Unthinkable Quotes - Page 4

• While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.

  Michael Polanyi

  Learning, Knowledge, Management

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• I'm trying to trick people into thinking about the unthinkable by using pop culture images.

  John Shirley

  Thinking, People, Trying

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• Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it.

  Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg (2004). “Phases of the Moon: Stories of Six Decades”, Subterranean

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• Each person is a temporary focus of forces, vitalities, and values that carry back to an immemorial past and that reach forward into an unthinkable future.

  Lewis Mumford

  Past, Thought Provoking, Focus

  "Faith for Living". Book by Lewis Mumford, 1940.

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• From my childhood, obedience was something I could not get out of my system. When I entered the armed service at the age of twenty-seven, I found being obedient not a bit more difficult than it had been during my life to that point. It was unthinkable that I would not follow orders.

  Adolf Eichmann

  Order, Childhood, Age

  "Why? New Eichmann Notes Try to Explain" by Roger Cohen, www.nytimes.com. August 13, 1999.

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• What we learned on September 11 is that the unthinkable is now thinkable in the world

  John Ashcroft

  September 11, World, September

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• Conversation! Supple sentences, with first and second meanings and overtones beyond, outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals of elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patient explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable. As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal facility of the company. To this end, a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable.

  Jack Vance

  Challenges, Deception, Fleeting

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• In many parts of the world-including Polynesia, north Africa & the Middle East-public dancing that focused on a physically linked couple would have been unthinkable, a violation of communal propriety.

  Gerald Jonas

  Dance, Couple, Dancing

  Gerald Jonas (1998). “Dancing: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement”, Turtleback Books

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• Testing is the process of comparing the invisible to the ambiguous, so as to avoid the unthinkable happening to the anonymous.

  James Marcus Bach

  Bugs, Invisible, Process

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• The evolutionist thesis has become more stringently unthinkable than ever before.

  Wolfgang Smith

  Thesis

  Dr. Wolfgang Smith (2015). “Teilhardism And The New Religion: A Thorough Analysis of the Teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin”, p.18, TAN Books

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• But I think it’s important to discuss just how easy it is for any of us to get caught up in things that might seem unthinkable—to get sucked into the wrong environment and make moral compromises that can tarnish us terribly. We like to think that we change our environment, but the truth is that it changes us. So we have to be extraordinarily careful to choose the right environment—to work with, and even socialize with, the right people. Ideally, we should stick close to people who are better than us so that we can become more like them.

  Guy Spier

  Thinking, People, Important

  Guy Spier (2014). “The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment”, p.20, Palgrave Macmillan

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• The hatred I feel for him, for the phantom girl, for everything, is so real and immediate it chokes me. Gale is mine. I am his. Anything else is unthinkable. Why did it take him being whipped within an inch of his life to see it?

  Suzanne Collins

  Girl, Real, Hatred

  Suzanne Collins (2010). “Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games)”, p.117, Scholastic Inc.

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• He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

  Jack London

  Hurt, Animal, Essence

  Jack London (1992). “The Call of the Wild and White Fang”, p.116, Wordsworth Editions

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• I guess the answer would be yes." "Got to love that word." He kissed her so sweetly then, it brought tears to her eyes. "Got it in you to say it again?" And then he did the unthinkable. He went down on one knee.

  Cindy Gerard

  Eye, Tears, Would Be

  Cindy Gerard (2007). “To the Brink”, p.105, Macmillan

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• There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

  Milan Kundera

  Love Is, Violence, Unbearable Lightness Of Being

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• Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.

  Mark Nepo

  Long, Matter, Way

  Mark Nepo (2000). “The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have”, p.410, Conari Press

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• I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other.

  Wislawa Szymborska

  Who I Am, I Am Who I Am, Coincidence

  Wislawa Szymborska (2015). “Poems New and Collected”, p.267, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Why does anyone do anything? Belief. A belief that they are right and just in their actions. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac, because he believed that God had commanded it. To kill your son is unthinkable. A crime. But if you are acting in the belief that your God, your supreme deity whom you must obey, has demanded it of you, is it still a crime?

  Libba Bray

  Son, Sacrifice, Acting

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• That," he whispered, "is unthinkable." In Mosca’s experience, such statements generally meant that a thing was perfectly thinkable, but that the speaker did not want to think it.

  Frances Hardinge

  Thinking, Want, Speakers

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• I think life without Coronation Street would be unthinkable. It's part of all our lives.

  Michael Parkinson

  Thinking, Would Be, Streets

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• The unthinkable is that we're distorting this atmospheric balance. We're shifting the chemical balance so that we have more poisons in the atmosphere - ozones and acid rain on ground level - while we're also changing the thermal climate of the earth through the greenhouse effect and - get this - simultaneously causing destruction of our primary filter of ultraviolet light. It's incredible. Talk about the national-debt crisis - we're piling up debts in the atmosphere, and the piper will want to be paid.

  Michael Oppenheimer

  Rain, Ozone, Light

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• I write some art criticism, and one thing that's clear to me is that politics is fashionable in the American art world in a way it maybe isn't in American fiction. Your work of art becomes fashionable the moment it has some kind of political commentary. I think this has its dangers - the equation between fashion, politics, and art is problematic for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, the notion of politics as being de rigueur in the world of fiction is almost unthinkable. In fiction in America at the moment, the escape into whimsy is far more prevalent than the political.

  Katie Kitamura

  Fashion, Art, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The unthinkable occurred: two communist countries went to war with each other.

  Neil Sheehan

  Country, War, Two

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• What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

  H. L. Mencken

  Believe, Effort, Political

  H.L. MENCKEN (1958). “PREJUDICES A SELECTION”

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• Now familiar with my own particular voice and accent, my Dragon app prints out exactly what I speak into my iPad. Twenty years ago this miracle would be unthinkable.

  Robert Genn

  Technology, Voice, Ipads

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