The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.

- Mao Zedong

I think the motive is to establish in federal law the personhood from conception forward and try and alter the Constitution through statute.

- Zoe Lofgren

My great crime in the world is blunder I will get into scrapes without intention or any bad motive.

- Stand Watie

I really have no ulterior motive in taking on certain roles. I have no larger issue that I really want to show people. I'm an actor, that's all. I just do what I do.

- Sally Field

No one does anything from a single motive.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The old detective story that's got a really complicated motive doesn't apply to mine.

- Ruth Rendell

Where destruction is the motive, unity is dangerous.

- Ravi Zacharias

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as 'evolver,' is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Everyone, no doubt, remains first and foremost a man of his own country and continues to draw from it his motive force.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

When the severity of the law is to be softened, let pity, not bribes, be the motive.

- Miguel de Cervantes

The man who could go to Africa and rob her of her children, and then sell them into interminable bondage, with no other motive than that which is furnished by dollars and cents, is so much worse than the most depraved murderer that he can never receive pardon at my hand.

- Abraham Lincoln

I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe.

- Laurence Housman

To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.

- Lord Byron

Every action needs to be prompted by a motive.

- Leonardo da Vinci

For 'Motive,' it wasn't a question of making it look un-Canadian, but instead, we wanted it to be the product of a bunch of really skilled people making something. And that's what you have.

- Kristin Lehman

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

- George Eliot

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

- Eric Hoffer

Profit per se is not my motive.

- Chris Hughes

Dissolving differences has always been an important motive for my writing, right from 'The Mistress of Spices.'

- Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I believe it is universally understood and acknowledged that all men will ever act correctly, unless they have a motive to do otherwise.

- Abraham Lincoln