As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal
It is necessary to correct the error that vegetarianism has made us weak in mind, or passive or inert in action. I do not regard flesh-food as necessary at any stage.
Mahatma Gandhi
It is with pious fraud as with a bad action; it begets a calamitous necessity of going on.
Thomas Paine
Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.
Adam Ferguson
Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.
Jules Renard
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
Arthur Miller
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces
Stefan Zweig
No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it themselves.
Rachel Carson
The so called unconscious inferences can be traced back to the all-preserving memory, which presents us with parallel experiences and hence already knows the consequences of an action. It is not anticipation of the effects; rather, it is the feeling: identical causes, identical effects .
Friedrich Nietzsche
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Marshall McLuhan
When too many Americans don't vote or participate, some see apathy and despair. I see disappointment and even outrage. And I believe that out of this frustration can come hope and action.
Paul Wellstone
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
W. H. Auden