Failure Of Imagination Quotes

#1. Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

Margaret Atwood

#2. Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

Adrienne Rich

#3. Pessimism is often a failure of imagination.

Scott Adams

#4. Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Edward Abbey

#5. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring

Adam Phillips

#6. Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed.

Paul Karl Feyerabend

#7. For an American like me, growing up linked to a very different food chain, yet one that is also rooted in a field of corn, not to think of himself as a corn person suggests either a failure of imagination or a triumph of capitalism.

Michael Pollan

#8. In fiction workshops, we tend to focus on matters of verisimilitude largely because such issues are so much easier to talk about than the failure of imagination.

Tim O'Brien

#9. I tried to kill myself when I was thirteen but failed. That was the greatest failure of my life.

S.A. Tawks

#10. I stare out the window and reflect on the similarity between writing and saving a life and the inevitable failure of one's imagination and one's goals and ambitions to create a character or a life worth saving.

Miriam Toews

#11. A lot of suffering is just getting rid of dross in yourself, and lingering and hanging in the darkness is often - I say this against myself - a failure of imagination, to imagine the door into the light.

John O'Donohue

#12. C. S. Lewis, who was once described by a friend as a man in love with the imagination, believed that a complacent acceptance of the status quo reflects more than a failure of nerve.

C.S. Lewis

#13. We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination.

Derek Parfit

#14. When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity ... that was a quality God's image carried with it ... when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

Graham Greene

#15. In my dream, the angel shrugged and said, if we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination
and then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand.

Brian Andreas

#16. Philosophers' Syndrome: mistaking a failure of the imagination for an insight into necessity.

Daniel Dennett

#17. The reason we don't often confront the larger question of whether or not war is survivable is because of a failure of imagination. We honestly cannot imagine having reached a state in our own evolution in which we do not fight.

Marianne Williamson

#18. I talk about going to [George W. Bush's] Inauguration and crying
when he took the oath, 'cause I was so afraid he was going to
wreck the economy and muck up the drinking water' ... the failure of
my pessimistic imagination at that moment boggles my mind now.

Sarah Vowell

#19. War, except in self-defense, is a failure of moral imagination.

Bill Moyers

#20. Hatred is a failure of imagination.'
Graham Greene, 'The Power and the Glory'.

Graham Greene

#21. The CIA not only missed the invasion, it refused to admit that it had missed it. Why would anyone in his right mind invade Afghanistan, graveyard of conquerors for two thousand years? A lack of intelligence was not the cause of the failure. A lack of imagination was.

Tim Weiner

#22. Native nations were often matrilineal: that is, clan identity passed through the mother, and a husband joined a wife's household, not vice versa. Matrilineal does not mean matriarchal, which, like patriarchal, assumes that some group has to dominate - a failure of the imagination.

Gloria Steinem

#23. When you resort to violence to prove a point, you've just experienced a profound failure of imagination.

Sherman Alexie

#24. The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

Edmund White

#25. It's a total failure of the Western imagination that the only enemy they can see is Adolph Hitler.

Tariq Ali

#26. Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of. Quick: try to think of a single movie about the horrors of Stalinism. This is not a failure of imagination. This is moral meltdown.

Mona Charen

#27. Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

William Irwin Thompson

#28. Success could be defined as the ability to go on persevering even when it seems that there are no possibilities left. Each failure is not truly a failure, just another possibility explored and found wanting. We never truly run out of possibilities for success, just imagination to find them.

Jennifer Megan Varnadore

#29. It seems to me that my lack of faith is not, as I once thought, a triumph of the rational mind, but rather a failure of the imagination - an inability to tolerate mistery.

Zoe Heller

#30. For me, it's always a failure of the imagination. I have that anxiety that time is passing, that everything is ultimately fleeting and impermanent. I better take advantage of every single moment.

Jason Silva

#31. He considered it a shame when people couldn't grasp the infinite-a failure not just of imagination but of simple vision.

Jess Walter

#32. Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet ...

Stephen King

#33. The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination ... Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.

Julius Lester

#34. Not thinking it's possible is a failure of imagination.

Vinod Khosla

#35. Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

George Friedman

#36. Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination.

Noah Richler

#37. In my personal view, a failure to discover unimagined objects and answer unasked questions, once HST functions properly, would indicate a lack of imagination in stocking the Universe on the part of the Deity.

John N. Bahcall

#38. War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Adrienne Rich

#39. The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.

Robert Charles Wilson

#40. I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.

Maria Semple

#41. We let what we know limit what we can imagine; the result, a failure of imagination.

Keith Ferrazzi