37 Cause Quotes

A cause may be inconvenient, but it's magnificent. It's like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it.

A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.

Every individual is a center for the manifestation of a certain force. This force has been stored up as the resultant of our previous works, and each one of us is born with this force at our back.

No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.

The 'Terror' of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

For we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane. He pretended all this time that humans were rational beings, when we are really the most terrible monsters these poor creatures could ever have conceived of in their nightmares. They had no way of knowing the story of blind Samson, who pulled down the temple on his own head to slay his enemies.

Now, as ever, I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas's position, question his motives, or do aught that can be personally offensive to him. Whenever, if ever, he and we can come together on principle so that our cause may have assistance from his great ability, I hope to have interposed no adventitious obstacle. But clearly, he is not now with us - he does not pretend to be - he does not promise ever to be. Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends - those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work - who do care for the result.

Once for all, then, we are not opposed to the punishment of thieves and murderers; we are opposed to their manufacture.

Every Iraqi atrocity has confirmed the justice and the urgency of our cause. (Applause.) Against this enemy we will accept no outcome except complete victory.

Lord Byron and Shelley and Plunkett, McDonough and Hunt and Pearse See now why their hatred of tyrants Was so insistently fierce. Is Freedom only a Will-o'-the-wisp To cheat a poet's eye? Be it phantom or fact, it's a noble cause In which to sing and to die!

The divine tape recorder holds a million scenarios, each perfectly sensible. Little quirks at the outset, occurring for no particular reason, unleash cascades of consequences that make a particular feature seem inevitable in retrospect. But the slightest early nudge contacts a different groove, and history veers into another plausible channel, diverging continually from its original pathway. The end results are so different, the initial perturbation so apparently trivial.

Causa latet, vis est notissima

I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.

It is evident that everything which does not exist at first and then exists, is determined by something other than itself.

You are here to discuss a matter which is of extreme importance to yourselves, your families and your community, so let's get to the subject at hand. A hundred and fifty-five years ago, in the state of Guanajuato in Mexico, a padre proclaimed the struggle for liberty. He was killed, but ten years later Mexico won its independence. We Mexicans here in the United States, as well as all other farm workers, are engaged in another struggle for the freedom and dignity which poverty denies us. But it must not be a violent struggle, even if violence is used against us. Violence can only hurt us and our cause. The law is for us as well as the ranchers. The strike was begun by the Filipinos, but it is not exclusively for them. Tonight we must decide if we are to join our fellow workers.

These trends are part of the forces of history that cannot be stopped. No person and no organization can resist them for very long. They are inevitable. Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. Our opponents must understand that it's not just a union we have built. Unions, like other institutions, can come and go. But we're more than an institution. For nearly 20 years, our union has been on the cutting edge of a people's cause - and you cannot do away with an entire people; you cannot stamp out a people's cause.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Conclui, como se conclui sempre em Filosofia, que me encontrava diante duma Causa Primaria, portanto impenetravel.

Just as he who gives his life to serve a great idea is admirable, he who avails himself of a great idea to serve his personal hopes of glory and power is abominable, even if he too risks his life. To give one's life is a right only when one gives it unselfishly.

It is the cause, and not the death, that makes the martyr.

Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk in life.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless. To understand what happens now one must find the cause, which may be very long ago in its beginning, but is surely there, and therefore a knowledge of history as detailed as possible is essential if we are to comprehend the present and be prepared for the future. Fate, Mr. Kung taught me, is not the blind superstition or helplessness that waits stupidly for what may happen. Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.

'Well, who begun it?' That's what at the end of a war We always say not who won it, Or what it was foughten for.

The present is the necessary product of all the past, the necessary cause of all the future.

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

The only lost cause is one we give up on before we enter the struggle.

To settle this matter (heresy), I am determined to use my kingdoms and dominions, my friends, my body, my blood, my life and my soul.