate him.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 181

Life, Death, War, Way

“We were never involved in politics. It was the political party that pushed their agenda, the Bill, forward and we only reacted to the consequences the Bill would bring.”

Frank Bainimarama (1954) Prime Minister of Fiji

2000, Reaction to calls from Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for the Military to stay out of politics (30 September 2005)

“If consequences are removed from enough actions, then the very concept of human agency evaporates, life itself becomes meaningless, and is thenceforth a vacuum in which people oscillate between boredom and oblivion.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy (2006)

Life, People

“My feeling is that Darwinism is only at best a partial solution, and an extremely dangerous partial solution. I would say, based on the little I know, Darwinism explains microevolution within species quite well. As to its broader consequence and implications, I don't think it explains individual species evolution at all well.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Science and Society: March 2008, ABC Science and Society: Ben Stein Holds Court, 31 March 2008, 2008-04-18 http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2008/03/index.html,

Feeling, Thinking

“I’m acquainted with a, uh, gentleman who claims that the extent to which a society focuses on the needs of its lowest common denominator is the extent to which that society’ll be mired in mediocrity. Whereas, if we would aim the bulk of our support at the brightest, most talented, most virtuous instead, then they would have the wherewithal to solve a lot of our problems, to uplift the whole culture, enlighten it or something, so that eventually there wouldn’t be so many losers and weaklings impeding evolution and dragging the whole species down. He claims that martyrs like you just perpetuate human misery by catering to it. He believes individuals have to take responsibility for their own lives and accept the consequences of their choices.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Support, Problem

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

4 quotes from: 'The Color in my Painting'
Homage to the square' (1964)

Color, Painting, Dependency

“If the power of government be very extensive, and the subjects of it have, consequently, little power over their own actions, that government is tyrannical, and oppressive; whether, with respect to its form, it be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or even a republic.”

Joseph Priestley book Essay on the First Principles of Government

Section III, "Of Civil Liberty"
Essay on the First Principles of Government, 2nd Edition (1771)

“The function of knowledge in the decision-making process is to determine which consequences follow upon which of the alternative strategies. It is the task of knowledge to select from the whole class of possible consequences a more limited subclass, or even (ideally) a single set of consequences correlated with each strategy.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 78.

Knowledge, Decision

“In order for a slave--or, for that matter, a slaveholder--to become free, a series of successive perceptions must be realized. First, the person must perceive that the owners (and slaves) are merely human, that is, putting all rhetoric aside, that there exists a dichotomy of privilege and exploitation, and that the privilege is a result of exploitation. … The second realization is, once again, that the owners and slaves are merely human, meaning this time that the exploitation and consequent privilege are not inevitable, but the result of social arrangements and force (as well as a huge dollop of bad luck on the part of those enslaved). … The third realization is yet again that the owners are merely human, by which I now mean they are vulnerable. Wealth does not protect them.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 63

Bad luck, Time, Success, Parting

“The problem creationists have with evolution is not that it challenges belief in God, because it doesn’t. Their problem is that evolution, -like every other field of science- challenges the accuracy and authority of the storybooks which creationists equate to God. Consequently, they tend to reject science almost entirely, and will often take all the sciences they perceive as threatening, and lump them all together under one heading, which they then refer to as “evolution-ism”. It’s an attempt to minimize the sheer volume of sciences allied against them. This is also part of their intentionally-erected illusion of equality; a false dichotomy that if their legendary folklore isn’t the absolute authority -being both literally and completely true, then God couldn’t create or even exist any other way.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"6th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3k0dDFxkhM, Youtube (February 2, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

God, Way, Problem, Science