Causal Chain Quotes

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

All is bound by the law of causation

If something were brought about without an antecedent cause, it would be untrue that all things come about through fate. But if it is plausible that all events have an antecedent cause, what ground can be offered for not conceding that all things come about through fate?

Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

One fault begets another; one crime renders another necessary.

Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.

In historical events great men — so-called — are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter.

Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'

What we call little things are merely the causes of great things.

Political history is not a sequence of incoherent and haphazard events but a chain of causes and effects.

The question of causality is complex. For some philosophers and physicists, time might not exist. And since cause-and-effect reasoning needs the concept of time - of one thing preceding another - the effort to establish causality is a mug's game, an infinite regression of increasingly unanswerable questions.

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?

The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.

Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand.

In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to another. Every mistake is in a sense the product of all the mistakes that have gone before it, from which fact it derives a sort of cosmic forgiveness; and at the same time every mistake is in a sense the determinant of all the mistakes of the future, from which it derives a sort of cosmic unforgivableness.

Every present state of a simple substance is the natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is big with its future.

Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.

The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate.

Everything we do, even the slightest thing we do, can have a ripple effect and repercussions that emanate. If you throw a pebble into the water on one side of the ocean, it can create a tidal wave on the other side.

Great crimes come never singly; they are linked To sins that went before.

When a body acts upon another one, it is always immediately or through some intermediate body; this intermediate body is in general what one calls a machine.

... we are the products of our past. ... a web of complexities.

When an individual changes in even a small way he immediately changes the world around him. And that concentric circle moves out and changes everything.

God, our genes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code at an ancient terminal - there's no way free will can ever exist if we as individuals are the result of some external cause.