Averting Quotes & Sayings

Potentially the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia and perhaps Iran, an 'anti-hegemonic' coalition, united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. . . . Averting this contingency . . . will require a display of US geostrategic skill on the western, eastern and southern perimeters of Eurasia simultaneously." - Zbigniew Brzezinski, former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama — F. William Engdahl

God has provided you with many avenues for obtaining wisdom and averting failure. Resist your inclination to accept advice with easy solutions and to reject help that requires a more difficult path. — Jim George

The burden therefore rests with the American legal community and with the American human-rights lobbies and non-governmental organizations. They can either persist in averting their gaze from the egregious impunity enjoyed by a notorious war criminal and lawbreaker, or they can become seized by the exalted standards to which they continually hold everyone else. The current state of suspended animation, however, cannot last. If the courts and lawyers of this country will not do their duty, we shall watch as the victims and survivors of this man pursue justice and vindication in their own dignified and painstaking way, and at their own expense, and we shall be put to shame. — Christopher Hitchens

God extends his grace to his people (and mankind in general) when he destroys the wicked, because in destroying the wicked, he is averting their evil works that so plague God's children and mankind in general. When he maims and kills cultists and theological liberals, he prevents the spread of heretical doctrine that damns souls ... God's judgment - not his favor - leads the world to righteousness. We should petition God's judgment on the wicked because judgment is a form of grace. — Andrew Sandlin

Factory farming, like comparable evils throughout history, depends for its existence upon concealment. It depends on people either not noticing or willfully averting their gaze. — Matthew Scully

Restoring trust, reinventing political parties, finding new ways in which average citizens can meaningfully participate in the political process, creating new mechanisms of effective governance, limiting the worst impacts of checks and balances while averting excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, and enhancing the capacity of nation-states to work together should be the central political goals of our time. — Moises Naim

m a butterfly!" screamed the fat man as he ran, flapping his arms like two really flabby, really rubbish wings. "You're actually not," Valkyrie Cain told him for the eighth time. He ran around her in a big circle, bathed in moonlight, and she just stood there with her head down. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and moments earlier she'd had to drag her eyes away from his wobbling bosoms before they made her feel queasy. Now that his trousers were starting their inexorable slide downwards, she was averting her gaze altogether. "Please," she said, "pull up your trousers. — Derek Landy

The very falsehood that stained her, was a proof how blindly she loved another
this dark, slight, elegant, handsome man
while he himself was rough, and stern, and strongly made. He lashed himself into an agony of fierce jealousy. He thought of that look, that attitude!
how he would have laid his life at her feet for such tender glances, such fond detention! He mocked at himself, for having valued the mechanical way in which she had protected him from the fury of the mob; now he had seen how soft and bewitching she looked when with a man she really loved. He remembered, point by point, the sharpness of her words
'There was not a man in all that crowd for whom she would not have done as much, far more readily than for him.' He shared with the mob, in her desire of averting bloodshed from them; but this man, this hidden lover, shared with nobody; he had looks, words, hand-cleavings, lies, concealment, all to himself. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Resurrecting American democracy is vital to averting climate catastrophe. We must first repeal the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which has flooded elections with billions of oily petrodollars from carbon tycoons. — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Airport security is a particular bugbear. At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, while I can see that averting terrorism is manifestly important, the measures taken seem, simultaneously, absurd. — James Purefoy

Science has succeeded to poetry, no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there no possibility of averting this sore evil? — Charles Lamb

Reading was credited not only with improving morale but easing adjustment and averting the onset of psychoneurotic breakdowns. According to one article: "When we read fiction or drama, we perceive in accordance with our needs, goals, defenses, and values," and a reader will "introject meaning that will satisfy his needs and reject meaning that is threatening to his ego. — Molly Guptill Manning

It was his detachment that saved us. Another man would have reacted with force to the Soviet treachery. He would have shared the righteousness of the cause, been stirred to attack by the saber rattling. Jack resisted. He was not moved by the emotion of other around him. He knew his course and stayed to it. Thank God. The boy who had read alone of history's heroes was now safely on of them. He had done it not winning a war, but by averting one far more horrible than any leader in the past could have imagined." - p.373 — Chris Matthews

It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests. Can you understand that? Can you understand that in averting the pitfalls and miseries that beset man, Eternity prevents men from finding their own bitter and better solutions, the real solutions that come from conquering difficulty, not avoiding it? — Isaac Asimov

Averting the looming (pick your favorite term) catastrophe, time bomb, crisis, or emergency, requires us to hew to their worldview, one in which we humans are the problem and the Earth is the object to be saved. The biggest and most influential environmental groups routinely preach a message of doom. They regularly claim, for instance, that technology is dangerous (their opposition to nuclear and GMOs are obvious examples of this mindset) and that industrial development must be stopped in order to the save the planet. However, the painful paradox is that they are aiming to stop many of the innovations that are helping to improve the environment and raise the living standards of millions of people. They are also promoting energy policies that would be ruinous for the environment they say they want to protect. — Robert Bryce

Holy Goshness! She gasped mentally, quickly averting her eyes.

For Being such a private and antisocial guy in normal everyday life, zonked out Harley sure didn't have a problem with wandering around in the buff. — Amy Cook

Oh, for crap's sake, I can barely look at it," Aphrodite said, turning her head from the archway and averting her eyes. "And I usually love sparkly things. — P.C. Cast

It was a hard thing, to vanish, especially when the people parted for him. Most of them didn't stare. No, in fact, they did the opposite of staring, averting their eyes and granting him too wide a berth for such a crowded place. It only drew more attention. Still, Will did his best to enjoy the apple and the blue-sky day and the fresh air as he made his way to the steps of the Great House. — Victoria Schwab

Nationalization of the economy will not constitute a solution to society's difficulties; it will merely be a reflexive means of averting immediate meltdown. — Richard Heinberg

She then recovered her wits and averting her eyes from the wreck of her house she shook Babbington's hand, embraced Stephen tenderly, greeted all the officers, young gentlemen and seamen she knew, and said she would not get in their way - would go and sort her baggage and draw breath in one of the loose-boxes: there was nothing she preferred to a really commodious loose-box. — Patrick O'Brian

Thinking about averting plane crashes in 1935, or stopping infections of central lines in 2003, or rescuing drowning victims today, I realized that the key problem in each instance was essentially a simple one, despite the number of contributing factors. — Atul Gawande

But since the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) employ a very clever artifice, namely, to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement into one whole, scattered and disjointed one from another, so as to appear to be in doubt and uncertainty, while they are in reality firm and steadfast, it will be of advantage, Venerable Brethren, to bring their teachings together here into one group, and to point out the connexion between them, and thus to pass to an examination of the sources of the errors, and to prescribe remedies for averting the evil. — Pope Pius X

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe - and would benefit the vast majority - are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets. — Naomi Klein

All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required. There are ways of preventing this — Naomi Klein

The thing that struck me was his intensity. Whatever he was interested in he would generally carry to an irrational extreme." Jobs had honed his trick of using stares and silences to master other people. " One of his numbers was to stare at the person he was talking to. He would stare into their fucking eyeballs, ask some question, and would want a response without the other person averting their eyes. — Walter Isaacson

Dasha introduced Alexander to Marina. They shook hands and both stared at each other for longer than was appropriate. Marina, embarrassed, stepped away, averting her gaze. Alexander smiled, putting his arm around Dasha. "Dasha," he said, "so this is your cousin Marina." Tatiana wanted to shake her head at him, while a perplexed Marina remained speechless. Later on in the kitchen, Marina said to Tatiana, "Tania, why did Dasha's Alexander look at me as if he knew me?" "I have no idea." "He is adorable." "You think so?" said Dasha, who was heading past the girls to the bathroom, leaving Alexander in the corridor. "Well, keep your hands off him," she added cheerfully. "He's mine." "Don't you think?" Marina whispered to Tatiana. "He's all right," said Tatiana. "Help me wash this frying pan, will you?" Adorable Alexander stood in the doorway, smoking and grinning at Tatiana. — Paullina Simons

In the great meteor shower of August, the Perseid, I wail all day for the shooting stars I miss. They're out there showering down, committing hari-kiri in a flame of fatal attraction, and hissing perhaps into the ocean. But at dawn what looks like a blue dome clamps down over me like a lid on a pot. The stars and planets could smash and I'd never know. Only a piece of ashen moon occasionally climbs up or down the inside of the dome, and our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of that strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever. — Annie Dillard

Prayer is converse with God, equal honor with the Angels, progress in good things, averting of evils, righting of sinners. — Ephrem The Syrian

I am already used to taking on the same sins. For a Fairy Tail Mage, the true sin is averting one's eyes ... and no longer being able to believe in anyone! — Hiro Mashima

You're crying?"
"I'm a woman of the desert," she said, averting her face. "But above all, I'm a woman. — Paulo Coelho

My existence from day to day has become a matter of averting my eyes, of cringing. Death is the only truth left. Death is what I cannot bear to think. At every moment when I am thinking of something else, I am not thinking death, am not thinking the truth. — J.M. Coetzee

The month behind her had gone, leaving nothing but the blank of dead time. It had gone into the planless, thankless work of racing from emergency to emergency, of delaying the collapse of a railroad - a month like a waste pile of disconnected days, each given to averting the disaster of the moment. It had not been a sum of achievements brought into existence, but only a sum of zeros, — Ayn Rand

He dragged his mouth along her jaw. She smelled so good, so feminine. He moved his mouth to her neck, and instantly, she went taut and recoiled. Right. He was a vampire. Worth about as much as a stray dog. And this stray dog was humping her leg. She must be mortified. Fucking humiliating. He shoved himself off her, averting his gaze so she wouldn't see the color change in his eyes that signified arousal. She was too aware of his desire as it was, and he was an idiot for letting it go as far as it had. With a curse, he grabbed up his ruined shirt. It was bloody, dirty, and torn to shit. It wasn't wearable, but he put it to good use while he waited for his heart rate and breathing to return to pre-hump-the-enemy levels. — Larissa Ione

Scholastics called the "irascible" (averting) and "concupiscible" (attracting) emotions. — Peter Kreeft