Irreversible Quotes - Page 3

• Activity proneness in the service of an ideology ... leads the individual into an irreversible series of commitments from which is forged an identity to which the individual inevitably becomes strongly attached psychologically.

  Edgar Schein

  Commitment, Atheism, Identity

  20 Copy quote

• Textbooks describe DNA as a blueprint for a body. It's better seen as a recipe for making a body, because it is irreversible. But today I want to present it as something different again, and even more intriguing. The DNA in you is a coded description of ancient worlds in which your ancestors lived. DNA is the wisdom out of the old days, and I mean very old days indeed.

  Richard Dawkins

  Wisdom, Mean, Dna

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• The march to freedom is irreversible.

  Nelson Mandela

  March

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• Women's liberation, if not the most extreme then certainly the most influential neo-Marxist movement in America, has done to the American home what communism did to the Russian economy, and most of the ruin is irreversible.  By defining relations between men and women in terms of power and competition instead of reciprocity and cooperation, the movement tore apart the most basic and fragile contract in human society, the unit from which all other social institutions draw their strength.

  Ruth Wisse

  Home, Men, America

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• There is no question that if one were to ask whether we Americans are moving towards more liberty or more government control over our lives, the answer would unambiguously be the latter - more government control over our lives. We might have reached a point where the trend is irreversible and that is a true tragedy for if liberty is lost in America, it will be lost for all times and all places.

  Walter E. Williams

  Moving, America, Government

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• Let the separation between you and the world be final and irreversible. Say, 'Here I go for Christ and His Cross, for the faith of the Bible, for the laws of God, for holiness, for trust in Jesus; and never will I go back, come what may.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Jesus, Law, Finals

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• In the complex course of its evolution, life exhibits a remarkable contrast to the tendency expressed in the Second Law to Thermodynamics. Where the Second Law expressed an irreversible progression toward increased entropy and disorder, life evolves continually higher levels of order. The still more remarkable fact is that this evolutionary drive to greater and greater order also is irreversible. Evolution does not go backward.

  J. H. Rush

  Law, Order, Levels

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• Most business mistakes are irreversible setbacks, but you get another chance. There are two things in life that you don't get another chance at - marrying the wrong person and what you do with your children.

  Warren Buffett

  Children, Mistake, Things In Life

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• I think we must ask ourselves if this is really what we want to do to God's creation, to drive it to extinction? Because extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park. We can't bring them back.

  Stuart L. Pimm

  Animal, Thinking, Jurassic Park

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• Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

  Tony Kushner

  Democracies Have, Government, Talking

  "Tony Kushner, Radical Pragmatist". Interview with Ben Greenman, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2003.

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• We see a newborn moth unwrapping itself and announce, Look, children, a miracle! But let an irreversible wound be knit back to seamlessness? We won't even see it, though we look at it every day.

  Leif Enger

  Children, Miracle, Looks

  Leif Enger (2007). “Peace Like a River”, p.202, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions. Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Self, Sunrise, Dimensions

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• Climate change is the greatest threat to our common future. We have a very short period of time to tackle the problem before it becomes irreversible and out of control. A lot of progress has been made, but we must now go further, faster and turn targets into real change

  Chris Huhne

  Real, Progress, Climate

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• Rome wasn't built in a day, and we won't replace fossil fuels with clean energy based on the events of a single week, either. But the important thing to remember is that, once they happen, clean energy victories are irreversible. No one will tear down wind farms because they are nostalgic for fracking in our watersheds. And nobody will pull down their solar panels because they miss having mercury in their tuna or asthma inhalers for their kids. Because once we leave fossil fuels behind, we are never going back.

  Michael Brune

  Kids, Wind Farms, Rome

  "The Road Ahead (And Some Bumps Along the Way)" by Michael Brune, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 21, 2013.

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• Can the state, which represents the whole of society and has the duty of protecting society, fulfill that duty by lowering itself to the level of the murderer, and treating him as he treated others? The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process.

  Kofi Annan

  Levels, Death Penalty, Life Is

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• We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the earth's functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide and even genocide, but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the killing of the life systems of the earth, and geocide, the devastation of the earth itself.

  Thomas Berry

  Suicide, Environmental, Earth

  Thomas Berry (2011). “The Great Work: Our Way into the Future”, p.104, Crown

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• The greatest danger hanging over our children and grandchildren is initiation of changes that will be irreversible on any time scale that humans can imagine.

  James Hansen

  Children, Energy, Environment

  "Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them" by James Hansen, www.theguardian.com. February 14, 2009.

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• The siren song of redistribution of wealth by centralized government never ceases for those who seek irreversible and unusurpable control over the lives and liberties of private citizens.

  Josh Jones

  Song, Government, Liberty

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• Evolution in the biosphere is therefore a necessarily irreversible process defining a direction in time; a direction which is the same as that enjoined by the law of increasing entropy, that is to say, the second law of thermodynamics. This is far more than a mere comparison: the second law is founded upon considerations identical to those which establish the irreversibility of evolution. Indeed, it is legitimate to view the irreversibility of evolution as an expression of the second law in the biosphere.

  Jacques Monod

  Science, Views, Expression

  Jacques Monod (1971). “Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology”

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• It is with our entire past ... that we desire, will and act ... from this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person ... that is why our duration is irreversible.

  Henri Bergson

  Science, Past, Survival

  Henri Bergson (2014). “Creative Evolution”, p.13, Lulu Press, Inc

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• If a child in its first thousand days - from conception to two years old - does not have adequate nutrition, the damage is irreversible.

  Josette Sheeran

  Children, Health, Years

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• Somtimes you lie in a strange room, in a strange person's home, and you feel yourself bending out of shape. Melting, touching something hot, something that warps you in drastic and probably irreversible ways you won't get to take stock of until its too late

  Rob Sheffield

  Lying, Home, Touching

  Rob Sheffield (2007). “Love Is a Mix Tape: Life, Loss, and What I Listened To”, p.63, Crown Archetype

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• Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Men, Goal, Doe

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• How could people, I wondered for the ten thousandth useless time, how could people who had loved so dearly come to such a wilderness; and yet the change in us was irreversible, and neither of us would even search for a way back. It was impossible. The fire was out. Only a few live coals lurked in the ashes, searing unexpectedly at the incautious touch.

  Dick Francis

  Fire, People, Ashes

  Dick Francis (1981). “Whip hand: Trial run ; Twice shy”

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• In five years' time at this pace global warming becomes irreversible.

  Yosef Abramowitz

  Years, Pace, Global Warming

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