Ominous Quotes

• What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.

  Thomas Sowell

  Government, Libertarian Party, Long

  Thomas Sowell (1993). “Is Reality Optional?: And Other Essays”, Hoover Inst Press

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• For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned

  George Santayana

  Fashion, Ideas, Investing

  1913 Winds of Doctrine,'Modernism and Christianity'.

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• The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

  James Thurber

  Past, Sound, Comedy

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• Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts.

  Haruki Murakami

  Fate, Storm, Adjusting

  "Kafka on the Shore". Book by Haruki Murakami. Chapter One, September 12, 2002.

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• Never has good weather felt so bad. Never have flowers inspired so much fear. Never has the warm caress of a sunbeam seemed so ominous. The weather is sublime, it's glorious, it's the end of the world.

  Joel Achenbach

  Flower, Weather, Sublime

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• Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities—those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult—not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.

  Robert Jensen

  Jobs, Speaks Out, People

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• In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.

  Tracy Kidder

  Order, Goes On, Strange

  Tracy Kidder (2009). “Strength in What Remains”, p.111, Random House

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• It began as most thing begin. Not on a dark and stormy night. Not foreshadowed by ominous here comes the villain music, dire warning at the bottom of a teacup, or dread portents in the sky. It began small and innocuously, as most catastrophes do. A butterfly flaps its wings somewhere and the wind changes, and a warm front hits a cold front off the coast of western Africa and before you know it you’ve got an hurricane closing in. By the time anyone figured out the storm was coming, it was too late to do anything but batten down the hatches and exercise damage control.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Butterfly, Exercise, Dark

  FaceBook post by Karen Marie Moning from Jun 06, 2013

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• To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.

  Gore Vidal

  Evil, Greed, Mind

  "Comment, July 1961" by Gore Vidal, www.esquire.com. May 19, 2008.

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• Fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step.

  Haruki Murakami

  Eye, Fate, Play

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Mar 11, 2012

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• Enhancement not only allows the possibilities of a healthy fullness and exuberance, but of a rather ominous extravagance, aberration, monstrosity ... This danger is built into the very nature of growth and life. Growth can become over-growth, life 'hyper-life' ... The paradox of an illness which can present as wellness - as a wonderful feeling of health and well-being, and only later reveal its malignant potentials - is one of the chimaeras, tricks and ironies of nature.

  Oliver Sacks

  Health, Feelings, Growth

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• Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel-dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Heart, Angel, Dark

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Henry Nelson Coleridge (1854). “The complete works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: With an introductory essay upon his philosophical and theological opinions”, p.588

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• The most ominous of fallacies - the belief that things can be kept static by inaction

  Freya Stark

  Mistake, Belief, Fear Of Failure

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

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• And see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Clouds, Sky, Inferiority

  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (2011). “Why We Can't Wait”, p.59, Beacon Press

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• Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over.

  Arthur Erickson

  Artist, America, Management

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• Something deathless and dangerous in the world sweeps past you...It is something fearful and ominous, something turbulent and to be dreaded, which distends the drama to include the life of nations as well as of men. It is an ageless warning.

  John Mason Brown

  Drama, Past, Men

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• "Foreboding" and "ominous" is what you're striving to achieve-not mention.

  Josip Novakovich

  Writing, Strive, Achieve

  Josip Novakovich (2008). “Fiction Writer's Workshop”, p.126, Writer's Digest Books

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• Under the ominous shadow which the second World War and its attendant circumstances have cast on the world, peace has become as essential to civilized existence as the air we breathe is to life itself.

  Cordell Hull

  War, Air, Shadow

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• The Earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations.

  Mervyn Peake

  Moon, Generations, Earth

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• I like to think that I'm not as ominous in real life.

  Daniel Dae Kim

  Real, Thinking, Real Life

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• Americans have discovered the fragility of life, that ominous fragility that the rest of the world either already experienced or is experiencing now with terrible intensity.

  Jose Saramago

  Fragility, World, Intensity

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• We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

  Chinua Achebe

  Integrity, Struggle, Ordinary

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays”, p.169, Penguin

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• The key strengths of civilizations are also their central weaknesses. You can see that from the fact that the golden ages of civilizations are very often right before the collapse. The Renaissance in Italy was very much like the Classic Maya. The apogee was the collapse. The Golden Age of Greece was the same thing. We see this pattern repeated continuously, and it is one that should make us nervous. I just heard Bill Gates say that we are living in the greatest time in history. Now you can understand why Bill Gates would think that, but even if he is right, that is an ominous thing to say.

  Arthur Demarest

  Thinking, Age, Weakness

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The woods always look different at night...as if the daytime trees and flowers and stones had gone to bed and sent slightly more ominous versions of themselves to take their places.

  Suzanne Collins

  Flower, Night, Tree

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• Filling life exceedingly is called ominous.

  Laozi

  Taoism, Filling

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