Means to an End Quotes

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of a high obligation.... To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself ... absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.

Revolting means for good ends make the ends of themselves revolting.

The end of a melody is not its goal; but nonetheless, if the melody had not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

The first sign of corruption in a society ... is that the ends justify the means.

There is a point at which methods devour themselves.

Unfortunately, once an economy is geared to expansion, the means rapidly turn into an end and "the going becomes the goal.

I think different societies, cultures, individuals, teams of people, make the world a better place. The founding fathers, they made New England, they made those 13 colonies. I don't know if they thought they were changing the world or just changing their world, but they did make the world a better place. Doctors that cure patients or cure diseases or make discoveries, they're making the world a better place. Can I make the world a better place by selling underpants? Not really. That's just the means. That gives me resources to try to make the world a better place.

A gun will give you the body, not the bird

The book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count.

There are times when the end justifies the means. But when you build an argument based on a whole series of such times, you may find that you've constructed an entire philosophy of evil." --Luke Skywalker

One must be especially wary of an Administration that seems to feel that what it judges to be a good end, always justifies any means.

Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end.

We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means

I believe God knew what he was doing when he put oil under our ground. It should be a means to an end.

I understand by socialism a society in which the aim of production is not profit, but the use. In which the individual citizen participates responsibly in his work, and in the whole social organization, and in which he is not a means who is employed by capital.

He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. If we ought to do so in things natural and earthly, how much more then in spiritual?

But if the longing for the achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for translating it into deeds.

Both of our political parties, at least the honest portion of them, agree conscientiously in the same object: the public good; but they differ essentially in what they deem the means of promoting that good. One side believes it best done by one composition of the governing powers, the other by a different one. One fears most the ignorance of the people; the other the selfishness of rulers independent of them. Which is right, time and experience will prove.

Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.

I never compared Nazis into communism, but communism was the same thing, the end justifies the means. Whatever the means.

The measure was also allowable on principle, for that it was perfectly justifiable to use all the means that God and nature had put into their hands

[A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means.

Don't get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It's an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself

People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end.

As the means, so the end.