Precarious Quotes - Page 4

• There are a broad range of issues that need to be dealt with. We've got the president's name up on buildings in places where they could be a terrorist attack. This is a very precarious situation.

  Reince Priebus

  Issues, Names, President

  Source: abcnews.go.com

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• Germany is not a fair country. Millions of people believe that things aren't fair in this country. Company profits and bonus payments have increased at the same rate as precarious employment situations.

  Martin Schulz

  Country, Believe, People

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• In Cuba, what we do not accept is the comparison of our participatory democracy with bourgeois democracy which has not solved anything for humanity. The only thing it has done is to take humanity towards a precarious point. They have created the environmental crisis, the food crisis, the water crisis and the pandemics all over the world. The reason for that is because they have taken the majority of the resources and given it to militarism paid for by the western powers because it is a great business for them; this is the real truth.

  Alejandro Castro Espin

  Real, Taken, Water

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• But really - look at the span of my career, and it's something people dream about. And to be spared major injury: I had some moments along the way, but being able to retire on my own terms after having driven during those decades when safety conditions were more precarious than today - am I lucky, or  what?

  Mario Andretti

  Dream, Careers, People

  Source: www.caranddriver.com

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• I was at Yale and I said to the poet Elizabeth Alexander, "I'm interested in the ways in which black health seems precarious in the United States." She introduced me to the term "John Henryism." And then I went back and researched it and understood that, woah, this thing I am thinking about is actually a condition that's named.

  Claudia Rankine

  Thinking, Yale, Black

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.

  David Maraniss

  Cities, Balance, Dying

  David Maraniss (2016). “Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question, do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years? It'd be a very precarious one for Republicans because he'd be running, and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don't want to be running and have that kind of thing hanging over your head.

  Donald Trump

  Running, Years, Two

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Unless the Stream of their Importation could be turned... they will soon so outnumber us, that all the advantages we have, will not in my Opinion be able to preserve our Language, and even our Government will become precarious.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Government, Immigration, Able

  Benjamin Franklin (1931). “Educational views of Benjamin Franklin”, AMS Press

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• To wage war on misery and to struggle against injustice is to promote, along with improved conditions, the human and spiritual progress of all men, and therefore the common good of humanity. Peace cannot be limited to a mere absence of war, the result of an ever precarious balance of forces. No, peace is something that is built up day after day, in the pursuit of an order intended by God, which implies a more perfect form of justice among men.

  Pope Paul VI

  Spiritual, Peace, War

  Catholic Church. Pope (1963-1978 : Paul VI), Pope Paul VI (1980*). “On the development of peoples”

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• I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

  Walter Bagehot

  Block, Worry, Political

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• Asian Homo erectus died without issue and does not enter our immediate ancestry (for we evolved from African populations); Neanderthal people were collateral cousins, perhaps already living in Europe while we emerged in Africa... In other words, we are an improbable and fragile entity, fortunately successful after precarious beginnings as a small population in Africa, not the predictable end result of a global tendency. We are a thing, an item of history, not an embodiment of general principles.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Cousin, Successful, Science

  "Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History".

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• They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Lonely, Religious, Science

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.353, W. W. Norton & Company

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• We need to roll back precarious employment models. Temporary and limited contracts were initially seen as a way of introducing more flexibility so as to bridge periods of need in certain phases of production. Some employers have taken advantage of the model to push down wages. In general, we must strive for equal pay for equal work.

  Martin Schulz

  Taken, Equal Pay, Bridges

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• No one has been able to define or synthesize that precarious, splendid, and perhaps untidy instant when the creative process begins. This is what the uniqueness of the artist is all about. The transcendent right of the artist is the right to create even though he may not always know what he is doing.

  Norman Cousins

  Artist, Creative, Able

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• Do I wear a helmet? Ugh. I do when I'm riding through a precarious part of town, meaning Midtown traffic. But when I'm riding on secure protected lanes or on the paths that run along the Hudson or through Central Park - no, I don't wear the dreaded helmet then.

  David Byrne

  Running, Central Park, Parks

  "David Byrne and Jeremy Deller: Audio Games". Modern Painters Interview, www.blouinartinfo.com. March 17, 2010.

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• The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .

  Aldous Huxley

  Lying, Civilization, Waiting

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• The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes there has never been peace in the world; and long before history began murderous strife was universal and unending.

  Winston Churchill

  War, Race, Long

  Winston Churchill (1957). “The world crisis”

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• [...] a morass of despair violence death with a thin layer of glass spread upon the surface where Love, a tiny crab with pincers and rainbow shell, walked delicately ever sideways but getting nowhere, while the sun [...] rose higher in the sky its tassels dropping with flame threatening every moment to melt the precarious highway of glass. And the people: giant pathworks of colour with limbs missing and parts of their mind snipped off to fit them into the outline of the free pattern.

  Janet Frame

  Glasses, Flames, Sky

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• In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.

  Virginie Despentes

  Children, School, Kids

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• The more experiences and experiments accumulate in the exploration of nature, the more precarious the theories become. But it is not always good to discard them immediately on this account. For every hypothesis which once was sound was useful for thinking of previous phenomena in the proper interrelations and for keeping them in context. We ought to set down contradictory experiences separately, until enough have accumulated to make building a new structure worthwhile.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Nature, Science, Thinking

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• Inclined to peace by his temper and situation, it was easy for [Augustus] to discover that Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, and the possession more precarious and less beneficial.

  Edward Gibbon

  War, Rome, Events

  Edward Gibbon, Francis Parkman, William H. Prescott, Theodore Roosevelt (2012). “The Modern Library Essential World History 4-Book Bundle: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged); Montcalm and Wolfe; History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Naval War of 1812”, p.59, Modern Library

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• I know truth is more like a mountain that has to be scaled. The peak of the mountain pierces the clouds and can only rarely be seen, and has never been reached. And what you see of it, moreover, depends upon the flank of the mountain you stand upon, and how exhausted getting even so far has made you. Virtue lies in looking upwards, toiling upwards, and sometimes joyously leaping from one precarious crag of fact and feeling to the next.

  Fay Weldon

  Lying, Clouds, Feelings

  Fay Weldon (2012). “The President’s Child”, p.6, HarperCollins UK

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• That's why I've never thought of retiring because I do it all the time whether on the stage or off. I found that in a precarious situation, a smile is the shortest distance between people. When one needs to reach out for sympathy or a link with people, what better way is there?

  Victor Borge

  Distance, People, Needs

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• Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.

  Charles Caleb Colton

  Wind, Literature, Wave

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• The simplicity and uniformity of rural occupations, and their incessant practice, preclude any anxieties and agitations of hope and fear, to which employments of a more precarious and casual nature are subject.

  William Falconer

  Practice, Simplicity, Anxiety

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