Imperatives Quotes

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out. ~ Harold Rosenberg

The dream of a planned, fair, moral, ethical, cash-free society remains strong, particularly among socialists and liberals. It clearly represents a fundamental human instinct. But feudalism just did not work very well, if only because powerful people will not always obey moral imperatives. ~ Terence Kealey

Why we are here is important, but to know where we are going is imperative. It's not what you've got, it's what you use, that makes a difference in how your life turns out. ~ Zig Ziglar

Globalization is now no longer an objective but an imperative, as markets open and geographic barriers become increasingly blurred and even irrelevant. ~ Jack Welch

Adam and Eve, placed in the garden of Eden, find themselves forbidden to eat of "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis 2:17). Catholic theologians believe this "knowledge" forbidden by Elohim-Yahweh is neither omniscience nor moral discernment, but the ability to decide what is good or evil. Jewish theology is more subtle. The "tree" of the knowledge is interpreted as the representation of a world where good and evil "are in a combined state," where there is no absolute Good and Evil. In other words, the "tree" is a foreshadowing of the real world we live in, a world where nothing is absolutely clear cut, where moral imperatives are tied to human values, and where everything of any greatness and importance always takes place beyond good and evil. Furthermore, in the Hebrew tradition "to eat" means "to assimilate." To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is therefore to personally enter this real world where human initiative "combines" good and evil. Adam's transgression, from which all the others are derived, is clearly "that of autonomy," accordingly, as emphasized by Eisenberg and Abecassis, this would be "the desire to conduct his own history alone in according to his own desire and his own word or law. ~ Alain De Benoist

The act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it's almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject. ~ Pankaj Mishra

Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be. ~ Charlie Munger

They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience. ~ Marsden Hartley

As graduation loomed, I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn't done studying. I applied for a master's in English literature at Stanford and was accepted into the program. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans - i.e., "human relationality" - that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced - of passion, of hunger, of love - bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats. At Stanford, I had the good ~ Paul Kalanithi

The pain is what you make of it. You have to find something in it that yields. I understood my guiding imperative as: keep bleeding, but find some love in the blood. ~ Leslie Jamison

The message has to go to the streets, it's imperative that we reach those who may not get to a church. We receive their questions, it's important that the world asks questions. ~ Robert Hood

It is imperative that we do not fear challenges that we have attracted to promote our growth. Every obstacle we encounter is an opportunity for spiritual evolution. ~ Dannion Brinkley

It's absolutely imperative for the parents and the typical kids to have time by themselves, to go out to dinner or even go on vacation while someone else cares for the autistic child. ~ Jenny McCarthy

Treating other people as you would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs. ~ Phil Zuckerman

I think it's imperative to follow your heart and choose a profession you're passionate about, and if you haven't found that 'spark' yet, if you're not sure what you want to do with your lives - be persistent until you do. ~ Steve Kerr

Taking responsible steps to reduce poverty is not merely a moral imperative but an economic one. ~ John Yarmuth

Today's anti-immigration debates lack essential perspective about the nature of migration, the character of the migrant and the imperatives that drive the world to the City....It does not and cannot stop the Great Migration, for one simple reason: access to the raw potential of urban advantage cannot be entirely controlled. ~ Jeb Brugmann

The major impediment to experiencing the sacred depths of ordinary moments is the speed and distraction of contemporary life that moves to the imperatives of the global economic order.In addition, we increasingly live in a virtual world in which our reality is filtered through media and information technology. ~ Sam Keen

Americans ought to be the best-traveled, most cosmopolitan people on earth, not only because experience of the world is desirable in its own right, but because as a people acquires a great concentration of power, worldliness becomes a moral imperative. ~ Shana Alexander

Peace with Israel is a strategic imperative for Jordan. ~ Abdallah II Of Jordan

I believe that what we get out of life is what we've set ourselves up to get, so there's no such thing as an inconsequential decision. Our destinies are the culmination of all the choices we've made along the way, which is why it's imperative to listen hard to your inner voice when it speaks up.
Don't let anyone else's noise drown it out. ~ Megan McCafferty

Pretty, pink Barbie fucks hard and raw like an animal. Her head is thrown back, spine arched, she's oblivious to rules, to moral order, to all but inner imperatives. And I wonder: could she live like she fucks? ~ Karen Marie Moning

The search for justice and security, the struggle for equality of opportunity, the quest for tolerance and harmony, the pursuit of human dignity - these are moral imperatives which we must work towards and think about on a daily basis. ~ Aga Khan IV

Lydia finally found it in herself to forgive her mother for seizing what small joy she could, whatever the consequences. Love, it seemed, had its own imperatives. ~ Anna Campbell

'Man up' is a sexist term that should be retired along with all the other gender-based imperious imperatives. ~ Christine Pelosi

This we can all bear witness to, living as we do plagued by unremitting anxiety . It becomes more and more imperative that the life of the spirit be avowed as the only firm basis upon which to establish happiness and peace. ~ Dalai Lama

To act without rapacity, to use knowledge with wisdom, to respect interdependence, to operate without hubris and greed are not simply moral imperatives. They are an accurate scientific description of the means of survival. ~ Barbara Ward, Baroness Jackson Of Lodsworth

I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period. ~ Robert Burchfield

It's probably the meaning of the Resurrection: love dies to be reborn. When we let die our attachments to remembrances, expectations, moral imperatives, evaluations, comparisons, self-images, beliefs about how others should behave, ideals, and even romance, we make ourselves clearings for love's rebirth. ~ Brad Blanton

It is imperative to contest all factions for complete victory, so the army is not garrisoned and the profit can be total. This is the law of strategic siege. ~ Sun Tzu

Sebastian's life was governed by a code of such imperatives. 'I must have pillar-box red pyjamas,' 'I have to stay in bed until the sun works round the windows,' 'I've absolutely got to drink champagne tonight. ~ Evelyn Waugh

I believe in previous lives and the Muse - and that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists. ~ Steven Pressfield

It just seems so fundamental to me. I'm able to marry the person I wanted to marry. That's the fundamental human imperative. Those of us who have been lucky enough should expand these rights to others. ~ Chelsea Clinton

We simply cannot afford to allow our government to go unscrutinised, most of all in amid the bleak seeming imperatives of the 'war on terror'. ~ Nick Harkaway

Is Christian ethics merely a specific set of Christian answers to the question of good and evil, right and wrong? To make it no more than this is to forget that man's fall was a fall into the knowledge of good and evil, reinforced by the inexorable knowledge of a condemning law, and that man's restoration in Christ is a restoration to freedom and grace, to a love that needs no law since it knows and does only what is in accord with love and with God. To imprison ethics in the realm of division, of good and evil, right and wrong, is to condemn it to sterility, and rob it of its real reason for existing, which is love. Love cannot be reduced to one virtue among many others prescribed by ethical imperatives. When love is only "a virtue" among many, man forgets that "God is love" and becomes incapable of that all-embracing love by which we secretly begin to know God as our Creator and Redeemer - who has saved us from the limitations of a purely restrictive and aimless existence "under a law."

So Bonhoeffer says very rightly: "In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all…. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil. ~ Thomas Merton

Legislators consistently put the political imperative before the national interest. ~ Doug Bandow

It took a couple of months before we were both convinced there were no rules about sexual activities in Hell and our spouses were not going to show up out of the blue. It was hard to start a sexual relationship in circumstances of such bizarre uncertainty, especially for an active Mormon and a good Christian, both lost in a Zoroastrian Hell. We were like virgin newlyweds. All my life I'd been raised to believe this kind of thing was wrong. All my life I had lived with a strong sense of morality. How do you give it up? How do you do things you thought you'd never do? Where do all the things you believed go, when all the supporting structure is found to be a myth? How do you know how or on what to take a moral stand, how do you behave when it turns out there are no cosmic rules, no categorical imperatives? It was difficult. So tricky to untangle. ~ Steven L. Peck

'Government gets things right' does not encourage sales. 'Government makes another blunder' does encourage sales, so there's a commercial imperative that pushes sensationalism. ~ John Major

Men will always seek gods in whose name they may perform great deeds or commit unspeakable atrocities, even when those gods are not gods but "tribal honor" or "genetic imperatives" or "social ideals" or "human
destiny" or "liberal democracy." Then again, men also kill on account of money, land, love, pride, hatred, envy, or ambition. They kill out of conviction or out of lack of conviction. Harris ~ David Bentley Hart

But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes - thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

It is better to control oneself, if one can, and not hit back. But on certain occasions, it is imperative to defend oneself. I don't think it's fair to ask anybody not to defend herself or himself. ~ Maya Angelou

As people's capacities wane, whether through age or ill health, making their lives better often requires curbing our purely medical imperatives - resisting the urge to fiddle and fix and control. ~ Atul Gawande

The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperative and her place in society. ~ Sandra Day O'Connor

By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world's land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia's mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential. ~ Pankaj Mishra

I pay for the privilege of handing over to trained professionals responsibility not just for my experience but for my interpretation of that experience - i.e. my pleasure. My pleasure is for 7 nights and 6.5 days wisely and efficiently managed ... just as promised in the cruise line's advertising - nay, just as somehow already accomplished in the ads, with their 2nd-person imperatives, which make them not promises but predictions. ~ David Foster Wallace

I think that it is useless to fight directly against natural weaknesses. One has to force oneself to act as though one did not have them in circumstances where a duty makes it imperative; and in the ordinary course of life one has to know these weaknesses, prudently take them into account, and strive to turn them to good purpose; for they are all capable of being put to some good purpose. ~ Simone Weil

I have four sons whom I love dearly. Suppose our lawn needed to be cut. I could say, "Boys, can you see the need? The grass is high. It's above my knees. Soon I will not be able to get to the garage. Don't you see the desperate need?" But in the final analysis, they get out the mower because their father says, "Mow the grass!" World evangelization is an imperative because Jesus said so. ~ George Sweeting

Today it's fashionable to talk about the New Economy, or the Information Economy, or the Knowledge Economy. But when I think about the imperatives of this market, I view today's economy as the Value Economy. Adding value has become more than just a sound business principle; it is both the common denominator and the competitive edge. ~ Arthur Levitt Jr

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals wish to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall. ~ Ray Bradbury

The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment. ~ Ralph Nader

The Green Party is no longer the alternative, the Green Party is the imperative ~ Rosa Clemente

I don't have anything against therapy, by the way; it's great for other people. It's just that, personally, I see the enterprise as proceeding from the same premises that cause the problems it seeks to treat. For you guys, what I am, fundamentally, is a closed system, a container of ego and id and biological imperatives. That I'm not may be a fiction, but if I can't imagine a reference point larger than myself, morally speaking, then what's the use? ~ Garth Risk Hallberg

Sometimes, some of us in some things we do know better. When we know better, I think it's imperative that we do better. Otherwise we're perpetuating myths that have for centuries done us no good. Men and women alike. No one is exempt from being called into consciousness. ~ Jill Alexander Essbaum

There was a time when Congress used to engage in serious debate and occasionally take tough stands opposing the alleged imperatives of national security. Over the last three decades, however, and particularly since 9/11, it has increasingly abdicated its powers and transferred them to to the executive branch. ~ Mike Lofgren

Destroying hope is a critically important project. And when it is achieved, formal democracy is allowed - even preferred, if only for public relation purposes. In more honest circles, much of this is conceded. Of course, it is understood much more profoundly by beasts in men's shapes who endure the consequences of challenging the imperatives of stability and order. ~ Noam Chomsky

Finally, Lutheran and Reformed traditions distinguish (without separating) three uses of the law: the first (pedagogical), to expose our guilt and corruption, driving us to Christ; the second, a civil use to restrain public vice; and the third, to guide Christian obedience. Believers are not "under the law" in the first sense. They are justified. However, they are still obligated to the law, both as it is stipulated and enforced by the state (second use) and as it frames Christian discipleship (third use). We never ground our status before God in our obedience to imperatives, but in Christ's righteousness; yet we are also bound to Christ, who continues to lead and direct us by his holy will. ~ Michael S. Horton

It was such a dismal time in Japan. It almost seemed as if they were dying as a people, their economy in tatters, the population dwindling, the remaining citizens isolated and adrift. Had they been wrong about everything? Kenzo wondered. The power of consensus and obligation, the imperatives of racial purity and harmony? ~ Don Lee

Faculty Meetings are held whenever the need to show off is combined
with the imperative of accomplishing nothing. ~ Alexander Theroux

Without reverence we [people] will gradually descend into ecocide. In the degree that the imperatives of the market - the temple of the Mall - govern our lives, we are in escalating danger of destroying the commonwealth of all sentient beings - bugs and bees and buntings - on which we depend for a luxurious life on planet earth. ~ Sam Keen

There's been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. I don't think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we've stayed behind.

I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says "understand and respect the universe"… but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to "conquer" Earth, to steal their "precious" physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of "competition"… as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. "Conquering the galaxy" is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices ~ Greg Egan

Our words, like our deeds, should be filled with faith and hope and charity, the three great Christian imperatives so desperately needed in the world today. With such words, spoken under the influence of the Spirit, tears can be dried, hearts can be healed, lives can be elevated, hope can return, confidence can prevail ... May we all rejoice in the thought that when we say edifying, encouraging things unto the least of these, our brethren and sisters and little ones, we say it unto God. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

Musing on the phrase 'waste of time.' So much more complex than it appears. Many 'wastes of time' small talk, daydreaming are imperatives. ~ Tom Peters

Nonviolence is an imperative in order to bring about ultimate community. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The irony is that if we make every imperative into a command to believe the gospel more fully, we turn the gospel into one more thing we have to get right, and faith becomes the one thing we need to be better at. ~ Kevin DeYoung

suggested that a life without sex and without the presence of a partner offered numerous benefits. The celibate life allowed productivity, independence and ease free from the pressures of placating and accommodating the will and desires of another: released from the degrading imperatives of erotic congress, a new and better kind of life could be lived. Sex was an overrated bore. 'Besides,' I confessed as I ended the article, 'I'm scared that I may not be very good at it. ~ Stephen Fry

The desire for magic cannot be eradicated. Even the most supposedly rational people attempt to practice magic in love and war. We simultaneously possess the most primitive of brain stems and the most sophisticated of cortices. The imperatives of each coexist uneasily. ~ Erica Jong

There are those who feel an imperative need to believe, for whom the values of a belief are proportionate not to its truth, but to its definiteness. Incapable of either admitting the existence of contrary judgments or of suspending their own, they supply the place of knowledge by turning other men's conjectures into dogmas. ~ C.E.M. Joad

Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism ... When we shift our attention from 'save newspapers' to 'save society,' the imperative changes from 'preserve the current institutions' to 'do whatever works.' And what works today isn't the same as what used to work. ~ Clay Shirky

The web and its technologies are digital representations of everything we did before in a more private, bigger, faster and more empowering format than ever before. ~ David Amerland

Each of these imperatives has a tendency to degenerate into an excuse for greed and materialism in the absence of the other. Without the call to generosity, the call to productivity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives - as long as they accumulate their wealth by working productively. But without the call to productivity, the call to generosity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives - as long as they pay off God by tithing their 10 percent. The only way to root out materialism is to reorient people's attitudes about their entire economic lives. If you only lead people to do good work (productivity), they'll use their wealth selfishly. If you only lead them to get their use of wealth right (generosity), they won't orient their lives to good work. The whole life of a person has to turn away from selfishness and serve God and neighbor. As someone once said, the only effective place to intervene in a vicious circle is everywhere at once. ~ Greg Forster

So much of what seems to lie about in discourses about race concerns legitimacy, authenticity, community, belonging – is, in fact, about home. An intellectual home; a spiritual home; family and community as home; forced and displaced labor in the destruction of home; the dislocation of and alienation within the ancestral home; the creative responses to exile, the devastations, pleasures, and imperatives of homelessness as it is manifested in discussions on globalism, diaspora, migrations, hybridity, contingency, interventions, assimilations, exclusions. The estranged body, the legislated body, the body as home. In virtually all of these formations, whatever the terrain, race magnifies the matter that matters. ~ Toni Morrison

Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers. I wrote this book in ~ Atul Gawande

Bitcoin is the beginning of something great: a currency without a government, something necessary and imperative. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Why should we take care to maintain focus on the gospel of grace in our interpretations of Daniel? The first reason is to keep our messages Christian. We are not Jews, Muslims, or Hindus whose followers may believe our status with God is determined by our performance. We believe that Christ's finished work is our only hope. To make Daniel simply an example of one who fulfills God's moral imperatives and thus earns his blessing is essentially an unchristian message. Apart from God's justifying, enabling, and preserving grace, no human can do what God requires to be done. Jesus said, "Apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:5). Interpretations of Daniel devoid of the enabling grace of Christ - even in its Old Testament forms of unmerited divine provision - implicitly deny the necessity of Christ. ~ Bryan Chapell

The sinful heart is never transformed by conformity to the imperatives but only by relationship with the One who cleanses hearts. ~ Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

Selfishness is the bedrock on which all moral behavior starts and it can be immoral only when it conflicts with a higher moral imperative. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

What are man and woman if not members of two very different and warring tribes Yet decade after decade, century after century, they attempt in marriage to reconcile and forge a union. Why I don't know. Biological imperative Divine law Or just a desire to connect to that mysterious other In any case, it's always struck me as a hopeful thing. ~ Andrew Schneider

Television has certain imperatives that CNN had the luxury of ignoring for a long period of time. CNN could take the position that the news would be the star, because in most of the programming day, they were the only all-news operation on the air. ~ Brit Hume

Protecting Americans from harm goes beyond police and national defense. It's imperative that we not destroy the commons, the physical environment on which we rely. ~ Kevin O'Leary

The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether. ~ Colson Whitehead

I had begun my journey asking why my father was Muslim and this was why: I felt sure that none of Islam's once powerful moral imperatives existed within him, but he was Muslim because he doubted the Holocaust, hated America and Israel, thought Hindus were weak and cowardly, and because the glories of the Islamic past excited him. ~ Aatish Taseer

Live and let live was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me to be more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes. ~ Stefan Zweig

Every ego so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though is was a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares this delusion. ~ Hermann Hesse

Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions ... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue ... ~ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess. ~ John Bellamy Foster

Emotions aren't imperatives; they're not your boss. They're indicatives; they're reports. Thats why Paul wrote, " Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions; Roms 6:12 ~ Jon Bloom

It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation ... My work requires it - but I myself have no need or use for it - Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative - I think all chrysalides do - all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion -resurrection - the establishment of the entity. But now I've come up tot the outside of my casements. ~ Marsden Hartley

Our moral imperative is to work with all our powers for that day when the children of the world grow up without the fear of nuclear war. ~ Ronald Reagan

Unknown objects are operating under intelligent control ... It is imperative that we learn where UFOs come from and what their purpose is ... ~ Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter

Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative. ~ Robert McKee

To play is to listen to the imperative inner force that wants to take form and be acted out without reason. ~ Michele Cassou

To Jane Jacob's three traditional urban values of civic space, human scale and diversity, the current environmental imperative adds two more: conservation and regionalism. ~ Peter Calthorpe

The idea of democracy has been stripped of it moral imperatives and come to denote hollowness and hypocrisy. ~ Paul Wellstone

I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

When a man feels that he has a divine mission, say to lift up, to save or to liberate mankind - when a man feels the divine spark in his heart and believes that he is the mouthpiece of supernatural imperatives - when such a mission inflames him, it is only natural that he should stand beyond all merely reasonable standards of judgment. He feels that he is himself sanctified by this mission, that he is himself a type of a higher order! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution. ~ Fanny Kemble

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath too seriously, as an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of the cost or effects on others ~ Ezekiel Emanuel

The proclamation of the saving love of God comes before moral and religious imperatives. Today sometimes it seems that the opposite order is prevailing. ~ Pope Francis

It is imperative to base your life on yourself, to take responsibility for your own happiness. ~ Josei Toda

Now is the time of fresh starts
This is the season that makes everything new.
There is a longstanding rumor that Spring is the time
of renewal, but that's only if you ignore the depressing
clutter and din of the season. All that flowering
and budding and birthing--- the messy youthfulness
of Spring actually verges on squalor. Spring is too busy,
too full of itself, too much like a 20-year-old to be the best time for reflection, re-grouping, and starting fresh.
For that you need December. You need to have lived
through the mindless biological imperatives of your life (to bud, and flower, and show off) before you can see that a landscape of new fallen snow is THE REAL YOU.
December has the clarity, the simplicity, and the silence you need for the best FRESH START of your life. ~ Vivian Swift