Unseen Consequences Quotes

Nothing is hidden so much that it wouldn't be revealed through its fruit.

People hired by government know who is their benefactor. People who lose their jobs or fail to get them because of the government program do not know that that is the source of their problem. The good effects are visible. The bad effects are invisible. The good effects generate votes. The bad effects generate discontent, which is as likely to be directed at private business as at the government.

For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

When I left the Treasury, there was a poll that showed - and I don't remember the numbers exactly right - something like 90% of the people were against TARP. It prevented a disaster, but you don't get credit for a disaster that people don't see.

Ill habits gather unseen degrees, as brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.

Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

It's not just a matter of whether you support Obama or Romney. It's who they have coming with them. I always keep my powder dry, as they say in the military.

Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.

Some events take a lifetime to reveal their damage and influence.

But in the real world, you couldnt really just split a family down the middle, mom on one side, dad the other, with the child equally divided between. It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again. It was what you couldn't see, those tiniest of pieces, that were lost in the severing, and their absence kept everything from being complete.

What else are we not knowing about, and when didn’t we know it.

We think criminality is something that exists in somehow another world to us. But actually, there is an invisible criminal web in which we are all enveloped.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

When you have a dark side, nothing is ever as good as it seems.

There's a lot of things you don't see on the stats.

The things that don't happen to us that we'll never know didn't happen to us. The nonstories. The extra minute to find the briefcase that makes you late to the spot where a tractor trailer mauled another car instead of yours. The woman you didn't meet because she couldn't get a taxi to the party you had to leave early from. All of life is a series of nonstories if you look at it that way. We just don't know what they are.

We don’t know whether what we found is a chip of ice or the tip of an iceberg.

Vulgarized knowledge characteristically gives birth to a feeling that everything is understandable and explained. It is like a system of bridges built over chasms. One can travel boldly ahead over these bridges, ignoring the chasms. It is forbidden to look down into them; but that, alas, does not alter the fact that they exist.

Most of what matters in your life takes place in your absence.

The true history of my administration will be written 50 years from now, and you and I will not be around to see it.

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

The real war will never get in the books.

The reality is even if you are a hands-on Mayor or Governor or chief executive, at best, you must know about 10 or 20% of what's going on. Otherwise, you never get through the day... I was very hands on, and there's lots of stuff I didn't know, and lots of things that either went wrong or right that I would find out about afterwards.

Fatality makes us invisible.

But what if you discover that the price of purpose is to render invisible so many other things?