Means And Ends Quotes

“Kira is evil ... There's no denying that ... But lately I've been starting to think of it more like this ... The real evil is the power to kill people. Someone who finds himself with that power is cursed. No matter how you use it, anything obtained by killing people can never bring true happiness.”
― Tsugumi Ohba, Death Note, Vol. 3: Hard Run

“You think the end justifies the means, however vile. I tell you: the end is the means by which you achieve it. Today's step is tomorrow's life. Great ends cannot be attained by base means. You've proved that in all your social upheavals. The meanness and inhumanity of the means make you mean and inhuman and make the end unattainable.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.”
― Joseph O'Connor, Star of the Sea

“A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.”
― John Irving, The Hotel New Hampshire

“It isn’t always true that a critical end justifies desperate means.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, The Tarishe Curse

“Existence is not an end in itself but merely the framework upon which all good, both real and imagined, may be built.”
― Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

“You are still adrift while you still think that a means is an end.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay for it; and if I want a gift, I shall have to plead for it; and, according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation. Thus we see three different results from three different means. Will you still say that the means do not matter?”
― Mahatma Gandhi, Non-Violent Resistance

“The means are inconsequential, only the ends matter”
― Rita Stradling

“Every action in this world, every word, every thought, has an effect. But the actor is also acted upon by his action. The condition on which you are allowed to make a change in the world is that the world changes you as well.”
― Yael Shahar, A Damaged Mirror: A story of memory and redemption

“...[I]f I know that it is only by this process that the intended operation can be performed, then to say that if I fully will the operation, I also will the action required for it, is an analytical proposition...”
― Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

“But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“When we had no means, we said the end justifies the means. Now that we have no ends, we say the means justify the end. Neither is immoral. What is entirely immoral is that there is no longer any contradiction between the two: ends and means have become indifferent to one another. They are quite simply no longer of the same order.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Raus did not look up at the faces. An officer learned not to look at the faces. It was easier if you thought of them as bodies, as tools, means to an end. But just what the end was Raus could no longer say.”
― Miles Watson, Nosferatu

“The vehicle that will take you to your goal is as important as your goal, it definitely deserves as much respect as you do to your goal!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan