John Fogerty Quotes

O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that's broken!

The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

We hasten to alienate the very fates we intended to woo.

It is so often on the name of a misdeed that a life goes to pieces, not the nameless and personal action itself, which was perhaps a perfectly definite necessity of that life and would have been absorbed by it without effort.

What I am against is false optimism: the notion either that things have to go well, or else that they tend to, or else that the default condition of historical trajectories is characteristically beneficial in the long-run.

Sometimes you get what you want not because it's right or fair or even smart, but because you just don't know any better.

There is no such thing as a harmless truth.

It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

I think I may have created a monster with my - I won't say act - but with my redneck pose.

I mean whatever I do it's important that I put my stamp on it and keep it in my world, whether I'm doing a dance track or something like the Russian album for example.

Without a clear picture of where the military's covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world.

I'm not trying to pull the rug out from under anybody, but the music really does tell you where to go.

My life is studded with a series of coincidences.

...A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.

The law of unintended consequences, far more than the Constitution, is what governs the modern presidency.

We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction

Successful parties create their own monsters.

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

Anyone who has ever studied the history of American diplomacy, especially military diplomacy, knows that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind as a purpose of what you are doing, but in the end, you found yourself fighting for entirely different things that you had never thought of before ... In other words, war has a momentum of its own and it carries you away from all thoughtful intentions when you get into it. Today, if we went into Iraq, like the president would like us to do, you know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.

History is the unfolding of miscalculations

Theories and grand ideas are important, but they seldom unfold as planned.

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

… minor incidents—the kind you can never really foresee—combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.

Every action we have is going to have repercussions in ways we could not anticipate.

There are people who do what they believe is right, but as they say, 'The road to hell is paved with good intentions.'