These unintended consequences quotes will inspire you. In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging unintended consequences quotes, unintended consequences sayings, and unintended consequences proverbs.
Best Unintended Consequences Quotes
- “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
- “The law of unintended consequences is the only real law of history.” ~ Niall Ferguson
- “There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.” ~ Margaret J. Wheatley
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“Every government intervention [in the marketplace] creates unintended consequences, which lead to calls for further government interventions.” ~ Ludwig von Mises
- “All history is the history of unintended consequences.” ~ T. J. Jackson Lears
- “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
- “Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and “solutions” often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on.” ~ Richard Pascale
- “The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.” ~ Ann Druyan
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“He is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” ~ Adam Smith
- “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
- “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
- “Half a century ago, the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.” ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
- “I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.” ~ Steve Jobs
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“I’m just worried about the unintended consequences of the laws.” ~ Mary Katharine Ham
- “Without reflection, we go blindly on our way.” ~ Margaret J. Wheatley
- “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
- “[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
- “Politics is tricky; it cuts both ways. Every time you make a choice, it has unintended consequences.” ~ Stone Gossard
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“Clearly there are always unintended consequences of any legislative or regulatory act that’s taken in the heat of battle.” ~ Richard Grasso
- “It’s not in the mainstream media yet, but the biggest jump in skin cancer has occurred since the advent of sunscreens. That kind of thing makes me happy. The fact that people, in pursuit of a superficial look of health, give themselves a fatal disease. I love it when ‘reasoning’ human beings think they have figured out how to beat something and it comes right back and kicks them in the nuts. God bless the law of unintended consequences. And the irony is impressive: Healthy people, trying to look healthier, make themselves sick. Good!” ~ George Carlin
- “The term blowback, which officials of the Central Intelligent Agency first invented for their own internal use, . . . refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign act of terrorists or drug lords or rogue states or illegal arms merchants often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations.” ~ Chalmers Johnson
- “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
- “The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective.” ~ Richard Schickel
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“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
- “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
- “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
- “The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of actions in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction.” ~ Anthony Giddens
- “parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.” ~ Stacy Schiff
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“The most corrosive piece of technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “Happiness cannot be attained by wanting to be happy – it must come as the unintended consequence of working for a goal greater than oneself.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl
- “Call me an extremist but killing a few hundred million people seems like the sort of method that might have unintended consequences.” ~ James Nicoll
- “Unintended consequences, he thought miserably. He was angry at his anger, the way it surged up and took over.” ~ Jeanne DuPrau
- “With calm, knowledgeable precision, Daniel Ziblatt wades into the adjacent swamps of federalism and nineteenth-century European history, emerging with hands full of gems. Beneath the tangle of great statesmen and national culture, he discovers conflicting regional political interests, sharp regional variations in political capacity, fearful defenses against excessive democracy, coercive conquest of weak states, and unintended consequences galore. Read, think, and learn.” ~ Charles Tilly
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“I do think that I have a better sense of how military action can result in unintended consequences.” ~ Barack Obama
- “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.” ~ Aaron Sorkin
- “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
- “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
- “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
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“Even limited military actions end up carrying with them great costs and unintended consequences.” ~ Barack Obama
- “Any prediction worth its weight 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
- “We could solve this problem of a divided vote, or an unintended consequence of your vote, to a voting system which uses your name, where I am right now, they’ve got it on the ballot for a statewide referendum which enables people to.” ~ Jill Stein
- “In terms intellectually, [what] shaped my life was the whole Munich thing [the Munich Agreement] that I knew about all my life, in terms of how large powers make decisions that affect small countries, and the unintended consequences of that. The other part is I knew about the Holocaust. l just didn’t know that it applied to my family. But that did affect the way I thought about what I was seeing as ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; there’s no question about that.” ~ Madeleine Albright
