motive

Marx forecast that the profit motive would lead to overworking and exhausting the fertility of our soil and other natural systems.

I think a misconception everybody has is that I had an ulterior motive.

Did Michael Brown have a motive to violently attack the officer?

The story remains mysterious, and authorities are not revealing a motive yet.

Communist-era clerks were famously rude and indifferent, because they had no motive to make people happy.

The voice of the orator peculiarly should be free from studied effects, and responsive to motive.

Not suspecting her motive, he represented the hazard of putting so great an affront on the favourite of the Empress.

The wish to go to heaven without dying is, as I know, a motive derived from child-life.

But her parents, did you never discover any thing about them—who or what they were—the motive of so strange an abandonment?

Whatever was his motive, he persisted in his resolution, and to the end was faithful to his oath.