29 Motives Quotes

I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty as a professed philanthropist.

Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

Men who content themselves with the semblance of truth, and a display of words, talk much of our obligations to Great Britain for protection. Had she a single eye to our advantage? A nation of shopkeepers are very seldom so disinterested.

I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.

The force which makes for war does not derive its strength from the interested motives of evil men; it derives its strength from the disinterested motives of good men. Pacifists have sometimes evaded that truth as making too great a concession to Mars, as seeming to imply (which it does not in fact) that in order to abolish war, men must cease to be noble. Base motives are, of course, among those which make up the forces that produce war. Base motives are among those which get great cathedrals built and hospitals constructed-contractors' profit-seeking, the vested interests of doctors and clergy. But Europe has not been covered by cathedrals because contractors wanted to make money, or priests wanted jobs.

I believed in my own heart that it was necessary. But I also hated him. Will I ever be sure that I didn't do it because of that hatred, that longing for vengeance? I fear that I will always suspect that I am an assassin in my heart.

Are men's lives nothing but the secretions of overactive glands?

Jackson fought for the constitutional rights of the South, and any one who imagines he fought for slavery knows nothing of Jackson.

We might add now that we do have an authoritative account of why the United States bombed Serbia in 1999. It comes from Strobe Talbott, now the director of the Brookings Institution, but in 1999 he was in charge of the State Department-Pentagon team that supervised the diplomacy in the affair. He wrote the introduction to a recent book by his Director of Communications, John Norris, which presents the position of the Clinton administration at the time of the bombing. Norris writes that 'it was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform - not the plight of Kosovar Albanians - that best explains NATO's war'. In brief, they were resisting absorption into the U.S. dominated international socioeconomic system. Talbott adds that thanks to John Norris, anyone interested in the war in Kosovo 'will know ... how events looked and felt at the time to those of us who were involved' in the war, actually directing it. This authoritative explanation will come as no surprise at all to students of international affairs who are more interested in fact than rhetoric. And it will also come as no surprise, to those familiar with intellectual life, that the attack continues to be hailed as a grand achievement of humanitarian intervention, despite massive Western documentation to the contrary, and now an explicit denial at the highest level; which will change nothing, it's not the way intellectual life works.

What I hypocrite I am. To pretend that my motives are pure

I found out from their memories just what kind of person each was. Some were haters, the sort of people you'd expect to find in any conspiracy to kill. Others were merely afraid, others were dedicated to a cause - but I didn't care that much why they had wanted me dead. I needed to know more the purposes of their lives, what made them choose their choices

That he delights in the misery of others no man will confess, and yet what other motive can make a father cruel?

It has been said that the people of this country are deeply interested in the humanitarian and philanthropic considerations involved in [the Eastern Question]. All must appreciate such feelings. But I am mistaken if there be not a yet deeper sentiment on the part of the people of this country, one with which I cannot doubt your lordships will ever sympathise, and that is-the determination to maintain the Empire of England.

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions. (p. 402)

Ce que nous prenons pour des vertus n'est souvent qu'un assemblage de diverses actions et de divers interets, que la fortune ou notre industrie savent arranger; et ce n'est pas toujours par valeur et par chastete que les hommes sont vaillants, et que les femmes sont chastes.

L'interet parle toutes sortes de langues, et joue toutes sortes de personnages, meme celui de desinteresse.

On ne loue d'ordinaire que pour etre loue.

The principle saboteur, the man with the cheap fistful of dollars.

This insinuation of the interests of the self into even the most ideal enterprises and most universal objectives, envisaged in moments of highest rationality, makes hypocrisy an inevitable by product of all virtuous endeavor.

If tempted by something that feels 'altruistic,' examine your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, They arrive at their conclusions - largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none: But sometimes in a smoking-room, one learns why things were done.