Good Intentions Quotes - Page 3

• History is a better guide than good intentions.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

  Women, History, Guides

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• Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignation with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards- the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.

  Joan Didion

  Kindness, Real, Winning

  Joan Didion (1968). “Slouching towards Bethlehem”

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• The Senate is a place filled with goodwill and good intentions, and if the road to hell is paved with them, then it's a pretty good detour.

  Hubert H. Humphrey

  Political, Detours, Politics

  Newsweek, p. 23, January 23, 1978.

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• My hatred is a thousand times more powerful than all your good intentions.

  Jim Goad

  Powerful, Hatred, Thousand

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• Good intentions never change anything. They only become a deeper and deeper rut.

  Joyce Meyer

  Motivational, Ruts, Never Change

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• We call an intention good which is right in itself, but the action is good, not because it contains within it some good, but because it issues from a good intention.

  Peter Abelard

  Issues, Action, Intention

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• One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.

  John Dewey

  Heart, Deeds, Conscience

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• The object of most prayers is to wangle an advance on good intentions.

  Robert Breault

  Prayer, Intention, Objects

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• I think we're entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it's in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind.

  Thom Yorke

  Time, Thinking, Entering

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• Now, the United Nations is an organization that I believe was founded with good intentions. As a matter of fact, a prominent Tennessean named Cordell Hull was very involved with it.

  Zach Wamp

  Believe, Organization, Matter

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• I'm very skeptical about the good intentions of Milosevic.

  Warren Christopher

  Intention, Skeptical

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• Hell is full of good intentions.

  Thomas Gray

  Hell, Intention

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• One of the things is that the good intentions of Prohibition, from reading over the years and from becoming obsessed with the research of gangs in New York City, seems to have allowed crime figures at the time, like Luciano, Capone, Torrio and Rothstein, to organize to become more powerful, which pulled all the way through until the '70s.

  Martin Scorsese

  New York, Powerful, Reading

  "Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter Interview BOARDWALK EMPIRE". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. September 14, 2010.

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• The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.

  Philip Roth

  Work, Writing, Sisterhood

  1979 In the NewYorkTimes Book Review,15 Jul.

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• A benefit consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer.

  Seneca the Younger

  Birthday, Done, Benefits

  "De Beneficiis" by Seneca the Younger, I. 6, 63 AD.

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• The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.

  Robert Briffault

  Character, Men, Evil

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• The mindset of legislating for the betterment of society guarantees the growth of the beast. ... Politicians see government as a solution but the people see government as part of the problem. Beastly bureaucracy is born out of good intentions married to poor solutions. Only when politicians realize what constituents already know will the true problem even be addressed much less solved.

  R. Lee Wrights

  Government, People, Growth

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• Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.

  Samuel Gridley Howe

  Wisdom, Thinking, Important

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• Medicine is intention. Those who are proficient at using intention are good doctors.

  Sun Simiao

  Inspirational, Doctors, Medicine

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• There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

  Laura Lippman

  People, Dangerous, Busybodies

  Laura Lippman (2015). “The Last Place”, p.44, Faber & Faber

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• The plea of good intentions is not one that can be allowed to have much weight in passing historical judgment upon a man whose wrong-headedness and distorted way of looking at things produced, or helped to produce, such incalculable evil; there is a wide political applicability in the remark attributed to a famous Texan, to the effect that he might, in the end, pardon a man who shot him on purpose, but that he would surely never forgive one who did so accidentally.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Men, Evil, Political

  Theodore Roosevelt (1899). “Thomas H. Benton”

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• The United Nations emerged as a temple of official good intentions, a place where governments might - without abating their transgressions - go to church; a place made remote - by agreed untruth and procedural complexity, and by tedium itself - from the risk of intense public involvement.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Government, Risk, Church

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• Liberals get credit for good intentions, and that's about it, because everything they do fails.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Credit, Failing, Intention

  "In 1943, LaGuardia Asked Citizens to Shovel Snow — In 2014, De Blasio Promises Equal Distribution of Snow Removal". "The Rush Limbaugh Show", www.rushlimbaugh.com. January 3, 2014.

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• I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.

  Steven Erikson

  Compassion, Hatred, Soil

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• Good intentions are only lies the weak tell themselves.

  R.L. LaFevers

  Lying, Weak, Intention

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