This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities." - Josiah Stamp, Josiah Charles Stamp, 1st Baron Stamp, Lord Stamp
"A religious man is guided in his activity not by the consequences of his action, but by the consciousness of the destination of his life." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"The most human thing we have to do in life is is to learn to speak our honest convictions and feelings and live with the consequences. This is the first requirement of love, and it makes us vulnerable to other people who may ridicule us. But our vulnerability is the only thing we can give to other people." -
"Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune." - William James
"It will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, and improvidence, or want of application" - Samuel Smiles
"Let's face it. Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you're attacked, but along, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man - war, poverty and tyranny - and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson
"Let's face it. Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you're attacked, but along, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man - war, poverty and tyranny - and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each." -
"Let's face it. Let's talk sense to the American people. Let's tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains, that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you're attacked, but along, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man - war, poverty and tyranny - and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each." -
"All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly." - Albert Camus
"The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions." - Albert Camus
"The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions. Everything is permitted does not mean that nothing is forbidden. The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions." -
"Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Nature imitates herself. A grain thrown into good ground brings forth fruit; a principle thrown into a good mind brings forth fruit. Everything is created and conducted by the same Master; the root, the branch, the fruits - the principles, the consequences." - Blaise Pascal
"Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think there are no little things." - Bruce Barton
"When anger rises, think of the consequences." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you - out of love - takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice. The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice, is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences yourself." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who forgives you -- out of love--takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of consequences." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"As never before, the essence of war is fire, famine and pestilence. They contribute to its outbreak; they are among its weapons; they become its consequences." - Dwight Eisenhower, fully Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
"Terrible consequences there will always be when the mean vices attempt to mimic the grand passions. Great men will never do great mischief but for some great end." - Edmund Burke
"It is not true that the relations between the sexes are of the same order with the rest of man’s instincts. They have social consequences which place them in a class apart." - Ernest Dimnet
"Repentance… is recoil, recoil not from the bad act and its painful consequences, but from the principle underlying the act." - Felix Adler
"Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclination we have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices, bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He sails henceforth for one point of the compass." - George Santayana
"Everyone will experience the consequences of his own acts. If his acts are right, he will get good consequences; if they are not, he will suffer for it." - Harry Browne, fully Harry Edson Browne
"History is not, of course, a cookbook offering pretested recipes. It teaches by analogy, not by maxims. It can illuminate the consequences of actions in comparable situations, yet each generation must discover for itself what situations are in fact comparable." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"[Central Intelligence Agency] analysts were only too aware that no one has ever been penalized for not having foreseen an opportunity, but that many careers have been blighted for not predicting a risk. Therefore the intelligence community has always been tempted to forecast dire consequences for any conceivable course of action, an attitude that encourages paralysis rather than adventurism." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their action." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"Mankind will never know what it was spared because of the risks avoided or because of actions taken that averted awful consequences – if only because once thwarted the consequences can never be proved." - Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
"It is an undoubted fact that an overwhelming majority of religious persecutors have been men of the purest intentions, of the most admirable and unsullied morals… Such men as these are not bad, they are only ignorant; ignorant of the nature of truth, ignorant of the consequences of their own acts." - Henry Thomas Buckle
"It is the function of parents to see that their children habitually experience the true consequences of their conduct." - Herbert Spencer
"Of all the ingenious mistakes into which erring man has fallen, perhaps none have been so pernicious in their consequences, or have brought so many; evils into the world, as the popular opinion that the way of the transgressor is pleasant and easy." - Hosea Ballou
"What action would promote happiness of a rational being is completely insoluble, and consequently no imperative respect it is possible which should, in the strict sense, command to do what makes happy; because happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination, resting solely on empirical grounds, and it is vain to expect that these should define an action by which one could attain the totality of a series of consequences which is really endless." - Immanuel Kant
"There is no wickedness so desperate or deceptive - we can never foresee its consequences. Of all the evil spirits abroad in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous." - James Froude, fully James Anthony Froude
"Success often comes to those who dare and act; it seldom goes to the timid who are ever afraid of the consequences." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"Voluntary simplicity keeps me mindful of what is important, of an ecology of mind and body and world in which everything is interconnected and every choice has far-reaching consequences. You don’t get to control it at all. But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life an element of deepest freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more." - Jon Kabat-Zinn
"Infants instinctively resist enculturation because they intuitively sense in it a denial of life that robs us of our spirit and our loving, willing, thinking, being. Resistance is futile. Without exception, these cultural techniques involve carefully masked threats that prey upon the child’s rapidly learned fear of pain, harm, or deprivation, and more primal anxiety over separation or alienation from parent, caregiver, or society. “Do this or you will suffer the consequences.” This threat, in fact, underlies every facet of our life from our first potty training through university exams." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"We generally prefer our illusions to reality, even though the illusions may lead to tragic consequences... How much of our psychic energy is channeled away by those who drain our lives to enrich theirs." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"More consequences for thought and action follow from the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other question." - Mortimer J. Adler, fully Mortimer Jerome Adler
"God... created man; He has also created the circumstances under which he lives and acts; but still He has endowed man with discretion to choose how to act... And as he can exercise his discretion or his will in doing a thing or not doing it, he is responsible for his own deeds, and made to suffer the consequences." - Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.
"Now, we shall be able to judge the extent of the spiritual undernourishment if we look at all these movements from another angle: not as errors but rather as attempts to find healing. I use this comparison: For a long time medical men combated fever as if it itself constituted the illness. Medicine today inclines rather to respect it, not only as a symptom of the disease but of the struggle of the organism against the disease. True, it is this struggle which makes it ill, and yet this very struggle is also the proof of its vitality and is the necessary way to healing." - Paul Tournier
"Most illnesses do not, as is generally thought, come like a bolt out of the blue. The ground is prepared for years, through faulty diet, intemperance, overwork, and moral conflicts, slowly eroding the subject’s vitality. And when at last the illness suddenly shows itself, it would be a most superficial medicine which treated it without going back to its remote causes, to all that I call “personal problems.” There are personal problems in every life. There are secret tragedies in every heart. “Man does not die,” a doctor has remarked. “He kills himself”... Every act of physical, psychological, or moral disobedience of God’s purpose is an act of wrong living and has its inevitable consequences." - Paul Tournier
"In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"Our actions are our own; their consequences belong to Heaven." - Saint Francis de Sales NULL
"Faith is not trying to believe something regardless of the evidence. Faith is daring to do something regardless of the consequences." - Sherwood Eddy, born George Sherwood Eddy
"People who have no strong belief in a life after this one will create a society fixated on short-term results, without much thought for the consequences of their actions." - Sogyal Rinpoche
"AIDS obliges people to thin of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences: suicide. Or murder." - Susan Sontag
"A just war is in the long run far better for a nation’s soul than the most prosperous peace obtained by acquiescence toward wrong or injustice. Moreover, though it is criminal for a nation not to prepare for war, so that it may escape the dreadful consequences of being defeated in war, it must always be remembered that even to be defeated in war is far better than never to have fought at all." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt
"Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"Duty is above all consequences, and often, at a crisis of difficulty, commands us to throw them overboard. It commands us to look neither to the right, nor to the left, but straight onward. Hence every act of duty is an act of faith. It is performed in the assurance that God will take care of the consequences, and will so order the course of the world, that, whatever the immediate results may be, His word shall not return to Him void." - Aubrey de Vere, fully Aubrey Albericus de Vere NULL