Untenable Quotes

#1. Seldom do people think things through foolishly. More often, they do not bother to think things through at all, so that even brainy individuals can reach untenable conclusions because their brainpower means little if it is not deployed and applied.

Thomas Sowell

#2. At twenty-one, so many things appear solid, permanent, untenable.

Orson Welles

#3. There is no dispute that Albany needs to be changed. There is no dispute that the current situation in Albany is untenable. Nobody knows that better than I do.

Andrew Cuomo

#4. Fanatics can justify practically any atrocity to themselves. The more untenable their position becomes, the harder they hold to it, and the worse the things they are willing to do to support it.

Mercedes Lackey

#5. Defending her scandalized ex-husband had cost Jenna Wheeler's family greatly in the suburban standings - but the murder of Haley McWaid must have made life here fairly untenable. Parents

Harlan Coben

#6. It appears that PepsiCo views structural change as a sign of weakness, an admission of failure, and an untenable break with past traditions.

Nelson Peltz

#7. Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time.

Karel Capek

#8. Friendship is untenable for people in our position.

Sherry Thomas

#9. This position is untenable, and there can be no pause in the agitation for full political power and responsibility until these are granted to all the women of the nation.

Florence Kelley

#10. As we understand the world better, the idea that it has a transcendent purpose seems increasingly untenable.

Sean Carroll

#11. Food is not a means toward resolution. It can't cure heartbreak or solve untenable dilemmas.

Kate Christensen

#12. How wise and how merciful is that provision of nature by which his earthly anchor is usually loosened by many little imperceptible tugs, until his consciousness has drifted out of its untenable earthly harbor into the great sea beyond!

Arthur Conan Doyle

#13. Feminists are in an untenable position, defending something they no longer believe in, and which history will force them to recognize was destructive of most of the central pillars of civilization. I'm just the first one to point it out publicly.

Dave Sim

#14. I would construct and work along various lines until I found them untenable. When one theory was discarded, I developed another at once. I realized very early that this was the only possible way for me to work out all the problems.

Thomas A. Edison

#15. Even originally well-defined pencils of cathode rays from the Sun cannot reach the Earth. For Birkeland's theories to be correct, the existance of such cathode rays is clearly presupposed to be necessary ... and this assumption is untenable.

Arthur Schuster

#16. The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.

Henry David Thoreau

#17. The belief that God will do everything for man is as untenable as the belief that man can do everything for himself. It, too, is based on a lack of faith. We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#18. Scientifically speaking, the existence of God is an untenable hypothesis. It's not well-defined, it's completely unnecessary to fit the data, and it adds unhelpful layers of complexity without any corresponding increase in understanding.

Sean M. Carroll

#19. We have more to fear from the opinions of our friends than the bayonets of our enemies. Politician turned Union General Nathaniel Banks, in plea he couldn't abandon an untenable position.

Shelby Foote

#20. Marx and Engels openly declared that the progressive income tax and the death tax are 'economically untenable' and that they advocated them only because 'they necessitate further inroads' upon the capitalist system and are 'unavoidable' as a means of bringing about socialism.

Ludwig Von Mises

#21. To say or imply that the foundation exists only on the sufferance of government is to reason from the untenable notion that the citizen and all his institutions are creatures of the state, not the other way around.

Richard Cornuelle

#22. God, freedom, and immortality are untenable in the light of pure reason.

Immanuel Kant

#23. Health care is the No. 1 concern of small businesses and the status quo is untenable.

Karen Mills

#24. It is with great disappointment that I call on Representative Anthony Weiner to resign. The behavior he has exhibited is indefensible and Representative Weiner's continued service in Congress is untenable.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz

#25. I've supported Jeremy Corbyn all the way along because I think that was the right thing to do. I've reluctantly reached the conclusion that his position is untenable.

Ed Miliband

#26. It become totally untenable to me that after acting for 25 years - I've played Juliet, Cleopatra and Anne Frank - there I was, sitting in Hollywood, just waiting for somebody to want me.

Susan Strasberg

#27. For any thinking person, it (perpetual happiness) is untenable. If you're a thinking person, your upbeat sometimes, said sometimes.

Ron Suskind

#28. I am convinced that both markets and free trade are good, but the traditional answer that we give to students to explain why they are good, the one based on perfect competition and Pareto optimality, is becoming untenable. Something much more interesting and more complicated is going on here

Paul Romer

#29. The risks of transporting deadly nuclear waste, the environmental justice impacts and the long-term health effects of both these projects are untenable ... We cannot afford to be silent on these important issues.

James Cromwell

#30. People leave when life becomes untenable where they are.

Isabel Wilkerson

#31. It's the 21st century. It's untenable to suggest that women had no significance and no interest and that just because they didn't vote they had no relevance to the course of our history.

Kate Williams

#32. With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

Guy Debord

#33. If we don't act now, the death tax will come back in just a few years. Under current law the death tax is phased out in 2010 but comes back in full force in 2011. That is a ridiculous and untenable policy.

Kit Bond

#34. It's hard to explain how this works, and I admit that it's fairly implausible or untenable as a way of life, but that seems to be how I go about my days: peaceably in person, fiercely on paper.

Katie Roiphe

#35. When a man does not live with his children and does not get along with the mother of his children, his fatherhood becomes essentially untenable, regardless of how he feels, how hard he tries, or whether he is a good guy. Almost by definition, he has become de-fathered.

David Blankenhorn

#36. Sometimes being heroic means showing uncommon grace in the face of untenable circumstances.

Julie Anne Long

#37. Just as we were misled into untenable ideas of the aether through trusting to an analogy with the material ocean, so we have been misled into untenable ideas of the attributes of the microscopic elements of world-structure through trusting to analogy with gross particles.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

#38. Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?

Douglas Coupland

#39. The more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs.

Steven Pinker

#40. At issue is not whether the global economy will pass away. It is passing away. Rising populations and debt combined with depletion of freshwater sources and fossil fuel make the status quo untenable. The only question is whether civil society will survive the transition.

Daniel Suarez

#41. I hear it said that West Berlin is militarily untenable - and so was Bastogne, and so, in fact, was Stalingrad. Any danger spot is tenable if men - brave men - will make it so.

John F. Kennedy

#42. In order to maintain an untenable position, you have to be actively ignorant. One motto on the show is, 'Keep your facts, I'm going with the truth.'

Stephen Colbert

#43. But to wish oneself into another's glory, as boy or as man, is an impossibility, untenable on psychological grounds if you are not a writer, and on aesthetic grounds if you are.

Philip Roth

#44. It is pointless to get your knickers in a twist if a certain person fails to react the way you want. It is best to avoid people and situations that you know drive you crazy. Remember to vote with your feet. If a situation is untenable or unchangeable, walk away.

Stuart Wilde