Quotes About Unintended Consequences

#1. In today's world more harm may be done by well-intentioned people trying to do good, who are unaware of the unintended consequences of their actions, than by people actually trying to cause harm.

Peter Coleman

#2. The point is, the "best" technology or idea doesn't always prevail. Sometimes chance and the law of unintended consequences win out.

Eric Weiner

#3. If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years, it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences.

Fareed Zakaria

#4. Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions ...

Ludwig Von Mises

#5. Parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

Stacy Schiff

#6. The internet is the most complex system that humans have ever invented. And with every internet enabled operation that we've seen so far, all of these offensive operations, we see knock on effects. We see unintended consequences.

Edward Snowden

#7. Clearly there are always unintended consequences of any legislative or regulatory act that's taken in the heat of battle.

Richard Grasso

#8. Even limited military actions end up carrying with them great costs and unintended consequences.

Barack Obama

#9. Each money-printing exercise brings about unintended consequences. These unintended consequences are higher inflation rates than had no money been printed.

Marc Faber

#10. Good intentions can often lead to unintended consequences. It is hard to imagine a law intended for the workforce known to Henry Ford can serve the needs of a workplace shaped by the innovations of Bill Gates.

Tim Walberg

#11. We have a lot of talented people in this Congress, and we can avoid a lot of unintended consequences if we just included them.

Dan Webster

#12. The trouble with anger is, it gets hold of you. And then you aren't the master of yourself anymore. Anger is. And when anger is the boss, you get unintended consequences.

Jeanne DuPrau

#13. Politics is tricky; it cuts both ways. Every time you make a choice, it has unintended consequences.

Stone Gossard

#14. The whole world is now one vast uncontrolled experiment - the way it always was, Crake would have said - and the doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate.

Margaret Atwood

#15. Unintended Consequences is full of substance, it is one of the must-read books of the year, and once I finish it I will be giving it a second read through right away.

Tyler Cowen

#16. The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.

Richard Schickel

#17. Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.

Margaret J. Wheatley

#18. Unintended consequences, he thought miserably.
He was angry at his anger, the way it surged up
and took over.

Jeanne DuPrau

#19. Even the most well-meaning
government policies have unintended consequences that have harmed
the economy. If government policies were today held accountable the way
private businesses are, the scoreboard would say government is failing
to help people ... and this is a fact.

Ziad K. Abdelnour

#20. I hope I'm wrong, but I am afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy - worse than Vietnam, not in the number who died, but in terms of its unintended consequences and its reverberation throughout the region.

Madeleine Albright

#21. Government interventions create unintended consequences that lead to calls for further intervention, and so on into a destructive spiral of more and more government control.

Ron Paul

#22. The problem with unintended consequences isn't with the consequences, it's with the unintended. Just because you didn't' intend for something to happen doesn't mean you didn't want it to.

Charles Yu

#23. This sound self-serving, but being interested in everything makes you a more effective opportunist - and that's what an editor has to be, a student of unintended consequences.

Terry McDonell

#24. I believe that life is chaotic, a jumble of accidents, ambitions, misconceptions, bold intentions, lazy happenstances, and unintended consequences, yet I also believe that there are connections that illuminate our world, revealing its endless mystery and wonder.

David Maraniss

#25. We must always be careful of the actions we take, for there are always unintended consequences. Sometimes they are serendipitous, other times they are appalling, but those consequences are always there. We must tread lightly in this world ... until we are sure of foot.

Neal Shusterman

#26. Call me an extremist but killing a few hundred million people seems like the sort of method that might have unintended consequences.

James Nicoll

#27. I'm just worried about the unintended consequences of the laws.

Mary Katharine Ham

#28. Lawmakers who interfere with commerce and the normal creation of jobs in an economy run the risk of doing harm rather than good. Unintended consequences from regulating or legislating to achieve a goal can occur and cause havoc in the markets or an economy.

Mark Skousen

#29. What I have learned from studying counterfactual history is that the law of unintended consequences always kicks in no matter how secure you are in your plan. We have to live with the historical record as it is, like it or not.

Gavriel David Rosenfeld

#30. The reason I am so negative about the Federal Reserve's policies is that they only target core inflation and argue that they can't identify bubbles, but when each bubble bursts, they flood the system with liquidity that brings about unintended consequences.

Marc Faber

#31. The use of large-scale military force in volatile regions of underdeveloped countries is difficult to do right, has major unintended consequences and rarely turns out to be quick, effective, controlled and short lived.

Dennis C. Blair

#32. It sometimes seems to me that the whole course of English history was one of accident, confusion, chance and unintended consequences - there's no real pattern.

Peter Ackroyd

#33. The multiple failures of top-down design, and the omnipresence of unintended consequences, can be attributed in large part, to the absence of relevant information.

Cass R. Sunstein

#34. [Hillary] Clinton is too much into regime change and a little bit too aggressive without knowing what the unintended consequences might be. Yes, we could get rid of Assad tomorrow, but that would create another political vacuum that would benefit ISIS.

Bernie Sanders

#35. Oh, the unintended consequences of perfidy!

Andrew Levkoff

#36. Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.

Margaret J. Wheatley

#37. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything.

Steve Jobs

#38. Any prediction worth its weigh would consider the spiritual, material, and unintended consequences of introducing a new technology to the world. It would proceed from the kind of understanding Chellis articulated: Life is Whole.

Stephanie Mills

#39. I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences.

Michael Crichton

#40. We cannot ignore the meaning of mad cow. It is one more warning about unintended consequences, about human arrogance and the blind worship of science.

Eric Schlosser

#41. All history is the history of unintended consequences.

T. J. Jackson Lears

#42. Think about rethinking what you're thinking, before speaking the thought you were thinking, and cause unintended consequences for speaking what you probably shouldn't have been thinking.

T.F. Hodge

#43. It is ... highly probable that from the very beginning, apart from death, the only ironclad rule of human experience has been the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Ian Tattersall

#44. New Zealand needs to balance its environmental responsibilities with its economic opportunities, because the risk is that if you don't do that - and you want to lead the world - then you might end up getting unintended consequences.

John Key

#45. The manufactured consensus of the IPCC has had the unintended consequences of distorting the science, elevating the voices of scientists that dispute the consensus, and motivating actions by the consensus scientists and their supporters that have diminished the public's trust in the IPCC.

Judith Curry

#46. The reality is that every time we manipulate nature's rhythms, we create unintended consequences that then require us to make still further changes."

~ Glenn Aparicio Parry

Glenn Aparicio Parry

#47. We need different perspectives here in Washington - someone who has private-sector experience, somebody who's actually created jobs, manufactures products, understands the incentives and disincentives, the intended and unintended consequences of legislation.

Ron Johnson

#48. Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11.

Nick Turse

#49. Since the end of human action, as distinct from the end products of fabrication, can never be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.

Hannah Arendt

#50. Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.

Viktor E. Frankl

#51. One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It's simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who's online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.

Eric Schmidt

#52. Globalization is not a monolithic force but an evolving set of consequences - some good, some bad and some unintended. It is the new reality.

John B. Larson

#53. God always saves the world from the consequences of unintended errors of men who live in fear of Him.

Mahatma Gandhi