Unaccountable Quotes & Sayings

My geography savors a delicious paradox: Home - a grounding - found in unearthly beauty. The predominant colors are blue, emerald, and terra-cotta. Every day, every season, I taste these colors and the intricate flavors of their unaccountable tones and hues. I have yet to earn this land. Perhaps I never will. Home is a religion. Sensibly you understand the need for it, yet not even sensible people can explain it. - from the Chapter Finding Home — Ellen Meloy

I think it's time that we said to people who are incapable of acknowledging that they've ever got anything wrong: 'I'm sorry, you've had your day.' Unelected, unaccountable elites, I'm afraid it's time to say, 'You're fired. We are going to take back control.' — Michael Gove

But he had something else to curse
his own viscious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long passed away. — George Eliot

We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded. — Rebecca Solnit

It consisteth in one knows not what, and springeth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable, being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy and windings of language. — Isaac Barrow

All through my life I've had this strange unaccountable feeling that something was going on in the world, something big, even sinister, and no one would tell me what it was."
"No," said the old man, "that's just perfectly normal paranoia. Everyone in the Universe has that. — Douglas Adams

From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views.
- Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic — Arthur Conan Doyle

But, that's the whole point of corporatization - to try to remove the public from making decisions over their own fate, to limit the public arena, to control opinion, to make sure that the fundamental decisions that determine how the world is going to be run - which includes production, commerce, distribution, thought, social policy, foreign policy, everything - are not in the hands of the public, but rather in the hands of highly concentrated private power. In effect, tyranny unaccountable to the public. — Noam Chomsky

All that makes a writer is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible personal prejudice like Stevensons in favor of all being happy as kings no matter if consumptive, or Hardy against God for the blunder of sex, or Sinclair Lewis' against small American towns, or Shakespeare's mixed, at once against and in favor of life itself. I take it that everybody has the prejudice and spends some time feeling for it to speak and write from. But most people end as they begin by acting out the prejudices of other people. — Robert Frost

A miracle is an act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king. — Ambrose Bierce

The discovery of the Square was a great event to the primitive mystics of the Nile. Very early it became an emblem of truth, justice, and righteousness, and it remains to this day through unaccountable ages have passed. — Joseph Fort Newton

Entering that gable-ended Spouter-Inn, you found yourself in a wide, low, straggling entry with old-fashioned wainscots, reminding one of the bulwarks of some condemned old craft. On one side hung a very large oil painting so thoroughly besmoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal crosslights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose. Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last come to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted. — Herman Melville

Prayer and dependence on God has been our history. How unfortunate it is now that an unaccountable and unelected and misguided judge from Wisconsin, Judge Barbara Crabb, has declared National Days of Prayer - established by the Congress - to be unconstitutional. — James Dobson

She had her own opinions on every subject, and kept steadily to them
very tiresome opinions they often were; as she was always thinking of what was right and what was wrong, and had a strange reverence for matters connected with religion, and an unaccountable liking to good people. — Emily Bronte

Wikipedia has experienced censorship at the hands of industry groups and governments, and we are - increasingly, I think - seeing important decisions made by unaccountable, non-transparent corporate players, a shift from the open web to mobile walled gardens, and a shift from the production-based Internet to one that's consumption-based. — Sue Gardner

If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need to do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way. — Sun Tzu

Pig power in America was infuriating, but pig power in the communist framework was awesome and unaccountable. — Eldridge Cleaver

Forever, just the word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that's got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math. — Karen Russell

You are curious and quick, you have a deft mind, and for some unaccountable reason, people tell you things
useful things. — Deanna Raybourn

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the
lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars. — Walt Whitman

How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story. — Thomas Henry Huxley

If the Federal Reserve pursues a policy which Congress or the President believes not to be in the public interest, there is nothing Congress can do to reverse the policy. Nor is there anything the people can do. Such bastions of unaccountable power are undemocratic. The Federal Reserve System must be reformed, so that it is answerable to the elected representatives of the people. — Wright Patman

People were always chasing after some leader or another, and stumbling from one superstition to the next, cheering His Majesty one day and giving the most disgusting incendiary speeches in Parliament the next, and none of it ever amounted to anything in the end! If this could be miniaturized by a factor of a a million and reduced, as it were, to the dimensions of a single head, the result would be precisely the image of the unaccountable, forgetful, ignorant conduct and the demented hopping around that has always been the image of a lunatic. — Robert Musil

The more tremendous the divinity is represented, the more tame and submissive do men become his ministers: And the more unaccountable the measures of acceptance required by him, the more necessary does it become to abandon our natural reason, and yield to their ghostly guidance and direction. — David Hume

Just as the financial crisis was incubated when unaccountable bank executives created a culture of rewarding short-term profits without wanting to know the ugly details about their mortgage-backed securities, so too does medicine's lack of accountability create an institutional culture that fosters overtreating and runaway costs. — Martin Makary

Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition. — Maurice Chevalier

Time is not the stable moving-staircase that prosemen have for centuries pretended it to be, but an unaccountable wibble-wobble — Robert Graves

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

As the old saying goes, you can't spell unprofessional, unethical, or unaccountable without the UN. — Brad Thor

To the darkness and the night, the spirits seem to have a natural claim - it is their realm; the boldest of us have sometimes felt an unaccountable creeping in the thick darkness. — Richard Jefferies

When a president promises something beyond his years in office, he is fundamentally unaccountable. It is not his budget that must finish the job. Another president inherits the problem, and it becomes a ball too easily dropped, a plan too easily abandoned, a dream too readily deferred. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I am too inexperienced and ignorant to conduct myself with propriety in this town, where every thing is new to me, and many things are unaccountable and perplexing. — Fanny Burney

I like to think that at best the interview becomes something like the unaccountable experience of talking to oneself in a mirror. — Michael Silverblatt

He contrasts it with eloquence. And what a noble gift it is, the power of playing upon the souls and wills of men, and rousing them to lofty purposes and holy deeds! Paul says, "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." We all know why. We have all felt the brazenness of words without emotion, the hollowness, the unaccountable unpersuasiveness, of eloquence behind which lies no Love. — Henry Drummond

There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth. — John Crowley

About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sudden glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, silver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean. — Edgar Allan Poe

When he rose and turned to go back the tarp was lit from within where the boy had wakened. Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world. Something all but unaccountable. And so it was. — Cormac McCarthy

The interaction with the unaccountable, self-regulating business called "modern medicine" is analogous to buying a used car from a stranger: you never really know what you're getting because of the things you're not being told. And what is not being disclosed can (seriously) hurt you.
(in "The Mammogram Myth: The Independent Investigation Of Mammography The Medical Profession Doesn't Want You To Know About", 2013) — Rolf Hefti

My master likewise mentioned another Quality which his Servants had discovered in several Yahoos, and to him was wholly unaccountable. He said, a Fancy would sometimes take a Yahoo, to retire into a Corner, to lie down and howl, and groan, and spurn away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, wanted neither Food nor Water; nor did the Servants imagine what could possibly ail him. And the only Remedy they found was to set him to hard Work, after which he would infallibly come to himself. To this I was silent out of Partiality to my own Kind; yet here I could plainly discover the true Seeds of Spleen, which only seizeth on the Lazy, the Luxurious, and the Rich; who, if they were forced to undergo the same Regimen I would undertake for the Cure. — Jonathan Swift

All my life I have been pursued by the black dogs of unaccountable gloom — Andrew Pyper

The disappointments of life can never, any more than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and most agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations, each heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him something corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable moodiness of the morbid and disagreeable. — George Eliot

Although people call love a capricious and unaccountable emotion that arises like an illness, nonetheless it has its own laws and reasons, like everything else. If these laws have been little studied so far, that is because a person struck down by love is in no condition to observe with a scholar's eye as the impression steals into his soul and shackles his emotions like a dream, as first his eyes go blind, at which moment his pulse and then his heart begin beating harder, all of a sudden there arises as of yesterday an undying devotion, the desire to sacrifice oneself; one's I gradually vanishes and crosses over into him or her; the mind becomes wither unusually dull or unusually sharp; the will surrenders to the will of another; and the head bows, the knees shake and the tears and fever come. — Ivan Goncharov

Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat. — Michelle Malkin

Suppose one who had always continued blind be told by his guide that after he has advanced so many steps he shall come to the brink of a precipice, or be stopped by a wall; must not this to him seem very admirable and surprising? He cannot conceive how it is possible for mortals to frame such predictions as these, which to him would seem as strange and unaccountable as prophesy doth to others. Even they who are blessed with the visive faculty may (though familiarity make it less observed) find therein sufficient cause of admiration. — David Berman

I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the coll mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody's pretty much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else. — Darin Strauss

Reading messed with my brain in an unaccountable way. It made me happy; or something. — Salvatore Scibona

Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of. — Kenny Smith

The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real. — Sarah Waters

The whimsicalness of our own humor is a thousand times more fickle and unaccountable than what we blame so much in fortune. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

One thing members of Congress need to realize is how much their reliance on staffers is hurting the institution and helping make it unaccountable. — John Fund

12. If we do not wish to fight, we can prevent the enemy from engaging us even though the lines of our encampment be merely traced out on the ground. All we need do is to throw something odd and unaccountable in his way. [This extremely concise expression is intelligibly paraphrased by Chia Lin: "even though we have constructed neither wall nor ditch." Li Ch'uan says: "we puzzle him by strange and unusual dispositions;" and Tu Mu finally clinches the meaning by three illustrative anecdotes - one of Chu-ko Liang, who when occupying Yang-p'ing and about to be attacked by Ssu-ma I, suddenly struck his colors, stopped the beating of the drums, and flung open the city gates, showing only a few men engaged in sweeping and sprinkling the ground. This unexpected proceeding had the intended effect; for Ssu-ma I, suspecting an ambush, actually drew off his army and retreated. What Sun Tzu is advocating here, therefore, is nothing more nor less than the timely use of "bluff."] — Sun Tzu

Even the editors of main journals themselves recognise that peer review may not be the best system ever devised by mankind. Here is what Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, has to say on the matter: "The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability - not the validity - of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong. — Malcolm Kendrick

The adventurous state of mind is a high house ... The joy of adventure is unaccountable. This is the attractiveness of artwork. It is adventurous, strenuous and joyful. — Agnes Martin

The social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs. Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions, and unaccountable antipathies ... — Thomas Hardy

What is called 'capitalism'is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close cooperation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society. — Noam Chomsky

I have often reflected within myself on this unaccountable humor in womankind of being smitten with everything that is showy and superficial, and on the numberless evils that befall the sex from this light fantastical disposition. — Joseph Addison

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. — Mark Twain

Some authors have what amounts to a metaphysical approach. They admit to inspiration. Sudden and unaccountable urgencies to writecatapult them out of sleep and bed. For myself, I have never awakened to jot down an idea that was acceptable the following morning. — Fannie Hurst

And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. — Herman Melville

The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling. — Dallas Willard

It is easy to be a moral perfectionist when one is politically unaccountable. — Robert D. Kaplan

When life happens, you can be either the author of your life or the victim of it. Those are your only two choices - accountable or unaccountable. This may sound harsh, but it's true. Every day we choose one approach or the other, and the consequences follow us forever. — Gary Keller

Quantitative easing is just the latest chapter in the Federal Reserve's hundred-year history of failure. ( ... ) The American people have suffered long enough under a monetary policy controlled by an unaccountable, secretive central bank. It is time to finally audit - and then end - the Fed. — Ron Paul

I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together. — Mark Twain

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for? — Virginia Woolf

It was unaccountable not to be obliged to go out to see her, not to have any occasion to be tormenting myself about her, not to have to write to her, not to be scheming and devising opportunities of being alone with her. Sometimes, of an evening, when I looked up from my writing, and saw her seated opposite, I would lean back in my chair, and think how queer it was that there we were, alone together as a matter of course - nobody's business any more - all the romance of our engagement put away on a shelf, to rust - no one to please but one another - one another to please, for life. — Charles Dickens

We must not allow our elected officials -many beholden to unaccountable corporate elites- to bastardize and pulverize the precious word democracy as they fail to respect and act on genuine democratic ideals — Cornel West

Greyhound racing is a self-regulating gambling business that depends on the uncontrolled breeding and unaccountable disappearance of thousands of dogs every year. That is a situation that is unacceptable and indefensible — Annette Crosbie

What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation. — Mark R. Levin

Passion is always a mystery and unaccountable, and unfortunately there is no doubt that life does not spare its purest children; often it is just the most deserving people who cannot help loving those that destroy them. — Hermann Hesse

The ability to choose who governs us, and the freedom to change laws we do not like, were secured for us in the past by radicals and liberals who took power from unaccountable elites and placed it in the hands of the people. — Michael Gove

Rolling onto his side, Jamie reached out and touched Evan's chest, two fingertips only tracing the curve of his pectoral and threading through the dark, curly hair. Something about that hairiness fascinated him, masculine yet soft. An unaccountable shyness wrapped around him, a weight upon his shoulders. His fingers trembled a little. "You'll, um, tell me if I do it wrong?"
Evan laughed softly, "Angel, there is no wrong. Go ahead and explore. If I don't like something, I'll tell you, 'kay? — Finn Marlowe

Though there are many barriers to expressing unreserved love, no such impediments to a developing a loving and generous heart deter a spiritual warrior. He who is without love is bereft of richness of life. Compassion, empathy, kindness, tenderness, and patience are essential for love. Anger, frustration, jealously, greed, and hatred are the antonym to love. When we love other people with all our ferocity, we transcend the misuse, waste, pain, tragedy, death, anguish, erotic obsessions, unaccountable confusion, and self-absorbed personal ambitions that, if left unchecked, numb our earthly existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess. — H.G.Wells

What I caution against is any unaccountable concentration of power. And I don't care whether that's the government, a corporation, the church, a really bad-ass girl scouts troop, whatever it is. — Daniel Suarez

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations. — Noam Chomsky

He was always with her, an appendage to her life, and she never could decide how to feel about him. Sometimes, when a smile broke across his face like sun reflecting off a stream, or she saw him relax into sleep, she was filled with an unaccountable sort of ache. It terrified her. — Kiersten White

It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things — Don DeLillo

I am sorry for your disappointment,' he continued, glancing into her face. Their eyes having met, became, as it were, mutually locked together, and the single instant only which good breeding allows as the length of such a look, became trebled: a clear penetrating ray of intelligence had shot from each into each, giving birth to one of those unaccountable sensations which carry home to the heart before the hand has been touched or the merest compliment passed, by something stronger than mathematical proof, the conviction, 'A tie has begun to unite us.' Both faces also unconsciously stated that their owners had been much in each other's thoughts of late. Owen had talked to the young architect of his sister as freely as to Cytherea of the young architect. — Thomas Hardy

On occasions, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon, there would be a flow into my mind with sudden and unaccountable emotion, sometimes a line or two of verse, sometimes a whole stanza, accompanied, not preceded by a vague notion of the poem which they were destined to form a part of ... I say bubble up because, so far as I could make out, the source of the suggestions thus proffered to the brain was the pit of the stomach. — A.E. Housman

He had but one consolation, that she had loved him, that her eyes had told him so, that although she did not know his name she knew his heart, and that perhaps, wherever she now was, in whatever undiscoverable place, she loved him still. Perhaps she even thought of him constantly as he did of her. Sometimes, in those unaccountable moments known to every lover, when the heart feels a strange stirring of delight although there is not cause for anything but grief, he reflected: 'It is her own thoughts that are reaching me! ... And perhaps my thoughts are reaching her!'
Fancies such as these, which an instant later he brushed aside, nevertheless sufficed to kindle a glow in him which was something near to hope. — Victor Hugo

To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing. — Peggy Guggenheim

Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of the baby's having been accommodated with a needle case to keep him quiet during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot Guards) of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be regarded as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either to apply externally or to take as a tonic. — Charles Dickens

An "event" is something that happens that does not quite fit into our established system of knowledge, and so it will appear to us as something unaccountable, something that we cannot quite get our minds around even as we recognize the great importance of the encounter. Badiou identifies — Mark T. Conard

It is an observation suggested by all history, and by none more than by that of James I and his successor [Charles I], that the religious spirit, when it mingles with faction, contains in it something supernatural and unaccountable; and that, in its operations upon society, effects correspond less to their known causes than is found in any other circumstance of government. — David Hume

So seemed it to me, as I stood at her helm, and for long hours silently guided the way of this fire-ship on the sea. Wrapped, for that interval, in darkness myself, I but the better saw the redness, the madness, the ghastliness of others. The continual sight of the fiend shapes before me, capering half in smoke and half in fire, these at last begat kindred visions in my soul, so soon as I began to yield to that unaccountable drowsiness which ever would come over me at a midnight helm. — Herman Melville

One can build the Empire State Building, discipline the Prussian army, make a state hierarchy mightier than God, yet fail to overcome the unaccountable superiority of certain human biengs. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Citizens' rights cannot be protected if their digital activities are governed and policed by opaque and publicly unaccountable corporate mechanisms. — Rebecca MacKinnon

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Those who write the editorials and those who write the columns, they simply are unaccountable. They're free to impose their cultural politics in the name of freedom of the press. — Jesse Jackson

I wouldn't join the International Criminal Court. This is a body based in The Hague where unaccountable judges, prosecutors, could pull our troops, our diplomats up for trial. And I wouldn't join. And I understand that in certain capitals of, around the world that that wasn't a popular move. But it's the right move not to join a foreign court that could, where our people could be prosecuted. — George W. Bush

Ten men of revolting appearance were approaching from the drive. They were low of brow, crafty of eye, and crooked of limb. They advanced huddled together with the loping tread of wolves, peering about them furtively as they came, as though in constant terror of ambush; they slavered at their mouths, which hung loosely over the receding chins, while each clutched under his ape-like arm a burden of curious and unaccountable shape. On seeing the Doctor they halted and edged back, those behind squinting and moulting over the companions' shoulders. — Evelyn Waugh

For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. — Loren Eiseley

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes. — H.P. Lovecraft

How could those who wrote the Constitution possibly understand its meaning better than those who had the experience of observing and participating in its operation? It is one thing to rail against the evils of politically unaccountable judges enlarging constitutional rights beyond the ideas and purposes of their adopters; another to explain why morally sustainable claims of equality be held captive to the extraordinary obstacles of Article V or subject to the partial and incomplete understandings of 1789 or 1868. — Jack N. Rakove

But the inexplicability of the General's conduct dwelt much on her thoughts. That he was very particular in his eating, she had, by her own unassisted observation, already discovered; but why should he say one thing so positively, and mean another all the while, was most unaccountable. How were people, at that rate, to be understood? — Jane Austen

The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable. — Augusten Burroughs

That night I experienced one of those sudden, unpleasant shifts of perception that occur to parents, when you notice a difference in your child that's been coming over a long time, and you're faced with it, and at the same time you're groping back to touch the child they were a minute ago, while a somehow unaccountable, unpredictable person is watching you, waiting for you to catch up with them, contemptuous because you haven't. — Dorothy Johnston

Nothing about his life is more strange to [man] or more unaccountable in purely mundane terms than the stirrings he finds in himself, usually fitful but sometimes overwhelming, to look beyond his animal existence and not be fully satisfied with its immediate substance. He lacks the complacency of the other animals: he is obsessed by pride and guilt, pride at being something more than a mere animal, built at falling short of the high aims he sets for himself. — Lewis Mumford

An accidental chaos blindly serving up the unaccountable beauty he now saw — Anne Rice