Unpredictable Consequences Quotes

Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.

Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstance. Good and evil, love and hate, night and day, sweet and bitter, man and woman, heaven above and the earth beneath--all those things are needful, one to the other, and who knows the end of each?

making a decision was only the beginning of things. When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.

Fire will burn any human body it touches, and starvation will waste it, but stories are not so predictable in their effects.

An ecosystem, you can always intervene and change something in it, but there's no way of knowing what all the downstream effects will be or how it might affect the environment. We have such a miserably poor understanding of how the organism develops from its DNA that I would be surprised if we don't get one rude shock after another.

Of all the weapons in the Federal Reserve arsenal, words were the the most unpredictable in their consequences.

It affords a violent prejudice against almost every science, that no prudent man, however sure of his principles, dares prophesy concerning any event, or foretell the remote consequences of things.

We cannot guess the outcome of our actions... Which is why our actions must always be acceptable in themselves, and not as strategies.

I think it's important for scientists to be a bit less arrogant, a bit more humble, recognising we are capable of making mistakes and being fallacious - which is increasingly serious in a society where our work may have unpredictable consequences.

I think death is a crucial element when designing games around the theme of the satisfaction of overcoming overwhelming odds.

This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime - he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.

Indefinite plans get dubious results.

The beauty of an art project is that you cannot always measure the impact, but one day it can become clear.

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.

Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.

I know what it's like to be in a difficult situation, where the results do not come in.

Predicting the number of casualties is an impossibility.