Unthinkable Quotes - Page 8

• Little wonder that it can seem unthinkable to say "no, thanks" to the modern-day equivalent of our tribe - our fear-driven culture.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Culture, Littles, Tribes

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

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• There are certain concepts, which exist in English, and are unthinkable, untranslatable into Hebrew and vice versa. Hebrew has a system of tenses, which is, in a big way, different from the English system of tenses, probably different than any European system of tenses, which means a different sense of reality, which means a different concept of time. So, things can be translated, but they become different.

  Amos Oz

  Mean, Reality, Different

  Source: logger.believermag.com

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• Socialism without democracy is unthinkable.

  Karl Kautsky

  Democracy, Socialism

  John Hans Kautsky, Karl Kautsky (1924). “Karl Kautsky: Marxism, Revolution, and Democracy”, p.217, Transaction Publishers

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• Once you decide that mediocrity is unthinkable, your only choices are excellence and quitting.

  Nick Murray

  Choices, Excellence, Mediocrity

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• Consider surgeons and their work. It's unthinkable to put your hands in the warm blood of another human's gut. Even with rubber gloves on. Who'd want to do that? But surgeons get over it.

  Park Dietz

  Blood, Hands, Gloves

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• We opened El Bulli; there were no secrets there. The recipes were not secret. Anybody who came, the recipes were there for them. This was unthinkable then.

  Ferran Adria

  Secret, Recipes

  "World's top chefs talk cuisine, creativity in Chicago". Interview with Mark Caro, www.chicagotribune.com. March 20, 2014.

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• You know what we need to heal are the thought forms and the feelings that cause us to create war and mass destruction on this kind of a level, because ultimately if we are to survive as a species, we have to become a human race for whom the thought of war is unthinkable.

  Marianne Williamson

  War, Race, Mass Destruction

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• Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

  Derrick Jensen

  Civilization, Doe, Done

  "Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization". Book by Derrick Jensen, January 4, 2011.

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• The idea of the Overton Window of using people on the political fringe to change the terms of acceptable debate, that`s an idea that`s been hugely influential in conservative politics since Joseph P. Overton thought it up, making radical ideas seem acceptable by advocating for the unthinkable.

  Rachel Maddow

  Using People, Ideas, Political

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• It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought...should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

  George Orwell

  Forgotten, Should, Adopted

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• You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.

  Toni Morrison

  Thinking, Willing

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• I love women who are bosses and who don't constantly worry about what their employees think of them. I love women who don't ask, "Is that OK?" after everything they say. I love when women are courageous in the face of unthinkable circumstances, like my mother when she was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. Or like Gabrielle Giffords writing editorials for the New York Times about the cowardice of Congress regarding gun laws and using phrases like "mark my words" like she is Clint Eastwood. How many women say stuff like that?

  Mindy Kaling

  Mother, New York, Cancer

  "Lena Dunham Hilariously, Candidly Interviews Mindy Kaling". Interview with Lena Dunham, www.rollingstone.com. November 11, 2013.

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• The self identity of Man is transcultural, and thus cannot have any single point of reference. Pluralism is not synonymous with tolerance of a variety of opinions. Pluralism amounts to the recognition of the unthinkable, the absurd, and up to a limit, intolerable. Reality in itself does not need to be transparent intelligible.

  Raimon Panikkar

  Reality, Men, Self

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• Look at South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. They still have many problems, setbacks as well as breakthroughs, but basically changes have happened that were considered unthinkable a decade ago.

  Dalai Lama

  Unions, Middle East, Looks

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• A mother's love is supposed to be unconditional. That you could give your child up, over their sexuality, is unthinkable.

  Kim Wayans

  Mother, Children, Love Is

  Source: collider.com

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• People drift from generation to generation, and the morally unthinkable becomes thinkable as the years move on.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Moving, Years, People

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• The average film has eight or ten producers on it. That is just in a world that would be unthinkable to me, because to me, to really be a producer of a film, you have to be a line producer.

  Rick McCallum

  Eight, Average, Would Be

  Source: collider.com

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• Some form of gnosis or immediacy is attached to all thinking as its root-form or primitive origination; every act of thinking has this passive derivation, this coming-into-being of thinking not out of nothing (as it likes to imagine) but out of some unthinkable something. But the most self-abstractivist or self-reductivist kind of thinking cannot tolerate even the notion (much less the traumatic experience or confrontation) of an incurable pathos, a weakness or blind-spot, within consciousness. The very idea is an insult to the autonomy or self-determinability of ego/will/reason.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Ideas

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• In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin — consideration for their feelings. As it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged.

  Elizabeth Hardwick

  Marriage, Running, Men

  Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature "Amateurs" (1974)

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• The unthinkable is not something we are thinking about at the moment.

  Peter Kenyon

  Football, Thinking, Statistics

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• The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.

  C. Vann Woodward

  War, Thinking, Discovery

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• As we have come to understand the psychology of evil, we have realized that such transformations of human character are not as rare as we would like to believe. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the "banality of evil" -- that is, under certain conditions and social pressures, ordinary people can commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable.

  Philip Zimbardo

  Believe, Character, Evil

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• Australia without the Irish would be unthinkable... unimaginable... unspeakable.

  Paul Keating

  Australia, Would Be, Unimaginable

  "Ned Kelly and 'Mary Poppins' Writer Among Top Irish-Australians". www.irishtimes.com. August 19, 2009.

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• Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable — and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.

  Samuel R. Delany

  Thinking, Fiction, Littles

  "Space Cowboy: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany". Interview with Scott Westerfeld, www.nerve.com. 2001.

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• That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off... and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

  Iain Banks

  Stars, Distance, Fighting

  "Consider Phlebas (The Culture, Book 1)". Book by Iain Banks (Chapter 2 "The Hand of God 137", p. 32), 1987.

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