Rodney Stark Quotes

If you're going to do something wrong, do it big, because the punishment is the same either way.

The possibility of remedying imprudent actions is commonly an inducement to commit them.

Most people lived their lives like criminals: act first, worry about the consequences later.

My childlike qualities sometimes lead me to jump into projects without thinking of the consequences.

I think there's something in the human psyche that we're titillated by the person who flies too close to the candle and their wings get singed.

I never ever take into consideration the consequences of my actions until it's too late.

I know that young people sometimes, caught up in the moment, make some very foolish decisions.

Humans have a tendency towards short-term thinking.

Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.

I don't think my father considered allowing a teenager to follow his dreams was necessarily good parenting, or even parenting. I think he thought I was a teenager with teenage impulses. I'm pretty sure he knew that if he just let me follow those impulses, it would wind up being very expensive and perhaps even life-endangering.

Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.

If we humans are good at anything, it’s thinking we’ve got a terrific idea and going for it without acknowledging the potential consequences or our own ignorance.

If a man gets drunk and goes out and breaks his leg so that it must be amputated, God will forgive him if he asks it, but he will have to hop around on one leg all his life.

He that is in haste may contract much guilt in a little time. What we say or do unadvisedly when we are hot, we must unsay or undo again when we are cool, or do worse.

It didn't matter if I got bitten by a dog or I ripped my pants on the fence post or I poked myself in the eye with a tree branch that I was crawling over, it was all about the shortcut. My whole life I took the shortcut, and I ended up lost.

For lawless joys a bitter ending waits.

A boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaks the door with his feet.

Rash actions are seldom committed in isolation. With the first rash action we always do too much. So we usually go on to commit asecond one--and then we do too little.

The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

A very poor kid came up to me after a talk and said 'I want to go blow up a factory.' I asked how old he was and he said 17. I said 'have you ever had sex?' He said 'no.' I said 'just remember if you get caught you aren't going to have sex for twenty years at least.' That's not saying that one person having sex is worth the salmon. I'm not saying it's a reason not to act, I'm saying don't be stupid.

People thought he was a glutton for punishment, that he liked getting dumped. But it wasn't like that. He could just never see anything coming, and as he lay on the solid, uneven ground with Hassan pressing too hard on his forehead, Colin Singleton's distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia. He was nearsighted. The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

The young women who attract so much attention never change: They are all stupid. They have at best only the crudest notions of their own power, and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.

No matter how grave the secret, how imperative absolute silence, someone would always feel the urge to confess, and an unleashed secret is a terrible force.

We rob ourselves when we make decisions in the moment with no thought of how those decisions will impact our futures.