Inevitable Quotes
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The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.
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More Inevitable Quotes
These new technologies are not yet inevitable. But if they blossom fully into being, freedom may irrevocably perish. This is a fight not only for the meaning of our individual lives, but for the meaning of our life together.
bill mckibben— p. 199 (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003))
Every humane and patriotic heart must grieve to see a bloody and causeless rebellion, costing thousands of human lives and millions of treasure. But as it was predetermined and inevitable, it was long enough delayed. Now is the appropriate time to solve the greatest problem ever submitted to civilized man.
thaddeus stevens— "Subduing the Rebellion" (22 January 1862), as quoted in The Selected Works of Thaddeus Stevens.
It seems like a cliche, but you do grow up a lot faster when you travel a lot, go through things like this interview, spend time away from home and hang around with other actors. It's inevitable that you're not going to have a so-called normal childhood.
matt dillon— Michael Blowen (November 3, 1983), "Matt Dillon Meets Fame ....Diffidently", The Boston Globe.
I was the last to consent to the separation, but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.
George III— 1785 Letter to John Adams, first US Ambassador to England, 1 Jun.
Much of my life seems in retrospect to have been spent in the company of putative national leaders passing through the process of being denounced and imprisoned for sedition, as part of the inevitable progression towards the Prime Ministership and the ritual tea-party at Windsor Castle.
james cameron— Point of Departure (London: Arthur Barker, 1967) p. 295.
Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.
ernesto 'che' guevara— Ch. 1 : General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare
Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate ... . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect ... higher intelligences ... even to the limit of God ... such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific.
fred hoyle— Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981), pp. 141, 144, 130
I have a suspicion it's inevitable, but give me my stick. I'll face it.
— 1942 On being asked what he thought about death, following a serious throat operation, quoted in John Stevens's introduction to My Remarkable Uncle (1965 edn).
Rebirth is inevitable so long as one has desires. It is like taking the soul from one pillow-case and putting it into another. Only one or two out of many men can be found who are free from all desires.
sarada devi— Swami Tapasyananda, Swami Nikhilananda. Sri Sarada Devi, the Holy Mother; Life and Conversations. p. 292.
The electrification of the automobile is inevitable.
— Reported in Keith Naughton, "Bob Lutz: The Man Who Revived the Electric Car", Newsweek Dec. 31, 2007 - Jan. 7, 2008 issue.
In a progressive country change is constant; change is inevitable.
benjamin disraeli— Benjamin Disraeli, Speech on Reform Bill of 1867, Edinburgh, Scotland (1867-10-29); reported in Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable the Earl of Beaconsfield, ed. T. E. Kebbel (1882), vol. 2, part 4, p. 487.
"What is the secret of your serenity ? Said the Master "Wholehearted cooperation with the inevitable ."
anthony de mello— p. 22 (One Minute Nonsense (1992))
Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.
philip roth— Chapter 3, "June 1941 – December 1941: Following Christians", pp. 113–114 (ISBN 0547345313)
Our tragic age demands poetry of courage and not whimpers about the inevitable end of all maya. People still extract pain of each other even after Buddha , Nanak and Gandhi have been preaching peace .
— Mulk Raj Anand, in Mulk Raj Anand: A Reader : Selections from His Fictional and Non-fictional ...(1 January 2005), p.xxi
The demand for a statement of a candidate’s religious belief can have no meaning except that there may be discrimination for or against him because of that belief. Discrimination against the holder of one faith means retaliatory discrimination against men of other faiths. The inevitable result of entering upon such a practice would be an abandonment of our real freedom of conscience and a reversion to the dreadful conditions of religious dissension which in so many lands have proved fatal to true liberty, to true religion, and to all advance in civilization.
— Theodore Roosevelt's Letter to Mr. J.C. Martin concerning religion and politics (November 6, 1908)
We resist only what is inevitable.
— 1957 Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch,'Paradise Lost'.
Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.
pearl buck— p. 192 (My Several Worlds (1954))
I believe, like you, that civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence, whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.
robert e. howard— From a letter to H. P. Lovecraft (c. August 1930)
I was involuntarily struck by the aptitude which the Russian displays for accommodating himself to the customs of the people in whose midst he happens to be living. I know not whether this mental quality is deserving of censure or commendation, but it proves the incredible pliancy of his mind and the presence of that clear common sense which pardons evil wherever it sees that evil is inevitable or impossible of annihilation.
mikhail lermontov— A Hero of Our Time
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
john f. kennedy— In a speech at the White House, 13 March 1962, Address on the first Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress.
It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others’ expense.
Anton Chekhov— My Life
In a progressive country change is constant; and the great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines.
benjamin disraeli— Speech in Edinburgh (1867).
What we are most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden learns from Kafka, is impatience and he decides that the hero “is, in fact, one who is not anxious.” But it was inevitable that Auden should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about itself consequently it admires more than anything else in the world doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.
Randall Jarrell— “Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 180
What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
karl marx— Section 1, paragraph 53, lines 11-13
It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.
bertrand russell— Letter to Gilbert Murray, April 3, 1902.
[Ivan:] "Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth." "No, I wouldn't consent," said Alyosha softly.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1945), part 2, book 5, chapter 4, p. 291.
We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.
— Theodore Roosevelt, "The City in Modern Life", Literary Essays (vol. 12 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed., 1926), p. 226. Book review in The Atlantic Monthly (April 1895).
While you may have your initial success, due to timing and surprise, the time will come when you too will have your losses, but there will be this great difference. You will not only be unable to make up your losses, but will grow weaker as time grows on, while on the other hand we will not only make up our losses but will grow stronger as time goes on. It is inevitable that we will crush you before we are through with you.
— Admiral Harold Stark, USN, Chief of Naval Operations, speaking to the Japanese ambassador before the war.
