Rules Without Consequences Quotes & Sayings

We bear the consequences for what we have done to ourselves, and for the sin that rules this world. Jesus forgave the thief, but he didn't take him down off the cross. — Francine Rivers

Normally, he liked boundaries. Boundaries were the safety net. Boundaries kept people on the right path. But right now, he felt like rules were made to be broken and consequences were miles and miles away. — Heather Burch

There are rules, and when certain things happen, there are ceratin consequences. — Sarah Paulson

There are laws. There are rules. And when you break them, there are consequences. Laws of nature and laws of life. Laws of love and laws of death. — Amy Harmon

I came from Paris in the Spring of 1884, and was brought in intimate contact with him [Thomas Edison]. We experimented day and night, holidays not excepted. His existence was made up of alternate periods of work and sleep in the laboratory. He had no hobby, cared for no sport or amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene. There can be no doubt that, if he had not married later a woman of exceptional intelligence, who made it the one object of her life to preserve him, he would have died many years ago from consequences of sheer neglect. So great and uncontrollable was his passion for work. — Nikola Tesla

I should have hoped to have trained him, my lady, to understand the rules of discretion."
"Trained! Train a barn-door fowl to be a pheasant, Mr. Horner! That would be the easier task. But you did right to speak of discretion rather than honour. Discretion looks to the consequences of actions - honour looks to the action itself, and is an instinct rather than a virtue. After all, it is possible you might have trained him to be discreet. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Rules are meant to protect us, so I follow them. Something might feel good at the moment, but the consequences are scary. — Wendy Higgins

Our government is just way too interested in mucking around in Silicon Valley by creating and enforcing rules based on little or no understanding of the consequences. — Michael Arrington

The commitment to enlarged thought is morally and politically significant in that it fosters the 'ability to think without rules', to cultivate judgement and conscience capable of thinking through the purposes and consequences of our actions from different perspectives, without proceeding in automatic fashion through obedience to pre-existing social conventions. — Patrick Hayden

Many rules are designed with the goal of improving performance, but they actually do the opposite. They are often controlling and certainly stifle creativity. Therefore, you need to be extremely aware of the consequences of each rule you put in place. We are so sensitive to rules that even small changes have a huge impact on our behavior. — Tina Seelig

The dome of the U.S. Capitol has fallen into severe disrepair ... As the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which oversees matters of the Capitol's physical plant, I have serious concerns about the consequences of omitting this funding from the stopgap spending measure. — Chuck Schumer

My role in the government was not to think about narratives and consistency with narratives, but think of the human consequences of rules. — Cass Sunstein

Screw the rules, damn the consequences, and just love. Love until it kills you, because there's nothing better worth dying for. — Karen Amanda Hooper

Einstein had, for the first time connected new and measurable consequences to statistical physics. That might sound like a largely technical achievement, but on the contrary, it represented the triumph of a great principle: that much of the order we percieve in nature belies an invisible underlying disorder and hence can be understood only through the rules of randomness. — Leonard Mlodinow

The nature of your outcome or problem in large part depends upon you. Results are what you get when you follow the rules. Consequences are the results of negative choices. Your thoughts become your actions. Your thoughts should be focused on what you desire. — Bobby F. Kimbrough Jr.

All the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet ... there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold. — Stephen Wolfram

There's nothing wrong with following the rules, Mia," I said at length. "I think what you might not realize is that not all consequences are bad, and sometimes breaking the rules is necessary. Not just because it can be fun," I said with a grin, and pulled away to look at her. "But because you have to figure out who you are, and sometimes that means being someone different than who everyone else wants you to be. — Kristen Kehoe

Consequences of breaking the rules should fit the rule broken and should have the aim of teaching her the repercussions of antisocial behavior; they should not have the aim of being punitive. — Virginia Beane Rutter

The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure. — Martin Rees

Our submission to general principles is necessary because we cannot be guided in our practical action by full knowledge and evaluation of the consequences. So long as men are not omniscient, the only way in which freedom can be given to the individual is by such general rules to delimit the sphere in which the decision is his. There can be no freedom if the government is not limited to particular kinds of action but can use its powers in any ways which serve particular ends. — Friedrich August Von Hayek

Playing by the rules, one does the best he can, irrespective of the social consequences. Whereas in making the rules, people ought to be concerned with the social consequences and not with their personal interests. — George Soros

When we recognize that legal rules are simply formulae describing uniformities of judicial decision, that legal concepts likewise are patterns or functions of judicial decisions, that decisions themselves are not products of logical parthenogenesis born of pre-existing legal principles but are social events with social causes and consequences, then we are ready for the serious business of appraising law and legal institutions in terms of some standard of human values.
Felix Cohen, Columbia Law Review, 1935 — Felix S. Cohen

Why didn't they say anything to me?'
'Probably because they knew you wouldn't listen to reason.'
'That is pure hog swill.'
'Would you have listened to them?'
'They would have tried to persuade me with conventional thinking - not at all the same as *reason*. Not all of us live by the same logic.'
'Yet you still have to abide by the same set of rules as the rest of them. The consequences won't be any different for you.'
'You say it as if I don't know what the consequences are.'
'You know exactly what the consequences are. But you don't believe they could happen to you. — Sherry Thomas

First of all, when we are all finished, and we have a mathematical theory by which we can compute consequences, what can we do? It really is an amazing thing. In order to figure out what an atom is going to do in a given situation we make up rules with marks on paper, carry them into a machine which has switches that open and close in some complicated way, and the result will tell us what the atom is going to do! If the way that these switches open and close were some kind of model of the atom, if we thought that the atom had switches in it, then I would say that I understood more or less what is going on. I find it quite amazing that it is possible to predict what will happen by mathematics, which is simply following rules which really have nothing to do with what is going on in the original thing. The closing and opening of switches in a computer is quite different from what is happening in nature. — Anonymous

When children's problem behavior persists despite rules and consequences, it often means that they do not have the skills to cope with challenging situations. We must either change those situations or teach better coping skills. — Jed Baker

According to the Shuos," Jedao said, "games are about behavior modification. The rules constrain some behaviors and reward others. Of course, people cheat, and there are consequences around that, too, so implicit rules and social context are just as important. Meaningless cards, tokens, and symbols become invested with value and significance in the world of the game. In a sense, all calendrical war is a game between competing sets of rules, fueled by the coherence of our beliefs. To win a calendrical war, you have to understand how game systems work. — Yoon Ha Lee

Most Romans believed that their system of government was the finest political invention of the human mind. Change was inconceivable. Indeed, the constitution's various parts were so mutually interdependent that reform within the rules was next to impossible. As a result, radicals found that they had little choice other than to set themselves beyond and against the law. This inflexibility had disastrous consequences as it became increasingly clear that the Roman state was incapable of responding adequately to the challenges it faced. Political debate became polarized into bitter conflicts, with radical outsiders trying to press change on conservative insiders who, in the teeth of all the evidence, believed that all was for the best under the best of all possible constitutions (16). — Anthony Everitt

Through luminous and erudite readings of the texts, Hasana Sharp shows us how profound and radical is Spinoza's conception of nature and his claim that humans always remain part of nature, acting solely according to the same rules. She demonstrates the political consequences of adopting this perspective through a provocative intervention in contemporary feminist theory, while along the way opening promising avenues for future work in a variety of other fields, such as animal studies and ecology. This is a challenging and important book. — Michael Hardt

The general public is easy. You don't have to answer to anyone; and as long as you follow the rules of your profession, you needn't worry about the consequences. But the problem with the powerful and rich is that when they are sick, they really want their doctors to cure them. — Moliere

With great pleasure she did what was forbidden, because the great advantage of being there was not having to respect the rules and not even having to put up with any major consequences if you broke them. — Paulo Coelho

There's a particular kind of explanation that works especially well in enforcing discipline. When the Oliners examined the guidance of the Holocaust rescuers' parents, they found that they tended to give "explanations of why behaviors are inappropriate, often with reference to their consequences for others." While the bystanders' parents focused on enforcing compliance with rules for their own sake, the rescuers' parents encouraged their children to consider the impact of their actions on others.* — Adam M. Grant

Lack of leadership can have fearsome consequences. A dog's mental health, after all, depends to a large degree on leadership: dogs get enormously distressed when they think no one is in charge. Accordingly, it's not only nonsensical to fail to establish rules and limits with a dog ... but cruel. — Caroline Knapp