Think The Unthinkable Quotes & Sayings

Likewise - now don't laugh - cars and trucks should view the bike lanes as if they are sacrosanct. A driver would never think of riding up on a sidewalk. Most drivers, anyway. Hell, there are strollers and little old ladies up there! It would be unthinkable, except in action movies. A driver would get a serious fine or maybe even get locked up. Everyone around would wonder who that asshole was. Well, bike lanes should be treated the same way. You wouldn't park your car or pull over for a stop on the sidewalk, would you? Well then, don't park in the bike lanes either - that forces cyclists into traffic where poor little meat puppets don't stand a chance. — David Byrne

Maybe you think death is the opposite of life, or that all this death-awareness stuff translates into the end of happiness and good times, but this is not the case. Death isn't morbid, fear is morbid. Death doesn't oppose life, fear opposes life. To close your eyes to death is to close them to life: what could be more morbid than that? From your perspective, death and suicide are horrific and unthinkable. From my perspective, they are empowering and lifeaffirming. and I would look at any person that doesn't have an open, honest relationship with these subjects as themselves nine parts dead. — Jed McKenna

The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable. — C. Vann Woodward

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

In an atmosphere of liberty, artists and patrons are free to think the unthinkable and create the audacious; they are free to make both horrendous mistakes and glorious celebrations. — Ronald Reagan

It's about Thiago," she said, and he felt the cool touch of finality. Of course it was the Wolf. When he'd seen them curved toward each other, laughing, he'd known, but a part of his mind had insisted on denying it - it was unthinkable - and then, when she'd looked across the cavern to him like that, to him, he'd hoped ...
"He's not who you think," Karou said, and Akiva knew what was coming next.
He braced for it.
"I killed him," she whispered.
...
...
...
Wait.
"What? — Laini Taylor

We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. — J. William Fulbright

Only through fiction can we think about the unthinkable... — Stephen King

Dare to think the unimaginable, imagine the unthinkable, dream of that which will never happen, yet continue to aspire and to test the limits of your very being and those around you. — Mark W. Boyer

That it's rough out there and chancy is no surprise. Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac. But at the same time we are also created. In the Koran, Allah asks "the heaven and the earth, and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness, those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then made in earnest? — Annie Dillard

Think the unthinkable. Then do the unthinkable. — James Patterson

I see a role for specialized knowledge, but I think that it's important for there to be an arena where it is shared, where it is communicated. It's not that somebody shouldn't have specialized knowledge. The ability to dig a trench and lay a cable is a kind of specialized knowledge. Farmers have specialized knowledge, too. The question is: what sort of knowledge is privileged in our societies? I don't think that a CEO is more valuable to society and ought to be paid ten million dollars a year, while farmers and laborers starve.
The range of what is valued has become so extreme that one lot of people have captured it and left three-quarters of the world to live in unthinkable poverty, because their work is not valued. What would happen if the sweepers of the city went on strike or the sewage system didn't work? A CEO wouldn't be able to deal with his own shit. — Arundhati Roy

We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless. — J. William Fulbright

We take as building material relations and relata. The relations unite the relata; the relata are the meeting-points of the relations. The one is unthinkable apart from the other. I do not think that a more general starting-point of structure could be conceived. — Arthur Stanley Eddington

I love women who are bosses and who don't constantly worry about what their employees think of them. I love women who don't ask, "Is that OK?" after everything they say. I love when women are courageous in the face of unthinkable circumstances, like my mother when she was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. Or like Gabrielle Giffords writing editorials for the New York Times about the cowardice of Congress regarding gun laws and using phrases like "mark my words" like she is Clint Eastwood. How many women say stuff like that? — Mindy Kaling

Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable - and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human. — Samuel R. Delany

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

He came to believe that, in addition to getting rid of parts of the self, projective identification was sometimes the only way in which some very fragmented patients could communicate. The problem lay in recognising, understanding and making sense of what was being communicated by the patient, in such a way that the patient could better understand what was happening in his internal world. Before any of this can happen, however, the therapist has to be capable of receiving, and holding on to (that is, containing) 'inside of himself what the patient has projected into him. These unprocessed, raw, fragmented, and sometimes 'unthinkable' thoughts and feelings were called by Bion, 'Beta Elements', and the capacity to process and think about them, was referred to as 'Alpha Function'. It follows from this that an increase in Alpha Function will also lead to a greater capacity in the therapist to contain and manage stress. — Ved P. Varma

In order to do the unthinkable, do not think about it. — J.R. Rim

We must contemplate some extremely unpleasant possibilities, just because we want to avoid them and achieve something better. Nobody, however, likes to think about anything unpleasant, even to avoid it. And so the crucial problem of thermonuclear war is frequently dispatched with the label 'War is unthinkable'
which, translated freely, means we don't want to think about it. — Albert Wohlstetter

If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable. — Thomas Ligotti

As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step. — Alison Hawthorne Deming

Infinite possibilities exist to create the previously un-creatable, think the unthinkable and do the undoable-it's an extraordinary time to be alive. — Mark Victor Hansen

I think Republicans should fight for the black vote and blacks should fight for a place in the Republican Party, just as they fought for their civil rights in the last century. It's a necessary thing and each may find more in common with the other than they imagine. Blacks will be in a far stronger position if both parties must compete for their votes. And the Republican Party is going to need black votes to compensate for the loss of Hispanic votes resulting from the strongly anti-immigrant views of its base - views that many blacks are in sympathy with. The passing of the generation of black leaders who led the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and the rise of a new generation of black leaders like Barack Obama and others, who have lived their whole lives in a post-civil rights society, may make possible an alliance that was unthinkable just a few years ago. — Bruce Bartlett

High intelligence is to think the unthinkable; genius is to realize the very unexpected one. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'd think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that's what cheap places do
draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I'd found an affordable one it wouldn't have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques. — David Sedaris

Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. — Helene Cixous

You have to be willing to think the unthinkable. — Toni Morrison

Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all. — Douglas Adams

At the very core of RIM is the innovation. We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable. And that is fantastic. — Thorsten Heins

Think the unthinkable,
Imagine the impossible
Pursue the imaginations limits. — Allan Weisbecker

If someone had told Allie that she would commit a premeditated act of murder, she would not have believed it. She would have spouted off all the reasons how she could never be capable of such a thing - that no matter how dire the circumstances, she would find a better way. She was so naive, so arrogant to think that the laws of necessity and unthinkable circumstance could not apply to her. She could tell herself that this was an act of mercy, but that would be a lie. This was an act of war. An act of terrorism. It was nothing less than an assassination.
If I do this, Allie told herself, I am no better than Mary. I will have sunk to the worst possible place a person can go. After this moment, I will be a cold-blooded killer and it can never be taken back.
So the question was, did Allie Johnson have the strength to sacrifice all that was left of her innocence if it meant she might save the world? — Neal Shusterman

The processes we're going through are two sides of the same coin, because everything ends in mystery - the scientists have theories, and the theologians have myths, and they are both the same thing, because we end up in ignorance. ... We have to think about the unthinkable, which is what religion does and science does, too. — Ray Bradbury

If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable. — Josephine Tey

All our rulers have said that war is unthinkable, and then we think about it almost all the time. We've got to make it unthinkable. — Norman Thomas

Getting over it doesn't mean forgetting it, it just means reducing the pain to a tolerable level, a level that doesn't destroy you. I know that right now the idea of getting over it is unimaginable. It's impossible, inconceivable, unthinkable. You don't want to get over it. Why should you? It's all you've got. You don't want kind words, you don't care what other people think or say, you don't want to know how they felt when they lost someone, They're no you, are there! They can't feel what you feel. The only thing you want is the things you can't have. It's gone. Never coming back. No one know how that feels. No one know what it's like to reach out and touch someone who isn't there and will never be there again. No one knows the unifiable emptiness. No one but you. You and me, love. We don't want anything. We want to die, but life won't let us. We're all it's got. — Kevin Brooks

What we all need most urgently now: to realize that transience is not separation - for we, transient as we are, have it in common with those who have passed from us, and they and we exist together in one being where separation is just as unthinkable. Could we otherwise understand such poems if they had been nothing but the utterance of someone who was going to be dead in the future? Don't such poems continually address inside of us, in addition to what is found there now, also something unlimited and unrecognizable? I do not think that the spirit can make itself anywhere so small that it would concern only our temporal existence and our here and now: where it surges toward us there we are the dead and the living all at once. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps the way to meet tomorrow's challenges is not to use yesterday's solutions, but to dare to think the previously unthinkable, to speak the previously unspeakable, and to try that which was previously out of the question. — Neale Donald Walsch

The orchestra strikes up with 'Stockholm in My Heart', and everyone joins in. Hands sway in the air, mobile phone cameras are raised. A wonderful feeling of togetherness. It will be another fifteen minutes until, with meticulous premeditation, the whole thing is torn to shreds. Let us sing along for the time being. We have a long way to go before we return here. Only when the journey has softened us up, when we are ready to think the unthinkable, will we be permitted to come back. — John Ajvide Lindqvist

But by God sometimes you have to be able to think about the unthinkable! — Ursula K. Le Guin

The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly (though this does not necessarily follow from the other two) two different kinds of what we call time. — N. T. Wright

Having unthoughtful thoughts for me is unthinkable, so much so that I cannot even think about that. — Ana Claudia Antunes

Do you think the Dear Leader's line should be read 'Love knows no replacement,' as if it's unthinkable to search for a substitute for love, or 'Love knows no replacement,' suggesting that love is sentient and is itself at a loss to comprehend its absence? — Adam Johnson

I think of the people who commit these acts as children. They're in their 20s, but like certain children, they have been told only one story, over and over. Like most children, they believe in an easily identifiable good and evil, and like most children, they are capable of unthinkable cruelty. — Michael Cunningham