Consequences of Actions Quotes

We've all made bad decisions, but they haven't always been resulting in the deaths of innocent people.

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

It is always man's ideas which drive his actions. This has, at times, resulted in great evil; but as we look around us, we cannot doubt that it has resulted in greater good.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

We are free to choose our actions, . . . but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.

Both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporary suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say 'Let me but have this and I'll take the consequences': little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

Each man lived his own life and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man, Destiny never closed her accounts.

Principles always have natural consequences attached to them. There are positive consequences when we live in harmony with the principles. There are negative consequences when we ignore them. But because these principles apply to everyone, whether or not they are aware, this limitation is universal. And the more we know of correct principles, the greater is our personal freedom to act wisely.

Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.

Good laws are produced by bad actions.

History privileges no right side, and the arc [of history] can bend so that it loops back upon us.

The future is the result of what we do right now.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.

He that makes his bed ill, lies there.

Someone will have to pay for the innocent blood that they shed every day.

Everything has positive and negative consequences.

A spine to my films that's become more evident to me is that many are about the choices people make, and the reverberations of those choices. You go this way, or that way, and either way, there's going to be consequences.

That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.

One who, while seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other living beings who also desire happinesss, will not find happiness hereafter.

He that lieth down with Dogs, shall rise up with Fleas.

You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.

An evil gain equals a loss.

The word is the shadow of the deed.