motive quotes

I run the paper purely for the purpose of making propaganda, and with no other motive.

-Baron
  Evidence to the Royal Commission on the Press.

The secret motive of the absent-minded is to be innocent while guilty. Absent-mindedness is spurious innocence.

- Saul Bellow
  More Die of Heartbreak.

And the motive for recording these scraps of the past? It Greenspan is much the same motive that has made me a novelist: a desire to reduce a chaos of experience to some sort of order, and a hungry curiosity.

- (Henry) Graham Greene
A Sort of Life, preface.

The underlying motive of many Socialists is, I believe, a hypertrophied sense of order†what they desire, basically, istoreducetheworld tosomething resembling a chessboard.

- George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
  The Road to Wigan Pier, ch.11.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

- Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
  TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn,'Notice'.