Imperatives Quotes - Page 13

• My generation is the first in my species to have put fitness next to godliness on the scale of things. Keeping in shape has become the imperative of our middle age. The heaviest burden of guilt we carry into our forties is flab. Our sense of failure is measured by the grade on a stress test.

  Ellen Goodman

  Fitness, Stress, Guilt

  Ellen Goodman (1990). “Making Sense”, Penguin Group USA

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• The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily.

  Erica Jong

  War, Practice, People

  Erica Jong (2007). “What Do Women Want?: Essays by Erica Jong”, p.40, Penguin

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• Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative.

  Shana Alexander

  Travel, People, World

  Shana Alexander (1970). “The feminine eye”, McCall Pub. Co

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• Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.

  Immanuel Kant

  Rights, Giving, Secret

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• I find the scientific mind horrendous. All those brains and not a moral imperative between them.

  Lucille Kallen

  Science, Brain, Mind

  Lucille Kallen (1987). “C.B. Greenfield: A Little Madness”

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• In a world where millions of human beings live in extreme poverty, die of malnutrition and lack medical care, where pandemics continue to kill, it is imperative to pursue good faith disarmament negotiations and to shift budgets away from weapons production, war-mongering, surveillance of private persons and devote available resources to address global challenges including humanitarian relief, environmental protection, climate change mitigation and adaptation, prevention of pandemics, and the development of a green economy.

  Alfred-Maurice de Zayas

  War, Challenges, Environmental

  "UN Expert Urges States to Cut Military Spending and Invest More in Human Development". www.ohchr.org. April 14, 2014.

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• How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail's pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it.

  Vivian Gornick

  Moving, Roots, People

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• the solution to racism lies in our ability to see its ubiquity but not to concede its inevitability. It lies in the collective and institutional power to make change, at least as much as with the individual will to change. It also lies in the absolute moral imperative to break the childish, deadly circularity of centuries of blindness to the shimmering brilliance of our common, ordinary humanity.

  Patricia J. Williams

  Lying, Ubiquity, Racism

  Patricia J. Williams (2016). “Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race”, p.68, Macmillan

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• To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut.

  Lynn Emanuel

  Book, Desire, Identity

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• It's tougher for me. But I don't think that's imperative to me starting a new movement, or revive an old movement, to help people.

  Lance Armstrong

  Thinking, People, Movement

  Interview with Dan Roan, www.bbc.com. January 26, 2015.

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• It's not imperative that I graduate in four years, and it's not imperative that I get all A's.

  Kellie Martin

  Years, Four, Graduates

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• Before you begin working your way into the system, it is imperative that you are ready to be judged. You are only new once. ... You are only ready when you can orchestrate the next move after you have the industry's attention.

  K Callan

  Moving, Next Move, Hollywood

  K. Callan (2000). “Directing Your Directing Career”

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• In Holland I have seen well-meaning, principled people blinded by multiculturalism, overwhelmed by the imperative to be sensitive and respectful of immigrant culture, while ignoring criminal abuse of women and girls.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Girl, People, Abuse

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• Men who scorn the idea of submission to the divine Will and are outraged by the notion of a God who requires submission are among the first to demand total submission to the process in which we are involved and seem to attach a kind of moral imperative to willing participation in it. Any other attitude, so they say, is reactionary or escapist or anti-social. Perhaps, after all, they have found a divinity to worship; and, if they have, the only charitable comment must be: God help them!

  Charles le Gai Eaton

  Attitude, Men, Ideas

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• The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

  Lynn Margulis

  Years, Differences, People

  "A Woman's Worth: 1857 Letter Echoes Still; Some Basic Disputes Over Feminism Persist" by Patricia Cohen, www.nytimes.com. July 18, 1998.

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• For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule.

  Ray Bradbury

  Running, Real, Book

  Ray Bradbury (1990). “Fahrenheit 451: Curriculum Unit”

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• Sometimes, some of us in some things we do know better. When we know better, I think it's imperative that we do better. Otherwise we're perpetuating myths that have for centuries done us no good. Men and women alike. No one is exempt from being called into consciousness.

  Jill Alexander Essbaum

  Men, Thinking, Good Man

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Command of English, spoken or written, ranks at the top in business. Our main product is words, so a knowledge of their meaning and spelling and pronunciation is imperative. If a man knows the language well, he can find out about all else.

  William Feather

  Men, Language, Spelling

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• The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Irrelevance, Criticism, Faults

  Elizabeth Bowen (1975). “Pictures and conversations”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why the writer hasn't written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.

  Robert Benchley

  Half, Letters, Today

  Robert Benchley (1943). “Benchley beside himself”

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• The Hacker Ethic: Access to computers--and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works--should be unlimited and total.
  Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!
  All information should be free.
  Mistrust authority--promote decentralization.
  Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.
  You can create art and beauty on a computer.
  Computers can change your life for the better.

  Steven Levy

  Art, Hands, Yield

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• Thinking carries a moral imperative. The searcher for truth must be ready to obey truth without reservation or it will elude him.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Thinking, Elude, Moral

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• In this country, you never pull the emergency brake, even when there is an emergency. It is imperative that the trains run on schedule.

  Friedrich Durrenmatt

  Running, Country, Schedules

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• Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control.

  Shoshana Zuboff

  Faith, Spiritual, Power

  Shoshana Zuboff (1988). “In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power”, New York : Basic Books

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• If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamicsthat present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.

  Shoshana Zuboff

  Technology, Division Of Labor, Challenges

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