Selected consequence quotes

1. Victory is for them, not for us. We have not made profit out of our country's misfortune. Victory does not bring us luck.

2. You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips.

3. Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma.

4. Ambition! powerful source of good and ill!

5. What do you tell a man with two black eyes? Nothing, he's already been told twice.

6. Don't order one for the road, because the road is already laid out.

7. Perhaps, if prematurely we dismiss ourselves from this world, all may even have to be suffered through again - the premature birth may not contribute to the production of another being, which must be begun again from the beginning.

8. War is a series of catastrophes that results in a victory.

9. Small habits well pursued betimes May reach the dignity of crimes.

10. I was right to back Muhammad Ali, but it caused me major enmity in many areas of this nation.

11. What love we've given, we'll have forever. What love we fail to give, will be lost for all eternity.

12. Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

13. It is the downfall of evil, that it never sees far enough ahead.

14. Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.

15. Yesterday I parked my car in a tow-away zone...when I came back the entire area was missing.

16. Intemperance is naturally punished with diseases; rashness, with mischance; injustice; with violence of enemies; pride, with ruin; cowardice, with oppression; and rebellion, with slaughter.

17. Every minute that we lose will cost us great losses later that we will not be able to afford.

18. Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

19. A fool and his words are soon parted.

20. Satisfaction linked with dishonor or with harm to others is a prison for the seeker.

21. Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

22. 'We lived in places that we never knew. We could not name the birds perched on our sill, Or see the trees we cut down for our view. What we possessed we always chose to kill. 'We claimed the earth but did not hear her claim, And when we died, they laid us on her breast, But she refuses us - until we earn Forgiveness from the lives we dispossessed.'

23. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.

24. There are no second acts in American lives.

25. And if I drink oblivion of a day, So shorten I the stature of my soul.

26. It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

27. People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become, and they pay for it, very simply, by the lives they lead.

28. What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

29. Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this: WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP Only he didn't say 'doggone.''

30. None but the dead have free speech.

31. An unforgiving eye, and a damned disinheriting countenance.

32. 'The problem with living outside the law is that you no longer have its protection'

33. Facilis descensus Averni: noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras. hoc opus, hic labor est.

34. Flagrant evils cure themselves by being flagrant.

35. 'Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.'

36. On the king's gate the moss grew gray; The king came not. They called him dead And made his eldest son one day Slave in his father's stead.

37. We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and along these fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

38. The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.

39. I carry the seeds of death with me and plant them wherever I linger long enough to love. My parents died so others could live; now I live, so others must die.

40. The greatest penalty of evildoing is to grow into the likeness of bad men.

41. Success is more dangerous than failure, the ripples break over a wider coastline.

42. Failure too is a form of death.

43. He who hesitates is sometimes saved.

44. Brer Rabbit keep on axin' 'im, en de Tar-Baby, she keep on sayin' nothin', twel present'y Brer Rabbit draw back wid his fis', he did, en blip he tuck 'er side er de head. Right dar's whar he broke his merlasses jug. His fis' stuck, en he can't pull loose. De tar hilt 'im.

45. Youk'n hide de fier, but w'at you gwine do wid de smoke?

46. The spirits that I summoned up I now can't rid myself of.

47. Who ever loves, if he do not propose The right true end of love, he's one that goes To sea for nothing but to make him sick.

48. I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying to numb things. I was trying not to feel things, and that's ridiculous. It's one of the dumbest things you can do, because all you're doing is postponing the inevitable. Someday you'll have to look all those things in the eye rather than try to numb the pain. (2004)

49. He made a mistake, you know? And if he hadn't done this particular thing that night, it wouldn't have been... but he was... it happened. (1995)

50. You have reason to wonder that you are not already in hell.

51. Hatred, slavery's inevitable aftermath.

52. I shall add that only he who has decided to commit suicide can start a nuclear war in the hope of emerging a victor from it. No matter what the attacker might possess, no matter what method of unleashing nuclear war he chooses, he will not attain his aims. Retribution will inevitably ensue.

53. God will not forgive us if we fail.

54. The spectacle of a field of battle after the combat is sufficient to inspire princes with the love of peace and the horror of war.

55. Understand this law and you will then know, beyond room for the slightest doubt, that you are constantly punishing yourself for every wrong you commit and rewarding yourself for every act of constructive conduct in which you indulge.

56. If someone puts up the argument that King Louis gave the Romagna to Pope Alexander, and the kingdom of Naples to Spain, in order to avoid a war, I would answer as I did before: that you should never let things get out of hand in order to avoid war. You don't avoid such a war, you merely postpone it, to your own disadvantage.

57. The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that died.

58. Sooner or later we have all to pay for what we do.

59. Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.

60. There are some remedies worse than the disease.

61. The end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

62. People don't forget, do they?

63. For all we take we must pay, but the price is cruel high.

64. 'I got nothing to say to you. Just park my damn truck, and if you scratch it, you're gonna get your ass whipped.' (Austin to Michael Cole, when he arrived at the Royal Rumble 1998.)

65. 'Your telling me, Stone Cold Steve Austin turns up the voltage, you don't wanna be my friend no more.' (To Jim Ross)

66. Whatever the dangers of the action we take, the dangers of inaction are far, far greater.

67. I have had direct experience of this myself. Often, what the press wrote, or did not write, about a remark I made somewhere proved to be of a far greater consequence than the remark itself. Democratic choice in such cases ceases to be a choice between alternatives people are familiar with, and have personally tried, and becomes a choice between alternatives offered by those who run the media.

68. I had long since insisted upon interpreting the things that Fate forced me to do as victories of my own will and intelligence, and now this bad habit had grown into a sort of frenzied arrogance. In the nature of what I was calling my intelligence there was a touch of something illegitimate, a touch of the sham pretender who has been placed on the throne by some freak chance. This dolt of a usurper could not foresee the revenge that would inevitably be wreaked upon his stupid despotism.

69. When the Knock of the Spirit sounds we follow or perish

70. Invitat culpam qui peccatum praeterit