The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those… — Ayn Rand Copy Share Image
Motives are better than actions. Men drift into crime. Of evil they do more than they contemplate, and of good they contemplate… — Christian Nestell Bovee Copy Share Image
Anyone who has ever tried to plot a detective mystery knows that the hardest thing to come up with is motive. — Elif Batuman Copy Share Image
At the core, our motives are always self-serving, Kate. Altruism is a fog created by sly minds seeking to benefit from the… — Ilona Andrews Copy Share Image
I feel like you can't trust a cat. I feel like a cat's got an ulterior motive. The moment you show any… — Wyatt Cenac Copy Share Image
It is a horrible demoralizing thing to be a lawyer. You look for such low motives in everyone and everything. — Katharine Tynan Copy Share Image
“Everyone had an ulterior motive in his worldview. Everyone was self-serving and therefore a potential instrument of pain. The world was a… — Jeremy Dyson Copy Share Image
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
One of the most arrogant undertakings, to my mind, is to write the biography of a man which pretends to go beyond… — Theodor Haecker Copy Share Image
Honesty has a beautiful and refreshing simplicity about it. No ulterior motives. No hidden meanings. An absence of hypocrisy, duplicity, political games,… — Charles R. Swindoll Copy Share Image
The root of the matter is a very simple and old fashioned thing... love or compassion. If you feel this, you have… — Bertrand Russell Copy Share Image
You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and… — Margaret Atwood Copy Share Image
Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity… — Henri Frederic Amiel Copy Share Image
The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love… — Havelock Ellis Copy Share Image
None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed motives. Are self deceivers, but the worst of all Deceits is to… — Louis MacNeice Copy Share Image
Ashamed of the many frailties they feel within, all men endeavor to hide themselves, their ugly nakedness, from each other, and wrapping… — Bernard de Mandeville Copy Share Image
It is remarkable how I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions. Is that a sign of… — Dietrich Bonhoeffer Copy Share Image
There is laughter that goes so far as to lose all touch with its motive, and to exist only, grossly, in itself.… — Max Beerbohm Copy Share Image
What a country wants to make it richer is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure… — John Stuart Mill Copy Share Image
The wind, as a direct motive power, is wholly inapplicable to a system of machine labour, for during a calm season the… — William Stanley Jevons Copy Share Image
Do you think it makes people nasty to be loved? You know it doesn’t! Then why should it make them nice to… — Christopher Isherwood Copy Share Image
I am a convinced and consistent critic of party-parliamentarism. I am for non-partisan elections of true people's representatives who are accountable to… — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Copy Share Image
Rely on your own strength of body and soul. Take for your star self-reliance, faith, honesty and industry. Don't take too much… — Noah Porter Copy Share Image
Apart from selfish reasons, such as fear of punishments, fear of blame, of dishonour, etc, there remains only two motives that can… — African Spir Copy Share Image
sacrifice' was often a cloak for many actions that did not always stem from the highest motives. — Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit Copy Share Image
The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives… — Steven Pinker Copy Share Image
The satisfaction that accompanies good acts is itself not the motivation of the act; satisfaction is not the motive, but only the… — Joseph Butler Copy Share Image
The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives. — Ralph Waldo Emerson Copy Share Image
By annihilating the desires, you annihilate the mind. Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to… — Claude Adrien Helvetius Copy Share Image
Vanity is truly the motive power that moves humanity, and it is flattery that greases the wheels. — St. Jerome Copy Share Image
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. — George Orwell Copy Share Image
The key to motivation is motive. It's the why. It's the deeper yes! burning inside that makes it easier to say no… — Stephen Covey Copy Share Image
Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and… — William Howard Taft Copy Share Image
So our building of the visible Church becomes much like any natural business function, using natural means and natural motives. — Francis Schaeffer Copy Share Image
Secrecy can spring from the best motives; but as it grows it begins to exist only for itself, only for its own… — Christopher Dodd Copy Share Image
Give a good deed the credit of a good motive; and give an evil deed the benefit of the doubt. — Brander Matthews Copy Share Image
However much I may sympathise with and admire worthy motives, I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the… — Mahatma Gandhi Copy Share Image
I think the motive is to establish in federal law the personhood from conception forward and try and alter the Constitution through… — Zoe Lofgren Copy Share Image
The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil. — Franz Kafka Copy Share Image
CAIR officials or former officials have been arrested on charges related to terrorism yet all it offers is silence and stonewalling in… — Paul Weyrich Copy Share Image
