Incapacity Quotes - Page 3

• The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society - and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic.

  Erich Fromm

  Home, Average, Sick

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• Some Native people suggest that one should test how cold the hands are by touching the thumb to the little finger of the same hand. As soon as you cannot carry out this exercise you are reaching a dangerous state of incapacity and you should immediately take steps to warm up.

  Mors Kochanski

  Exercise, Hands, People

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• I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

  G. M Gilbert

  Men, Thinking, Evil

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• The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the ultimate reality.

  Muhammad Iqbal

  Philosophy, Reality, Inquiry

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• The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Funny, Stupidity, Merit

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “George Bernard Shaw: The Collected Plays (Illustrated): 60 plays including Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, The Apple Cart, Cymbeline, Androcles And The Lion, The Man Of Destiny, The Inca Of Perusalem and Macbeth Skit”, p.1111, e-artnow

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• Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist.... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

  Allan Bloom

  Artist, People, Democracy

  Allan Bloom (2008). “Closing of the American Mind”, p.249, Simon and Schuster

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• I'm going to end a life that I thought could contain every kind of greatness but that in fact consisted only of my incapacity to really want to be great. Whenever I arrived at a certainty, I remembered that those with the greatest certainties are lunatics.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Greatness, Want, Facts

  Fernando Pessoa (2005). “The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive”

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• The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the council of Ravenna, he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius.

  Edward Gibbon

  Government, History, Enemy

  Edward Gibbon (2009). “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edited and Abridged): Abridged Edition”, p.563, Modern Library

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• The party which is out sees nothing but graft and incapacity in the party which is in; and the party which is in sees nothing but greed and animosity in the party which is out.

  Agnes Repplier

  Party, Political, Greed

  Agnes Repplier (1924). “Under dispute”

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• Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity.

  Doris Lessing

  Clever, People, Stupidity

  Doris May Lessing (1994). “Under my skin”

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• The proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Office, Atheism

  Thomas Jefferson, Richard Holland Johnston, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States “The Writings of Thomas Jefferson”

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• There has been in our time a lack of reliance on language and a lack of experimentation which are frightening to anyone who sees them as symptoms. We know the phenomenon of stage-fright: it holds the player shivering, incapable of speech or action. Perhaps there is an audience-fright which the play can feel, which leaves him with these incapacities.

  Muriel Rukeyser

  Player, Speech, Action

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• I do not accept the fact that conditions that prevent people from attaining their eternal destiny were born into them without any ability to control. That is contrary to the Plan of Salvation, and it is contrary to the justice and mercy of God. It's contrary to the whole teaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which expresses the truth that by or through the power and mercy of Jesus Christ we will have the strength to do all things. That includes resisting temptation. That includes dealing with things that we're born with, including disfigurements, or mental or physical incapacities.

  Dallin H. Oaks

  Jesus, Teaching, Destiny

  Source: www.mormonnewsroom.org

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• All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality.

  Marya Mannes

  Sex, War, Compassion

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• I was struck by the absence, even among very young boys and girls, of any interior motivation; they were incapable of thinking, of inventing, of imagining, of choosing, of deciding for themselves; this incapacity was expressed by their conformism; in every domain of life they employed only the abstract measure of money, because they were unable to trust to their own judgment.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Girl, Money, Motivation

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• You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.

  Peter Schjeldahl

  Agreement, Understanding, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Flaubert's famous sentence, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary, she is me"), in reality means, " Madame Bovary, c'est nous" ("Madame Bovary, she is us"), in our modern incapacity to live a "good-enough" life.

  Sophie Barthes

  Mean, Reality, Good Enough

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• Our nonviolence in respect of the Government is a result of our incapacity for effective violence.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Government, Violence, Results

  Mahatma Gandhi (1958). “Collected Works”

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• Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, Mission Control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily.

  Gene Kranz

  Should Have, Safety, Design

  Gene Kranz (2009). “Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond”, p.204, Simon and Schuster

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• In business be as able as you can, but do not be cunning; cunning is the dark sanctuary of incapacity.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Dark, Sanctuary, Able

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.380, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Cunning, Treachery, Offspring

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• Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

  Mason Cooley

  Asceticism, Celibacy

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• Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faithas well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!).... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Strong, Atheist, Attitude

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• There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Interesting, Quality, Transformation

  "'Lagos shows how a city can recover from a deep, deep pit': Rem Koolhaas talks to Kunlé Adeyemi". Interview with Chris Michael, www.theguardian.com. February 26, 2016.

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• He [William Henry Harrison] did not live long enough to prove his incapacity for the office of President.

  William C. Bryant

  Long, Office, President

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