Verb
get going; give impetus to
Source: WordNetWhen irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness somebody has to die. ... No man lives who has not got a panic button, and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion. Arthur Miller
The vast upheaval of the World War set in motion forces that will either destroy civilization or raise mankind to undreamed of heights of human welfare and prosperity. Arthur Henderson
A human act once set in motion flows on forever to the great account. Our deathlessness is in what we do, not in what we are. George Meredith
The proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state. Louis Althusser
The sophist, in contradistinction to the philosopher, is not set in motion and kept in motion by the sting of the awareness of the fundamental difference between conviction or belief and genuine insight. Leo Strauss
Those that set in motion the forces of evil cannot always control them afterwards. Charles W. Chesnutt