Causal Factors Quotes

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.

So, you could often say things are terrible and that accounts for what happened, or things are really bright, and that accounts for what happened. Often, the real explanation for what happened is much more subtle and interesting and involves maybe small shocks or what a couple people did on a Wednesday morning that changed the arc of history.

And as far as I'm concerned, it's like I say, drugs are not the problem. Other stuff is the problem.

Of causes, some are complete and primary, others auxiliary and proximate. Hence, when we say that all things come about through fate by antecedent causes, we do not mean this to be understood as 'by complete and primary causes,' but 'by auxiliary and proximate causes.'

Instead of seeking to pinpoint blame, seek to understand cause.

Genes are thought to contribute a certain amount to the cause of autism but it's not 100 per cent. It might be about 60 per cent genetic. So there are going to be environmental factors that mediate the impact of autism.

I think that people do things for a reason - that we have mental illness, that we have genetic wiring that can get triggered by certain environmental factors.

Every free action has two causes that come together to produce it. One is moral, the will that determines the act; the other is physical, the power that executes the will to act.

How can Hitler, or some other murderer, appear in this world? I don't think any single theory can account for the phenomenon, and I think it's a mistake to try to reduce it to being brutalized by your parents or having grown up in some horrible situation - like Charles Manson.

The second truism that we must understand is that poverty does not create our social problems, our social problems create our poverty.

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

There are occasions and causes, why and wherefore in all things.

In the abstract, it might be tempting to imagine that irreducible complexity simply requires multiple simultaneous mutations - that evolution might be far chancier than we thought, but still possible. Such an appeal to brute luck can never be refuted... Luck is metaphysical speculation; scientific explanations invoke causes.

My life experience has taught me nothing happens by chance. Even the idea of the ball in a roulette game: it's not chance it ends up in a certain place. It's forces that are at play.

Nowadays a lot of what was wrong with me would no doubt be ascribed to Attention Deficit Disorder, tartrazine food colouring, dairy produce and air pollution. A few hundred years earlier it would have been demons, still the best analogy I think, but not much help when it comes to a cure.

It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it.

There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.

Were it not for Occam's Razor, which always demands simplicity, I'd be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would especially be true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It's the old stuff, the conflicts we've never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action.

We can see why the study of history is often so contentious and why revisionist histories are so easy to construct. There are always many factors that could have caused an historical event; the difficult task is to discern which, among a welter of possible causes, were the significant ones—the ones without which history would have been different.