Inability Quotes - Page 15

• Censorship that comes from the outside assumes about people an inability to make reasoned choices.

  George Carlin

  People, Choices, Assuming

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• Many Israelis can get to know what's really happening. I mean, you have soldiers who go and see things. It's not like France and Algiers or, I don't know, England and Kenya or Belgium and Kenya. It's in your backyard. It's much more about willingness, indecision, the inability, or exposure. There is a decision not to be exposed. People can live like five minutes away from it all.

  Amira Hass

  Mean, People, Decision

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• No one can mock your meagre achievements or inability to accomplish the simplest of tasks, if they remain figments of your imagination. You can revel, again and again, in the glory of a fairy tale doomed never to appear in reality.

  Chris Murray

  Reality, Imagination, Achievement

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• In today's life, the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the agitated. The right to live and triumph is now conquered almost by the same means by which you conquer internment in an asylum: the inability to think, amorality and hiperexcitation.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Stupid, Mean, Thinking

  "The Book of Disquiet". Book by Fernando Pessoa, p.173, 1982.

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• All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting" will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

  Walter Bagehot

  Fall, Men, Hunting

  Walter Bagehot (1873). “Physics and Politics: Or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "natural Selection" and "inheritance" to Political Society”, p.186

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• What [Nietzsche] calls slave morality is to him purely spite-morality; and this spite-morality gave new names to all ideals. Thus impotence, which offers no reprisal, became goodness; craven baseness became humility; submission to him who was feared became obedience; inability to assert one's self became reluctance to assert one's self, became forgiveness, love of one's enemies. Misery became a distinction

  Georg Brandes

  Humility, Self, Names

  Georg Brandes (2015). “Friedrich Nietzsche (English Edition)”, p.17, WILLIAM HEINEMANN

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• As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. They realize that, whether they like it or not, they are simply going to have to put up with what to them are excruciatingly slow mental processes, that we humans have embarrassingly low I.Q.'s, and that probably because of these defects, we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplist and most explicit of directions.

  Cleveland Amory

  Cat, Mind, Realizing

  Cleveland Amory (2002). “The cat who came for Christmas ; The cat and the curmudgeon ; The best cat ever”

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• This absence of similarity among military questions naturally brings out the inability of memory to solve them; also the sterility of invariable forms, such as figures, geometrical drawings ( épures ), plans ( schémas ), etc. One only right solution imposes itself:;: namely, the application, varying according to circumstances, of fixed principles.

  Ferdinand Foch

  Memories, Military, Drawing

  Ferdinand Foch (1920). “The Principles of War”

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• Television is a new, hard test of our wisdom. If we succeed in mastering the new medium it will enrich us. But it can also put our mind to sleep. We must not forget that in the past the inability to transport immediate experience and to convey it to others made the use of language necessary and thus compelled the human mind to develop concepts. For in order to describe things one must draw the general from the specific; one must select, compare, think. When communication can be achieved by pointing with the finger, however, the mouth grows silent, the writing hand stops, and the mind shrinks.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Communication, Sleep, Writing

  Rudolf Arnheim (1957). “Film as Art”, p.195, Univ of California Press

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• I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.

  Terry Pratchett

  Night, Thinking, Events

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• The ability of nonintelligent people to understand the most complicated mechanisms and to use them has always been to me a cause of astonishment: their inability to understand simple questions is even more astonishing. The general acceptance of simple ideas is difficult and rare, and yet it is only when simple, fundamental, ideas have been accepted that further progress becomes possible on a higher level.

  George Sarton

  Acceptance, Simple, Ideas

  George Sarton (1952). “A History of Science: Ancient science through the Golden Age of Greece”

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• All I did in Chicago was to exercise my legal right to speak on my own behalf and I was given four years in jail as a result. But I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.

  Bobby Seale

  Exercise, Men, Thinking

  The Guardian Interview, February 1970.

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• The world was sick, and the ills from which it was suffering were mainly due to the perversion of man, his inability to live at peace with himself. The microbe was no longer the main enemy; science was sufficiently advanced to be able to cope with it admirably. If it were not for such barriers as superstition, ignorance, religious intolerance, misery and poverty.

  Brock Chisholm

  Religious, Ignorance, Men

  "Public health, a progressive science". Monthly Bulletin of the Philippine Health Service, 24, 1948.

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• Experimental artists build their skills gradually over the course of their careers, improving their work slowly over long periods. These artists are perfectionists and are typically plagued by frustration at their inability to achieve their goals.

  David Galenson

  Artist, Frustration, Skills

  David W. Galenson (2011). “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity”, p.4, Princeton University Press

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• Perhaps the deterioration of American education is illustrated by the high correlation between the number of years a person has attended school and his inability to understand the words "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It is more likely, though, that those who interpret the Second Amendment to preclude an individual right to own guns are driven by their political agenda. Whichever the case, they do themselves no credit when they tell us that a simple, elegant sentence means the opposite of what it clearly says.

  Sheldon Richman

  Education, School, Mean

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• Fundamental systemic crises are often associated with the decline of the dominant imperial power and its increasing inability to sustain the system over which it had previously presided. The profound instability of the interwar period owed much to Britain's inability to maintain its role.

  Martin Jacques

  Profound, Roles, Fundamentals

  "Northern Rock's rescue is part of a geopolitical sea change" by Martin Jacques, www.theguardian.com. February 17, 2008.

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• Now the code of life of the High Middle Ages said something entirely opposite to this: that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work's sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanatacism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.

  Josef Pieper

  Self, Opposites, Age

  "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" by Josef Pieper, translated by Gerald Malsbary, South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, (p. 27), 1998.

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• The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Individual Strength, Church, Weakness

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• There is perhaps no single factor contributing so much to people's frequent reluctance to let the market work as their inability to conceive how some necessary balance, between demand and supply, between exports and imports, or the like, will be brought about without deliberate control. The conservative feels safe and content only if he is assured that some higher wisdom watches and supervises change, only if he knows that some authority is charged with keeping the change "orderly.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  People, Balance, Watches

  "In Memoriam: F.A. Hayek" by Virginia Postrel, reason.com. June 1992.

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• If Apple has a flaw, it's the inability of the company to crush competition using the kind of aggressive tactics that companies like Microsoft and Intel have always applied.

  John C. Dvorak

  Crush, Apples, Competition

  "Apple's Swan Song". www.pcmag.com. January 14, 2013.

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• Pattern recognition and association make up the core of our thought. These activities involve millions of operations carried out in parallel, outside the field of our consciousness. If AI appeared to hit a brick wall after a few quick victories, it did so owing to its inability to emulate these processes.

  Daniel Crevier

  Wall, Victory, Owing

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• Las Vegas was and is a hard town that will make you pay for your inability to restrain your desires.... If you have a weakness, Las Vegas will punish you.

  Hal Rothman

  Las Vegas, Desire, Pay

  Hal Rothman (2015). “Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century”, p.25, Routledge

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• If Jesus ever commanded us to do something that He was unable to equip us to accomplish, He would be a liar. And if we make our own inability a stumbling block or an excuse not to be obedient, it means that we are telling God that there is something which He has not yet taken into account.

  Oswald Chambers

  Jesus, Liars, Block

  Oswald Chambers (2010). “My Utmost for His Highest”, p.271, Discovery House

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• I think that the inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive.

  James A. Baldwin

  Love Is, Thinking, Inability To Love

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• Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another's point of view... The best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse.

  Nikola Tesla

  Ignorance, Views, Appreciate

  "The Transmission Of Electrical Energy Without Wires As A Means For Furthering Peace". "Electrical World and Engineer", (pp. 21-24), January 7, 1905.

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