Imperiled Quotes & Sayings

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. - Sun Tzu — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Is it me, or did we just stop in the median and the driver got out?" Larry asks.
"He has to go peewee," Jade informs us.
"Good to know I'm not demented," Larry remarks. "Merely imperiled. — Daniel Asa Rose

A shadow strolled past the car, indifferent to our curbside melodrama. This was my second time imperiled in a a parked vehicle in the space of three hours. I wondered what goonish spectacles I'd overlooked in my own career as a pavement walker. — Jonathan Lethem

There is nothing puzzling ... about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or about the oligarchs' successful efforts to drag the Republic into five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war] kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope. — Walter Karp

Master Sun So it is said that if you know others and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know others but know yourself, you win one and lose one; if you do not know others and do not know yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. — Sun Tzu

Like some homeopathic cure, our very sense of imprisonment can be a step toward liberation. We need not rebel against our temporally determined roles. Merely to recognize them is to limit their power over us. The liberation implied by such awareness is threefold. To understand one's own temporal determinism is to establish, above and beyond what one says and does, an analytic posture toward the present as history; it is to achieve, amid the earnest vanities of contemporary society, an easing humility; it is to mark off, as territory precious and imperiled, the moments and pursuits that are left to our choice. — Robert Grudin

The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id. — Charlie Pierce

A perkier bit at the beginning of a Three Stooges comedy, Restless Knights (February 20, 1935), has Brennan playing their father, decked out in a large night cap and a fake white beard, lying on his deathbed calling for his sons. He confesses in tremolo that they are of royal blood: "Years ago I was the royal chamberlain of the Kingdom of Anesthesia." Now, he urges them to offer their swords in service of their imperiled queen. The quality of the writing is best exemplified in Brennan's telling Curly that his title is "Baron of Grey Matter." Brennan then says, "Come close my sons so that I may bless you," and rises enough to give them a sweeping triple slap, as the light fades on his 120-second part in this sixteen minute short. — Carl Rollyson

The Disney animators' rules on adult females: mothers are perfect but imperiled; stepmothers are wicked and occasionally homicidal; godmothers are sweet things with magical powers. — Richard Corliss

Freedoms, like privileges, prevail or are imperiled together You cannot harm or strive to achieve one without harming or furthering all. — Jose Marti

One's virtue is all that one truly has, because it is not imperiled by the vicissitudes of fortune. — Boethius

That Native American cultures are imperiled is important and not just to Indians. It is important to everyone, or should be. When we lose cultures, we lose American plurality -- the productive and lovely discomfort that true difference brings. — David Treuer

Fear comes from uncertainty; we can eliminate the fear within us when we know ourselves better. As the great Sun Tzu said: When you know yourself and your opponent, you will win every time. When you know yourself but not your opponent, you will win one and lose one. However, when you do not know yourself or your opponent, you will be imperiled every time. — Bruce Lee

What strikes me as people in diners rail at each other at the counter when before they ate in silence is not how imperiled they feel, but how safe. Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment. But — Lionel Shriver

We had generals who were admirals and admirals who wanted to be generals. Generals acting as admirals are bad enough, but it was the admirals who wanted to be generals who imperiled victory among the coral islands. — Holland Smith

Having told the truth for years as a first-rate reporter, Jason Leopold now comes completely clean about himself and also sheds light on his imperiled profession. A riveting account of just how hard the truth can be. — Mark Crispin Miller

I do get scared about the physical danger from drug dealers. But it's not in the same league as the danger I feel eating an $80 lunch with my privileged friends to discuss hunger and poverty. That's when my soul feels imperiled. — Jonathan Kozol

For the poets, my hope is that they will, quite simply, feel the obligation to be really informed about the situation in which we find ourselves, in terms of our imperiled planet. You should inform yourself so deeply that it becomes part of your nature, part of your voice. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper. — Cornel West

A generous donor (who had no doubt lived a life that imperiled his mortal soul) had granted [the Sisters] more than one hundred waterfront acres. — Kristin Hannah

However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the innocent. — Pope Pius XI

I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant's brilliant non-fiction about humankind's tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it. — John Burnham Schwartz

The New START accord cuts the strategic nuclear arsenals on each side to 1,550 warheads. Can any of its critics make a case that our security would be imperiled if, the very next day, Obama and Medvedev made moves to take the levels down to 1,000 - then to 500?
If so, come show us the math. If not, it may be time to stop making arms control so politically complicated - time to stop letting arms control get in the way of disarmament. — Fred Kaplan

Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain. — Frank Zappa

This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths. — Simon Heffer

But each one of us is guilty insofar as he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a spectacular death. Plato already deemed it a matter of course to go into hiding in desperate times of calamity, and to survive. But passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail. Impotent submission always left a margin of activity which, though not without risk, could still be cautiously effective. Its anxious omission weighs upon the individual as moral guilt. Blindness for the misfortune of others, lack of imagination of the heart, inner differences toward the witnessed evil
that is moral guilt. — Karl Jaspers

Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled. — Karen Thompson Walker

At a moment when distortions of Islam are what feed most Americans, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin has done something both practical and inspiring. He persuades us that the imperiled environment is both common struggle and common ground for people who share, it turns out, more than simply God. — John Hockenberry

To save our imperiled honor everything must be sacrificed, even virtue. — Jean Racine

I've often wanted to play the victim, or somebody who makes terrible choices. I would love to play the alcoholic mother who horribly lets down her children. That's a great morally imperiled role. — Lucy Lawless

Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom. — Timothy Keller

He had chosen to spend his days in the world of men. Life was what mattered, its slow, priceless pulse, its burning fragility; his debt lay with those importunate Flanders echoes that had never really left him. The private could aspire to be a general because both general and private, at their best, recognized the dire importance of strategy, fortitude, the value of their imperiled existence; but when the machinist became the executive he left the world of tangibles and human conjugacy and entered a shadow world of credits and consols - a world that seemed to reward nothing so much as irresponsibility and boundless greed. And when the thunder rolled down upon them - as he knew it would - how would he feel, playing with paper, striving to outwit his fellows, drinking imported Scotch evenings and listening to the brittle parade of comedians on radio ...? — Anton Myrer

Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled. — Malcolm Gladwell

The news media is so quick to pick up tragic stories of imperiled children that it seems like there are more terrible events today than ever before - when in fact it's quite the opposite. It is, in all manners possible to calculate, the safest time in the history of civilization to be a kid. — Gever Tulley

even great companies are imperiled if they miss a market transition - and — Anonymous

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. — Saidiya V. Hartman

It was a lesson, Magnus thought, to love while you could, love what was fragile and beautiful and imperiled. Nobody was guaranteed forever. — Cassandra Clare