The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.
Walter Bagehot

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

The causes of the China Incident were the exclusion and insult of Japan throughout China, the exclusion of Japanese goods, the persecution of Japanese residents in China, and the illegal violation of Japanese rights.
Hideki Tojo

The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.
Tom DeLay

The conscience of an artist worthy of the name is like an incurable disease which causes him endless torment but occasionally fills him with silent joy.
Georges Rouault

The death tax causes one-third of all family-owned small businesses to liquidate after the death of the owner. It is also an unfair tax because the assets have already been taxed once at their income level.
Ric Keller

The death tax is one of the leading causes of the dissolution of small businesses.
Kit Bond

The essential attribute of a new sense is, not the perception of external objects or influences which ordinarily do not act upon the senses, but that external causes should excite in it a new and peculiar kind of sensation different from all the sensations of our five senses.
Johannes P. Muller

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.
Plato

The final causes, then, of compassion are to prevent and to relieve misery.
Joseph Butler

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
Doris Lessing

The increasing importance of Sydney must in some measure be attributed to the flourishing condition of the colony itself, to the industry of its farmers, to the successful enterprise of its merchants, and to particular local causes.
Charles Sturt

The kind of event on a conveyor belt that causes a fire occurs in a variety of industrial environments, not uniquely in coal environments.
Richard Price

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.
Avicenna

The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain, without a thought being given to the real strong hold.
Edward Bach

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.
Elihu Root

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.
James Tobin

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.
Anthony Minghella

The problem is going to be finding the right words and implementing it in a way that is really dealing with people that are inciting and not preventing honest discussion of the underlying causes of this horrendous political situation the world is in now.
Clare Short

The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness.
Saint Ignatius