Uncooperative Quotes

• Positive deviance means doing the right thing for sustainability, despite being surrounded by the wrong institutional structures, the wrong processes and stubbornly uncooperative people. That is what sustainability-literate leadership means today. Surrounded by evidence of rampant unsustainability it is not possible to say 'I did not know'

  Sara Parkin

  Future, Mean, People

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• It's one thing to make a pronouncement in a moment of inspiration about what you intend to manifest in your life or what kind of person you intend to become. It's quite another thing to make a commitment to holding that vision regardless of what difficulties or obstacles may surface. Holding the vision involves an unwillingness to compromise what you're visualizing for yourself. It means being willing to suffer through criticism and what appears to be an uncooperative universe.

  Wayne Dyer

  Inspiration, Mean, Commitment

  Dr. Wayne W. Dyer (2013). “The Essential Wayne Dyer Collection”, p.454, Hay House, Inc

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• For the last 250 years or so, secularists have waited patiently for the fulfilment of their prediction that religion would die out in the next generation or two. But religious people have been singularly uncooperative, and new strategies have developed for controlling this blight on human progress. If religion won't "wither away" as philosopher Richard Rorty has wished, then perhaps it can be privatized and thereby removed from influence on public life‚ - sort of like localizing an outbreak of the plague.

  Daniel Taylor

  Religious, Years, Two

  7 Copy quote

• The study of law can be disappointing at times, a matter of applying narrow rules and arcane procedure to an uncooperative reality; a sort of glorified accounting that serves to regulate the affairs of those who have power--and that all too often seeks to explain, to those who do not, the ultimate wisdom and justness of their condition. But that's not all the law is. The law is also memory; the law also records a long-running conversation, a nation arguing with its conscience.

  Barack Obama

  Running, Memories, Reality

  Barack Obama (2007). “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”, p.437, Broadway Books

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• He didn't look insane or inhuman. He did look uncooperative.

  Robin McKinley

  Insane, Looks, Inhuman

  6 Copy quote

• Psychotherapy, unlike castor oil, which will work no matter how you get it down, is useless when forced on an uncooperative patient.

  Abigail Van Buren

  Oil, Useless, Matter

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• There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don't remember how I passed.

  Marilynne Robinson

  Education, Tired, Science

  4 Copy quote