Incapable Quotes - Page 7

• This [the U.S. Constitution] is likely to be administered for a course of years and then end in despotism... when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Government, Years, People

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• In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.

  Ansel Adams

  Photography, Cameras, Abstract

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• That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Freedom, Moving, Men

  Thomas Jefferson (1900). “The Life and Writings of ...”

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• The man of least capacity is the one who shows himself incapable of self-correction.

  Muhammad Ali

  Men, Self, He Man

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• I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

  A. N. Wilson

  People, Done, Research

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• There is a lack of critical assessment of the past. But you have to understand that the current ruling elite is actually the old ruling elite. So they are incapable of a self-critical approach to the past.

  Ryszard Kapuscinski

  Past, Assessment, Self

  "An Interview with Ryszard Kapuscinski: Writing about Suffering". Interview With Thomas Wolfe, quod.lib.umich.edu. 1998.

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• I have a character failing. I am quite incapable of identifying with anything whole-heartedly. Whatever I am doing, I am always planning to do something else. I would rather travel than arrive.

  Stephen Bayley

  Character, Planning, Failing

  "Stephen Bayley interview: prize exhibit". Interview With Lynn Barber, www.theguardian.com. December 3, 2000.

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• I do still get extremely nervous before speeches. My biggest fear is that I'll be standing there in front of hundreds of people and be incapable of talking. I'm afraid that I'll make a complete fool of myself and be unable to go on.

  Marcus Buckingham

  Talking, People, Goes On

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• If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

  Duff Goldman

  What If, Answers, Becoming

  "Duff Goldman: The Ace of Cakes On A Sugar High" by Regina Varolli, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 15, 2011.

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• I seem to be incapable of playing that guy that always does the right thing, who always responds well in any circumstance.

  Grant Bowler

  Guy, Doe, Circumstances

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• The Germans are incapable of any conception of greatness: proof Schumann.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Greatness, Culture, Proof

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2004). “Why I am So Wise”, p.36, Penguin UK

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• I think leaders are incapable of the strength that passive resistance entails.

  Meshell Ndegeocello

  Thinking, Passive Resistance, Leader

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• Whether many people realize it yet or not, man, the Inferior Animal, has by now proved himself incapable of keeping his own species - and others - alive for very much longer. So the earth has begun its own plan to set things right.

  Benjamin Hoff

  Men, Animal, People

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• It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or, of remedying it.

  Josiah Warren

  Common, Radical, Discovering

  Josiah Warren (1852). “Equitable commerce: a new development of principles as substitutes for laws and governments, for the harmonious adjustment and regulation of the pecuniary, intellectual, and moral intercourse of mankind, proposed as elements of new society”, p.105

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• The best I can say is that it's better for me to write about despair and darkness than to be incapable of getting off the sofa. It's better to write about suicide than to contemplate it too heavily.

  Paul Westerberg

  Suicide, Writing, Darkness

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• ...there is nothing that has been created without some reason, even if human nature is incapable of knowing precisely the reason for them all.

  Saint John Chrysostom

  Knowing, Environmental, Human Nature

  Saint John Chrysostom (1986). “Homilies on Genesis”, p.100, CUA Press

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• A tender-hearted and compassionate disposition, which inclines men to pity and feel the misfortunes of others, and which is, even for its own sake, incapable of involving any man in ruin and misery, is of all tempers of mind the most amiable; and though it seldom receives much honor, is worthy of the highest.

  Henry Fielding

  Men, Honor, Mind

  Henry Fielding (1903). “The Works of Henry Fielding: With an Essay on His Life and Genius”

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• The nearest my parents came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.

  Alan Bennett

  Dad, Journey, Weather

  Alan Bennett (2009). “A A Life Like Other People's”, p.80, Faber & Faber

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• The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Music, Spring, Fall

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• I was given life because it was my time, and now I take leave of it according to the same law. Content with the natural sequence of these events, I am touched neither by joy nor by grief. I am simply hanging in the air ... incapable of freeing myself, tied by the threads of things.

  Zhuangzi

  Death, Grief, Air

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• The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Writing, Expression, Literature

  D. H. Lawrence, Bruce Steele (1985). “Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays”, p.179, Cambridge University Press

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• Fascists are flourishing politically in France and Italy, and now comes the murder of Pim Fortuyn, a populist politician who might have done well enough in the forthcoming Dutch elections to hold the balance of power in that country's parliament. But it is the widespread Jew-baiting that best reveals that Europeans are evidently incapable of learning from their history. France is the outright prizewinner where anti-Semitism is concerned.

  David Pryce-Jones

  Country, Balance, Done

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• We are so attached to the earth, and yet we are incapable of holding onto it.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Earth, Holding On

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• It is absurd to believe that soldiers who cannot be made to wear the proper uniform can be induced to move forward in battle. Officers who fail to perform their duty by correcting small violations and in enforcing proper conduct are incapable of leading.

  George S. Patton

  Military, Believe, Moving

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• It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood.

  Pope Francis

  Blood, Humanity, Innocent

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