Selected intent quotes

1. Every program has two purposes: The one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

2. There is no reason why humanity cannot be served equally by weighty and trivial motives.

3. Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.

4. If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

5. I think there is some methodology in my travels.

6. I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.

7. Really to sin you have to be serious about it.

8. If a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.

9. Let us distinguish between acting intentionally and acting deliberately or on purpose, as far as this can be done by attending to what language can teach us.

10. My aim in helping the patient was not to cause death. My aim was to end suffering. It's got to be decriminalized.

11. Anybody can do anything, it's up to themselves. All it takes is the right intentions.

12. The growth of one blesses all. I am commited to grow in love. All that I touch, I leave in love. I move through this world consciously and creatively.

13. There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. ... As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the words, and try to divine how they would have dealt with the unforeseen situation; and, although their words are by far the most decisive evidence of what they would have done, they are by no means final.

14. The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

15. I don't intend for this to take on a political tone. I'm just here for the drugs.

16. If you look at the world with parted lips and a pure heart, and will the good, won't that make a true and beautiful poem? One's heart tells one that it will; and one's heart is wrong. There is no direct road to Parnassus.

17. When you cook it should be an act of love. To put a frozen bag in the microwave for your child is an act of hate.

18. I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.

19. The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

20. I would still invade Iraq even if Iraq never existed.

21. It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

22. Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift. It is so nearly what would please me I cannot but perfect it.

23. The hand that rounded Peter's dome, And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, Wrought in a sad sincerity, Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, The conscious stone to beauty grew.

24. What did Doctor Doom really want? He wanted to rule the world. Now, think about this. You could walk across the street against a traffic light and get a summons for jaywalking, but you could walk up to a police officer and say 'I want to rule the world,' and there's nothing he can do about it, that is not a crime. Anybody can want to rule the world. So, even though he was the Fantastic Four's greatest menace, in my mind, he was never a criminal!

25. A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.

26. A truth that's told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.

27. The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts: but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?

28. The success of love is in the loving - it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done.

29. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

30. I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of first introducing it into minds which were ignorant of its charms.

31. If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

32. Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.

33. I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. This might earn me some enemies, but in some ways they may be even more moral. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.

34. No-one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well.

35. Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

36. It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the doing. It is not how much we give, but how much love we put in the giving.

37. Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

38. Having heard, or more probably read somewhere, in the days when I thought I would be well advised to educate myself, or amuse myself, or stupefy myself, or kill time, that when a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble: and if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.

39. Veracity does not consist in saying, but in the intention of communicating truth.

40. I wrote a few children's books...not on purpose.

41. Anything can happen someday, even that an act conforming to honour and honesty can end up, at the end of the line, as a good political decision.

42. It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

43. There is no art when one does something without intention.

44. You never can tell when you do an act Just what the result will be; But with every deed you are sowing a seed, Though the harvest you may not see. Each kindly act is an acorn dropped In God's productive soil; You may not know, yet the tree shall grow And shelter the brows that toil. You never can tell what your thoughts will do In bringing you hate or love; For thoughts are things, and their airy wings Are swifter than carrier doves. They follow the law of the universe- Each thing must create its kind; And they speed o'er the track to bring you back Whatever went out from your mind.

45. Faithful to the word given and the idea had. / All else is up to God!

46. L'homme croit souvent se conduire lorsqu'il est conduit; et pendant que par son esprit il tend a un but, son coeur l'entraine insensiblement a un autre.

47. But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera.

48. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

49. In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

50. My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

51. The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety. (p. 127)

52. I believe that producing pictures, as I do, is almost solely a question of wanting so very much to do it well.

53. I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me.

54. I never meant 'Come up and see me some time' to be sexy.

55. No man is exempt from saying silly things; the mischief is to say them deliberately.

56. All bad art is the result of good intentions.

57. I didn't think anything we did was spectacular. I remember we thought, 'Let's just write some scary music.'

58. When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism. We only wanted to express that which was within us.

59. He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion.

60. I don't know whether I like it, but it's what I meant.

61. You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.

62. 'Tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!

63. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.

64. A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are an part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren't carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that's the standard cultural attitude. But they don't carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.

65. I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

66. I believe that during the intervention of NATO in Kosovo exists one consideration no one doubts: the reason for the air attacks, the bombing is not a material interest. The reason is purely humanitarian.

67. All the several pleas and excuses, which protect the committer of a forbidden act from the punishment which is otherwise annexed thereto, may be reduced to this single consideration, the want or defect of will. An involuntary act, as it has no claim to merit, so neither can it induce any guilt: the concurrence of the will, when it has its choice either to do or to avoid the fact in question, being the only thing that renders human actions either praiseworthy or culpable. Indeed, to make a complete crime, cognizable by human laws, there must be both a will and an act.

68. Lord, for the erring thought Not into evil wrought: Lord, for the wicked will Betrayed and baffled still: For the heart from itself kept, Our thanksgiving accept.

69. We did not think that [Egyptian President] Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai on May 14 would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.

70. Clear in thinking, and clear in feeling, / and clear in wanting