Unintended Benefits Quotes

The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Good consequences are sometimes the result of mistakes.

So mothers everywhere take heart. The indoctrination you administer now may have unanticipated positive effects years later.

Doing the right things for the wrong reasons is typical of humanity. Precession - not conscious planning - provides a productive outcome for misguided political and military campaigns.

It is a hard thing for intellectuals to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it.

Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

But HBO is less interested in how many people are watching than in how much the people who are watching are liking the show. They didn't set up their business model to make writers happy. It's just a nice unintended consequence.

War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. The earthquake means good business for construction workers, and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers; but no one has for that reason yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.

The injustice to an individual is sometimes of service to the public. Facts are apt to alarm us more than the most dangerous principles.

Science ... has no consideration for ultimate purposes, any more than Nature has, but just as the latter occasionally achieves things of the greatest suitableness without intending to do so, so also true science, as the imitator of nature in ideas, will occasionally and in many ways further the usefulness and welfare of man,-but also without intending to do so.

Even if neither of us got what we wanted, we found freedom in the third choices.