Unprecedented Quotes

You never bother me, Glory. It's remarkable how much you don't bother me. Almost unprecedented. ~ Marilynne Robinson

Whatever glory belongs to the race for a development unprecedented in history for the given length of time, a full share belongs to the womanhood of the race. ~ Mary McLeod Bethune

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they're demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we're changing. All we have to do is look: ~ Christian Rudder

Given the unprecedented ignorance of the Bible in contemporary America, it is likely that more young Americans will only know the Noah of 'Noah.' We can only hope that the film offers even a fraction of the wisdom of the original. ~ Dennis Prager

The Bahamas is headed for unprecedented economic activity. ~ Perry Christie

Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe. ~ Carl Sagan

The unprecedented success of Keynesianism is due to the fact that it provides an apparent justification for the 'deficit spending' policies of contemporary governments. It is the pseudo-philosophy of those who can think of nothing else than to dissipate the capital accumulated by previous generations. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

But there was also a notable decline in many quarters of the world of jingoist rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism. There was a sense of the human species, billions of tiny beings spread over the world, collectively presented with an unprecedented opportunity, or even a grave common danger. To many, it seemed absurd for the contending nation states to continue their deadly quarrels when faced with a nonhuman civilization of vastly greater capabilities. There was a whiff of hope in the air. ~ Carl Sagan

Whenever a new generation announces its radical and totally unprecedented culture shift, there is an evangelical movement that pressures churches to get on board if they want to adapt and survive the next wave. It's doubtful that cultures actually work like that. But it is especially disruptive for the ordinary growth of believers in a covenant of grace that extends to every culture and "to a thousand generations." There is change, to be sure, but what kind of change, to what end, and through what means? For that, Scripture rather than culture must provide the ultimate answer. ~ Michael S. Horton

The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. No creature who began as a mathematical improbability, who was selected through millions of years of unprecedented environmental hardship and change for ruggedness, ruthlessness, cunning, and adaptability, and who in the short ten thousand years of what we may call civilization has achieved such wonders as we find about us, may be regarded as a creature without promise. ~ Robert Ardrey

It argued a special genius; he was clearly a case of that. The spark of fire, the point of light, sat somewhere in his inward vagueness as a lamp before a shrine twinkles in the dark perspective of a church; and while youth and early middle-age, while the stiff American breeze of example and opportunity were blowing upon it hard, had made the chamber of his brain a strange workshop of fortune. This establishment, mysterious and almost anonymous, the windows of which, at hours of highest pressure, never seemed, for starers and wonderers, perceptibly to glow, must in fact have been during certain years the scene of an unprecedented, a miraculous white-heat, the receipt for producing which it was practically felt that the master of the forge could not have communicated even with the best intentions. ~ Henry James

I shall work with Congress, civil society groups and local government executives who are convinced that charter changes are needed to enable the country to surmount the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. ~ Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

It is a plague of unprecedented proportions. Anyone, who is unfortunate enough to become infected by its deadly parasites, is transformed into a mindless carrier with an inane desire to feed and spread the virus to other potential hosts. Even death is no escape. ~ Jason Medina

President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who's next? ~ Michelle Malkin

GCHQ has traveled a long and winding road. That road stretches from the wooden huts of Bletchley Park, past the domes and dishes of the Cold War, and on towards what some suggest will be the omniscient state of the Brave New World. As we look to the future, the docile and passive state described by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World is perhaps more appropriate analogy than the strictly totalitarian predictions offered by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bizarrely, many British citizens are quite content in this new climate of hyper-surveillance, since its their own lifestyle choices that helped to create 'wired world' - or even wish for it, for as we have seen, the new torrents of data have been been a source of endless trouble for the overstretched secret agencies. As Ken Macdonald rightly points out, the real drives of our wired world have been private companies looking for growth, and private individuals in search of luxury and convenience at the click of a mouse. The sigint agencies have merely been handed the impossible task of making an interconnected society perfectly secure and risk-free, against the background of a globalized world that presents many unprecedented threats, and now has a few boundaries or borders to protect us. Who, then, is to blame for the rapid intensification of electronic surveillance? Instinctively, many might reply Osama bin Laden, or perhaps Pablo Escobar. Others might respond that governments have used these villains as a convenient ex ~ Richard J. Aldrich

I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable. ~ Al Gore

Yes, she might have managed to lift the portcullis - with concentration, an unprecedented bout of luck, and the absence of a hangover. Oh, and if she were in mortal danger.
Unfortunately, her power was adrenaline-based, making it as infinite as it was uncontrollable.
"You think I use magick like mine to open a tomb?" Mari asked in a scoffing tone. Mistress of bluffing, working it here. ~ Kresley Cole

The financial wealth that has been created is unprecedented. Even if the stock market, for argument's sake, leveled off here, there's been so much wealth built up that we really can feel spending for some time. ~ Adam LaVorgna

We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: If you've got ambition and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession, regardless of where you started out. ~ Peter Drucker

We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being required to take unprecedented measures. Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity are in a state of shocked disbelief. ~ Alan Greenspan

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality. ~ Bono

The free spirit again draws near to life - slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It again grows warmer about him, yellower as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kind blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. he is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seem! what bloom and magic they have acquired!

He looks back gratefully - grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and self-alienation, to his viewing of far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights. What a good thing he had not always stayed "at home," stayed "under his own roof" like a delicate apathetic loafer! He had been -beside himself-: no doubt about that.

Only now does he see himself - and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What unprecedented shudders! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the joy that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall!

They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half-turned towards life: - there are some among them who allow no day to pass without hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe. And to speak seriously: to become sic ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We have come together with a unity of purpose because our nation demands it. September 11, 2001, was a day of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States.The nation was unprepared. How did this happen, and how can we avoid such tragedy ~ Anonymous

Pharmaceutical companies are enjoying unprecedented profits and access with this Administration. Yet the Republicans' prescription drug plan for seniors has been a colossal failure, and over 43 million Americans wake up every morning without health insurance. ~ Jim Clyburn

This is what we've been waiting for: finally, an unprecedented critical analysis of the history of Dutch design. Mienke Simon Thomas's Dutch Design is a book to have and to read: an important and richly detailed study of the cultural, economical and social-political context of twentieth-century design in the Netherlands. ~ Wim Crouwel

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is a masterpiece because it is an episodic novel that has a rigorous form - an unprecedented combination. From the very beginning we know the town of Macondo will endure only a century, so there is a limit to the length of the narrative. ~ Edmund White

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years. ~ Jared Diamond

deductible, depreciable, and deferrable - are about reducing your taxable income. No investment does that better than real estate, which offers unprecedented tax advantages both while you own it and when you sell it. Millionaire ~ Gary Keller

I believe that we are living in an unprecedented time of change. The real danger for society is that people resist, ignore or run away from massive changes in their lives and consequently do themselves long-term damage. ~ Adele Theron

It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race. ~ L. Neil Smith

[Henry James] privately characterized Roosevelt as "a dangerous and ominous jingo," and "the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding Noise. ~ Edmund Morris

In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word 'coal' is a remarkable and unprecedented event. ~ Jeff Goodell

I took the unprecedented step of asking that the State Department make all my work-related emails public for everyone to see. ~ Hillary Clinton

Thanks to the unprecedented reach of British navigation, London in the early 18th century was not just the emporium of the world, it was the first place in which it was possible to assemble artifacts from around the world and allow people to study them. ~ Neil MacGregor

Our government is operating within an unprecedented revenue shortfall and that we have an obligation to all citizens of the province to manage our finances responsibly. And that's what we're going to do. ~ Rachel Notley

Authorities this broad give the national security bureaucracy the power to scrutinize the personal lives of every law-abiding American. Allowing that to continue is a grave error that demonstrates a willful ignorance of human nature. Moreover, it demonstrates a complete disregard for the responsibilities entrusted to us by the Founding Fathers to maintain robust checks and balances on the power of any arm of the government. That obviously raises some very serious questions. What happens to our government, our civil liberties and our basic democracy if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked? As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority. Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person's life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government. ~ Ron Wyden

The psychological problem apparent in the Zarathustra type is how someone who to an unprecedented degree says no and does no to everything everyone has said yes to so far, – how somebody like this can nevertheless be the opposite of a no-saying spirit ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

We don't have a prayer of defeating the Red Threat of our generation without a long boom of almost unprecedented duration. ~ Mitch Daniels

To save our democracy, Americans need to restore the basic norms that once protected it. But we must do more than that. We must extend those norms through the whole of a diverse society. We must make them truly inclusive. America's democratic norms, at their core, have always been sound. But for much of our history, they were accompanied - indeed, sustained - by racial exclusion. Now those norms must be made to work in an age of racial equality and unprecedented ethnic diversity. Few societies in history have managed to be both multiracial and genuinely democratic. That is our challenge. It is also our opportunity. If we meet it, America will truly be exceptional. ~ Steven Levitsky

There was unprecedented elite condemnation of the plans to invade Iraq. Sensible analysts were able to perceive that the enterprise carried significant risks for U.S. interests, however conceived. ~ Noam Chomsky

During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve. ~ Robyn Davidson

Barna is correct when he writes, "After fifteen years of diligent digging into the world around me, I have reached several conclusions about the future of the Christian church in America. The central conclusion is that the American church is dying due to lack of strong spiritual leadership. In this time of unprecedented opportunity and plentiful resources, the church is actually losing influence. The primary reason is the lack of leadership. Nothing is more important than leadership."7 ~ Ed Stetzer

America's development began with a large-scale ethnic cleansing, unprecedented in human history. ~ Vladimir Putin

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don't need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it's unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we're built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We've never known anything else - hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn't recognize their own slavery - they even liked being slaves. I ~ Svetlana Alexievich

The invasion of Iraq was not an unprecedented event; it really was the natural extension of a conflict with Iraq that began on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and occupied Kuwait, which was a major oil supplier to the United States. ~ Michael Klare

I put myself up for full professor, an act of such unprecedented and unmitigated arrogance that the committee approved it, thus effectively rooting me to the scene of the crime, too weighed down by tenure, rank, and salary to be marketable ever again. ~ Richard Russo

Social media has shaken up the world of sales, with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offering new ways to hound leads and unprecedented insights into clients. ~ Ryan Holmes

This is an extraordinary book of unique psychological power. It reveals not only scholarship and sophistication of the author, but deep and intimate knowledge of the recesses of the human psyche. By masterful juxtaposition of evocative images, poetry, and selected quotes from scholars, Flesh and Blood seems to engage both the right and left hemispheres in an unprecedented dialogue. The result is a multi-dimensional, almost holographic picture of the primordial foundations of the human mind. ~ Stanislav Grof

We must establish all over the country schools of our own to train our own children to become scientists, to become mathematicians. We must realize the need for adult education and for job retraining programs that will emphasize a changing society in which automation plays the key role. We intend to use the tools of education to help raise our people to an unprecedented level of excellence and self respect through their own efforts. ~ Malcolm X

Within this new mix of genes are unprecedented possibilities, old weaknesses eliminated, and new weaknesses that might even turn out to be strengths. This is the mechanism by which the wheels of evolution turn. All ~ Hope Jahren

The unprecedented development of science and technology ... so rapid that it is said that 90 per cent of the scientists which this country has ever produced are still living today. ~ Robert Platt

Great American power and responsibility are not unprecedented, and have been used with restraint and great benefit in the past. We have not assumed that super strength guarantees super wisdom, and we have consistently reached out to the international community to ensure that our own power and influence are tempered by the best common judgment. ~ Jimmy Carter

At 378 parts per million, current CO2 levels are unprecedented in recent geological history. (The previous high, of 299 parts per million, was reached around 325,000 years ago). It is believed that the last time carbon dioxide levels were comparable to today's was three and a half million years ago, during what is known as the mid-Pliocene warm period, and it is likely that they have not been much higher since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago. In the Eocene, crocodiles roamed Colorado and sea levels were nearly three hundred feet higher than they are today. A scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) put it to me - only half-jokingly - this way: It's true that we've had higher CO2 levels before. But, then, of course, we also had dinosaurs. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is no quite so simple. ~ Keith Briffa

A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

To sound off with a cheerful 'give me liberty or give me death' sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous. ~ Hannah Arendt

The Supreme Court has never ruled that Congress can use the Commerce Clause to require individuals to engage in an activity they have chosen to avoid. Yet that is precisely what Obamacare does: It forces Americans without health insurance to purchase coverage. Such a requirement is unprecedented and unconstitutional. ~ John Cornyn

Go on from here, Ada, please. (She). Billions of boys. Take one fairly decent decade. A billion of Bills, good, gifted, tender and passionate, not only spiritually but physically well-meaning Billions, have bared the jillions of their no less tender and brilliant Jills during that decade, at stations and under conditions that have to be controlled and specified by the worker, lest the entire report be choked up by the weeds of statistics and waist-high generalizations. No point would there be, if we left out, for example, the little matter of prodigious individual awareness and young genius, which makes, in some cases, of this or that particular gasp an unprecedented and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work of art, or a denouncer's article. The details that shine through or shade through: the local leaf through the hyaline skin, the green sun in the brown humid eye, tout ceci, vsyo eto, in tit and toto, must be taken into account, now prepare to take over (no, Ada, go on, ya zaslushalsya: I'm all enchantment and ears), if we wish to convey the fact, the fact, the fact - that among those billions of brilliant couples in one cross section of what you will allow me to call spacetime (for the convenience of reasoning), one couple is a unique super-imperial couple, sverhimperator-skaya cheta, in consequence of which (to be inquired into, to be painted, to be denounced, to be put to music, or to the question and death, ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When a painter thinks to disengage from the world outside himself and fantasies unprecedented forms he thinks he will make a painting, he finds in this expression the same effect - I would even say the same picture - that he had unconsciously acquired by his habit to experience reality intensely. ~ Pierre Alechinsky

We attain freedom as we let go of whatever does not reflect our magnificence. A bird cannot fly high or far with a stone tied to its back. But release the impediment, and we are free to soar to unprecedented heights. ~ Alan Cohen

In times of unprecedented evil, God wants to give unprecedented grace. For, as St. Paul wrote, "Where sin abounds grace abounds all the more" (Rom 5:20). ~ Michael Gaitley

At an unprecedented time with the worst attack ever on our soil, our President displayed extraordinary determination, leadership and resolve when history was thrust upon him and the United States. ~ Olympia Snowe

Social enables word of mouth at an unprecedented scale. Its most powerful effect, through reviews and recommendations, is to put product quality and value for money as the key to success in commerce. Social brings a level of transparency that prevents marketers from advertising their way to success without underlying product quality. ~ Roelof Botha

For despite what some people say, love is not a sweet feeling bound to come and quickly go away. In many ways the twenty-first century is not that different from the thirteenth century. Both will be recorded in history as times of unprecedented religious clashes, cultural misunderstandings, and a general sense of insecurity and fear of the Other. At times like these, the need for love is greater than ever. Because love is the very essence and purpose of life. As Rumi reminds us, it hits everybody, including those who shun love - even those who use the word "romantic" as a sign of disapproval. ~ Elif Shafak

Whereas previous generations had to face some unpredictability, current generations are facing unprecedented levels of instability. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

Polarization (and Trumpism) is in itself a kind of political crisis. But all of this would be fine in the long run,
if the stakes weren't so high and the time frames so narrow. As a world-system, we really don't have the time
for Trumpism and the like. Global warming and the rapid changes pertaining to the internet age won't wait. We are
entering a time of unprecedented transformation and we are in dire need of politics that are progressive - in the
sense that they anticipate and productively respond to the upcoming multidimensional crisis - revolution. ~ Hanzi Freinacht

The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course - it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming. ~ Gerda Lerner

Winners have different potentials. Achievement is not the most important thing. Authenticity is. The authentic person experiences self-reality by knowing, being, and becoming a credible, responsive
person. Authentic people actualize their own unprecedented uniqueness and appreciate the uniqueness of others.
Authentic persons-winners-do not dedicate their lives to a concept of what they imagine they should be; rather, they are themselves and as such do not use their energy putting on a performance, ~ Muriel James

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits. ~ Susan Sontag

I was irresistibly drawn to write about Latter-Day Saints not only because I already knew something about their theology, and admired much about their culture, but also because of the utterly unique circumstances in which their religion was born: the Mormon Church was founded a mere 173 years ago, in a literate society, in the age of the printing press. As a consequence, the creation of what became a worldwide faith was abundantly documented in firsthand accounts. Thanks to the Mormons, we have been given an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate
in astonishingly detail
how an important religion came to be. ~ Jon Krakauer

Unprecedented amnesty in history of Georgia took place ~ Vano Merabishvili

I don't think there's any company that has the same tools as Martha Stewart Living does, and people know that. They really love the tools and, if you have the tools, you can pretty much do the craft. ~ Martha Stewart

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences - nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences:
"Esther's cleavage is something to be noticed" or "You can't have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture" or "I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort" or "I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed."
At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we'd rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure. ~ Paul Theroux

Living in the age of the Internet and being a part of the information generation, we have unlimited access to an unprecedented wealth of knowledge and learning. We have no excuse to show up to an appointment, a sales call, a date, or an important meeting without learning everything we can to tip the odds in our favor. ~ Susan C. Young

The tape measures and weighing scales of the Victorian brain scientists have been supplanted by powerful neuroimaging technologies, but there is still a lesson to be learned from historical examples such as these. State-of-the-art brain scanners offer us unprecedented information about the structure and working of the brain. But don't forget that, once, wrapping a tape measure around the head was considered modern and sophisticated, and it's important not to fall into the same old traps. As we'll see in later chapters, although certain popular commentators make it seem effortlessly easy, the sheer complexity of the brain makes interpreting and understanding the meaning of any sex differences we find in the brain a very difficult task. But the first, and perhaps surprising, issue in sex differences research is that of knowing which differences are real and which, like the intially promising cephalic index, are flukes or spurious. ~ Cordelia Fine

And the rule in life that has unprecedented power is that the individual who knows the right people, for the right reasons, and utilizes the power of these relationships, can become a member of the "club," whether he started out as a caddie or not. ~ Keith Ferrazzi

Because of new technologies, new wealth, new conditions of domestic life and of international relations, unprecedented criteria and issues are coming up for national decision. ~ Herman Kahn

While the Internet is censored in China, the censorship is allowing a level of speech to take place that's unprecedented. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

Some scientists believe climate change is the cause of unprecedented melting of the North Pole, and that effects these very uncertain weather patterns. I think we should listen to those scientists and experts. ~ Dalai Lama

The same solution--that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass--would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script. It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community. Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies of copies of much older lost originals, were collected in the nineteenth century and have found their way into a number of museums around the world. None remain on Easter Island itself and even in the period when they were collected no native Easter Islanders were able to read them. ~ Graham Hancock

The levels of poverty in 1933's rural America were unimaginable to us now. The 1933 Farm Bill, which introduced unprecedented government control over agriculture, was a reaction to the specific problems facing producers at that time. ~ Debbie Stabenow

As Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Barak have repeatedly said, the intelligence and security relationship between the United States and Israel at present is unprecedented. It has never been stronger. ~ Susan Rice

The sacrifices ordinary American men and women from communities large and small have been willing to make, often before they were past their teenage years, have secured our nation unprecedented freedoms and made us the world's bulwark of liberty. ~ Steve Buyer

When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control. ~ William Safire

The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency? ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

Sooner or later something had to give. But President Bush, faced with the unprecedented affront of 9-11, could not wait to take action. So he had to do what we were capable of doing, and he did it brilliantly. ~ Alexander Haig

The entire point of a new theory is that it is unprecedented; the first man to invent a jet aircraft could scarcely submit examples of jet aircraft flying in the past. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Within NASA, the shuttle is perhaps the least-groundbreaking project. Recall that Apollo was about creating brand-new technologies that did something unprecedented - putting men on the moon. The shuttle is, by comparison, a relic designed to make going into orbit routine. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

If we had failed to pursue the facts as far as they led, we would have denied the public any knowledge of an unprecedented scheme of political surveillance and sabotage. ~ Katharine Graham

After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have. But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country. ~ Michele Bachmann

Is it unprecedented for two goalkeepers employed in a match comprising seven goals to be the fixture's most competent protagonists? ~ Pete Gill

I was imprisoned in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks, when Egypt's state security was rounding people up in unprecedented numbers. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Once, on a walk by a river- Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow- his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Phillip Larkin the way she did. 'If I were to construct a religion/ I should make use of water.' She said she liked the laconic use of 'called in'- as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make us of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities- and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true. ~ Ian McEwan

Hate is on a scale, and is growing on a planetary scale of unprecedented size. The violent left is coming to our streets, all of our streets, to smash, to tear down, to kill, to bankrupt, to destroy. It is will be global in its nature and global in its scope. ~ Glenn Beck

Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play
more than piety, more than charity or vigilance
was what allowed human beings to transcend evil. ~ Tom Robbins

that August an ominous and unprecedented British armada of 450 ships and boats carrying forty-five thousand British soldiers and sailors, as well as the rented Germanic troops known as the Hessians (of Headless Horseman fame), assembled in New York Harbor ~ Sarah Vowell

Today, I join King Abdullah in Paris to stand in solidarity with the people of France in their darkest hour ... To stand in unity against extremism in all its forms and to stand up for our cherished faith, Islam. And so that the lasting image of these terrible events is an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy and support between people of all faiths and cultures. ~ Queen Rania Of Jordan

The campaign of character assassination waged [against President Clinton] by the right was a singular, unprecedented effort. Nothing like it exists on the left. What I object to on the right is the obsessive hatred, the bigotry, and the personal savaging of their opponents, all achieved through an echo chamber of talk radio, the Internet and Rupert Murdoch's media outlets. That kind of well-funded disinformation campaign has no analog on the left. ~ David Brock