Unwillingness Quotes

Most of the problems with the bodies and minds of the folks occupying the current culture involve an unwillingness to do anything hard, or anything that they'd rather not do. I applaud your resolve, and I welcome you to the community of people who have decided that EASY will no longer suffice. ~ Mark Rippetoe

Self distrust is good, but only if it leads to trust in God. Otherwise it ends as spiritual paralysis, inability and unwillingness to undertake any course of action. ~ Alan Cole

The doormat version of idiot compassion always involves allowing ourselves to feel walked all over in the name of idealizing what it means to be patient with another person's aggressive behavior. It's an unwillingness to face the uncomfortable truth that it's okay to feel angry and irritated. ~ Ethan Nichtern

I went around saying for a long time that I am not one of those Christians who is heavily into forgiveness
that I am one of the other kind. But even though it was funny, and actually true, it started to be too painful to stay this way. They say we are not punished for the sin but by the sin, and I began to feel punished by my unwillingness to forgive. ~ Anne Lamott

We may reconcile ourselves to the world at our peril, but it will never reconcile itself to us ... This unwillingness to die, doth actually impeach us of high treason against the Lord : is it not a choosing of earth before him ; and taking these present things for our happiness, and consequently asking them our very God (469)? ~ Richard Baxter

, Roosevelt was unmoved. Churchill had to agree to dispatch a political mission - the Cripps Mission - to India a few days after the fall of Rangoon. It failed and Churchill was delighted. He said to FDR, 'I feel absolutely satisfied we have done our utmost.' However, Roosevelt did not think so. He knew that Churchill had stacked the deck against the mission. He telegraphed Churchill to try again, saying that Britain's unwillingness 'to concede to the Indians the right of self-government was ~ Anonymous

All honest labor becomes easy; it only becomes hard when done with unwillingness. ~ Clive James

Doubt is an unwillingness to communicate. ~ Meir Ezra

Extremism frequently turns its champions into angry people, driven by conflicting desires. At first, I pitied my less enlightened parents and siblings. Then I felt superior to them, poor sinners that they were. Then I lost patience with their unwillingness
to see the one true path and resorted to threats, intimidation, and yelling. At night, I was tormented by thoughts of what would happen to all us of when we reached our graves. ~ Manal Al-Sharif

The Gospels fall apart without miracles. Today's discomfort with the miraculous reflects a fundamental unwillingness to believe God can do anything. Frankly, if God can create the world out of nothing, having his son still a storm to me seems reasonable. ~ Anonymous

And I implore those who hide behind the high sounding phrase called tradition, to realise that they throw this word around only to mask their unwillingness to change
- Mahesh Bhatt ~ Mahesh Bhatt

I suppose I do not on the whole greatly admire the 'Tortoises' of this world. While one may appreciate their plodding steadiness and ability to survive, one suspects their lack of frankness, their capacity for treachery. And I suppose, in the end, one despises their unwillingness to take chances in the name of ambition or for the sake of a principle they claim to believe in. ~ Kazuo Ishiguro

The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot. ~ William Ellery Channing

One of the most serious human defects in all ages is procrastination, an unwillingness to accept personal responsibilities now. ~ Spencer W. Kimball

Women are sometimes drawn in to believe against probability by the unwillingness they have to doubt their own merit. ~ Samuel Richardson

The price of getting men to fight is giving them respect. Men will fight to protect women they love, men will fight to protect children they have fathered, for obvious reasons, both moral and biological, but where a man is not respected, where men are 'cucked' . . . if men utilized and turned into a form of captive livestock, if men are enslaved to female vanity, protectiveness, emotional self-defense, what happens is men don't love their societies anymore because society is not giving them respect. The men are in the same relationship to society as an abused woman is to an abusive man. There may be attachment, an unwillingness or lack of capacity to escape, but there's no love. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Our ignorance, and it is based on the egos we have. It is the unwillingness to go beyond ego. ~ Edgar Mitchell

An unwillingness to accept risk has swamped more leaders than anything I can think of. ~ Andy Stanley

The people ahead of you, living in the liberty of instinct-guided uniqueness, will welcome you, encourage you, and mentor you. They will inspire you to be a pioneer and not a poser. Only those incarcerated by their unwillingness to listen to their instincts and to take the risks required for success will seek to deter you. ~ T.D. Jakes

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership. ~ Chinua Achebe

Marxist writers are generally either indifferent or mildly hostile to the anti-capitalist movement, which they see as no good substitute for the great projects of communism and social democracy. Now, in one sense this is quite justified[…] However, there seems very little reason to believe that a return to the tactics of the twentieth-century labour movement is going to achieve anything in the future… [W]hat is wrong with commodification is not commodification per se… Marxist tradition goes much further than simply recommending that the excessive power of capital be challenged and curbed. Historically, this tradition tends to assert that such a challenge can only be made by virtue of a direct challenge to the existing relations of production, conceived of as the basis for a social totality, and, crucially, that it can only be made by the proletariat, politically mobilizes as a 'Class of Itself'. In concrete terms, this means that only the labour movement, being organized and mobilized on the basis of its class identity and demanding the socialization of the means of production, can mount such a challenge… This is where I, and the anti-capitalist movement, part company with classical Marxism… [A]nti-capitalist movement is characterized by a certain pluralism, an unwillingness to impose any one model of social organization, and a refusal of neoliberal hegemony not on the basis of a single class identity or even a single universal human identity, but precisely n the basis of a d ~ Jeremy Gilbert

Honesty consists of the unwillingness to lie to others; maturity, which is equally hard to attain, consists of the unwillingness to lie to oneself. ~ Sydney J. Harris

Neglect transpires when the accountable adult fails to provide sufficiently for the needs of a child. It may be deliberate and conscious cruelty, or it may be an incapability or unwillingness to care for and nurture a child. ~ Patricia Dsouza

The greatest obstacle to learning is the inability or unwillingness to overcome beliefs. - Todd Anthonsen999 ~ Todd Anthonsen999

The only quality that distinguishes the greats from the masses, is the unwillingness to give up. ~ Abhijit Naskar

He found her unwillingness to quake in the face of his temper oddly intriguing. It was no reason to think he loved the witch, but it was curious. And that made him want to know her better. ~ Jaimey Grant

Sin is unwillingness to trust that what God wants for me is only my deepest happiness. ~ Ignatius Of Loyola

To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters - which were not all that important, anyway - was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks. ~ Thomas Cahill

More often than not, a statist's argument against Anarchism boils down to an unwillingness to take control and responsibility for their own lives, actions, and communities. The sad truth is that the human animal has been domesticated to the point where it actually fears Liberty. ~ Dane Whalen

I have seen your despatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bull-dog gripe, and chew & choke, as much as possible. ~ Abraham Lincoln

A hard head makes a soft ass. ~ Will Leamon

People and organisations should want to be associated with you as a brand. A sign of a depleted and irrelevant brand is unwillingness of your market or peers to associate with you. ~ Archibald Marwizi

What price are you willing to pay to see your church actively engaged in evangelism? Price? What do you mean by price? There is a cost for everything. One of the causes for evangelistic entropy is an unwillingness to count the cost of growth. If evangelism is really going to be a value that your church embraces, the church will have to embrace the changes that will take place when evangelism is activated in the church. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

Nisbett and Borgida summarize the results in a memorable sentence: Subjects' unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular. ~ Daniel Kahneman

For whatever reason, it seems like we're against love. Everyone. People think love equates to weakness, or gullibility, or an unwillingness to deal with reality, so they try to
ruin it, the social scientists and the admen, with studies and lingerie shows and boxes of candy. They try to invalidate it, dirty it up, but they can't, because people in love know
the truth. They know love is good and pure and really the most beautiful thing in the world. They know love is greater than anything, greater even than God. At first, I didn't
believe it, but I do now. You have made me realize it. Being away from you has been the hardest thing I have ever done. I am shaking and sweating. I am going into withdrawal. I need you. You are my withdrawal. You are my blood.
I want to protect you from all of this. When it's all over, I want to run away with you and never come back. I want to be buried in the ground with you. It's the only way we can keep this pure and beautiful, I'm afraid. We have to stay away from this whole life. We have to be normal. We have to get married and move to Berkeley. Our love can't
survive like this, no matter how hard we try. I'm quitting the band. I'm coming home. I need you. ~ Pete Wentz

Sin makes our armor vulnerable to attack from Satan, who then gains permission from God to attack us in the area where we have failed to uphold righteousness. If we break down in moral purity, Satan comes in and establishes a stronghold. If we give place to bitterness and unwillingness to forgive, we break fellowship with God and others. If we become money-focused, we fall into greed and deception. Sin is a vicious cycle that leaves us weak and vulnerable to ever more sin. ~ Os Hillman

This was distressing development. Charlotte could contend with Jane's low opinion of herself, her unfair prejudice against the Society, her unwillingness to picture herself as respectable or wealthy. But if Jane was in love, well, that was that. Jane would not be coming to London with them or joining the Society.
Love trumped everything in a woman's life. More than ambition. Respectability. Common sense. Love, they'd both been taught, conquers all. ~ Cynthia Hand

It worries me about our unwillingness to really address reforms and modernization in Medicare. This thing was designed 37 years ago. It has not evolved to keep pace with current medical technology. ~ John Sununu

Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage; an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone. ~ Denise Mina

One of the most devastating symptoms of pride is the unwillingness to forgive. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

The spirit of complaint is born out of an unwillingness to trust God with today.
Like the Israelites, it means you are spending your time looking back toward Egypt or wishing for the future all the while missing what God is doing right now. ~ Priscilla Shirer

The greatest difficulty with the world is not its ability to produce, but the unwillingness to share. ~ Roy L. Smith

In no way does God's absence call His existence into question. To the contrary, His absence calls into question my unwillingness to surrender to His existence. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

This seemed to be happening more and more lately out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he'd seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everyone else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who'd dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc Knew these people, he'd seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who'd make it happen.
Was it possible, that at every gathering--concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever--those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
'Gee,' he said to himself out loud, 'I dunno... ~ Thomas Pynchon

The origin of all science is the desire to know causes, and the origin of all false science is the desire to accept false causes rather than none; or, which is the same thing, in the unwillingness to acknowledge our own ignorance. ~ William Hazlitt

If there's a single trait common to all Savannahians, it's their love of money and their unwillingness to spend it. ~ John Berendt

For new atheists, the science is settled, the data is conclusive and the book (no, not the "Good Book") has been written. Time for everyone else to pack up and move on to other business, like, presumably, accumulating wealth and fulminating at the sight of the nearest Christmas tree. The militant atheist wants nothing more than to spoil the believer's spiritual journey. That's both mean-spirited and radically unenlightened. Though more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith, God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs this off as a "neurological disorder." His version of a quest for knowledge was a series of scathing jokes at the faithfuls' expense in the documentary "Religulous." The latest incarnation of the thought-eschewing secularist is American Atheists spokesman Dave Silverman, who sums up the argument this way on atheistnexus.org: "Religion is my bitch." He has also tweeted, "Yes it is a myth. Deal with it. All delusions are myths." It's these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neo-atheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn't seem to have much sociological meaning for them. ~ S.E. Cupp

The enemy of development is this pain phobia - the unwillingness to do a tiny bit of suffering. ~ Bruce Lee

If a mistake is made the honorable thing to do is to own up to it.' Of course I was talking about Levi owning up to his mistakes. But as I finish this book, I realize it applies equally to myself, and to all of us as we try but fail to live up to the standards we know are right. Our inability and unwillingness to keep the standards don't make the standards any less valuable and good. ~ Bristol Palin

The author defines professionalism as exemplified by his subjects in their mutual unwillingness to take expected opposition personally. They would not allow grudges to get in the way of more important business. ~ Chris Matthews

The real reason for withholding taxes is the unwillingness of workers to share their incomes with the government and the consequent difficulties of collection. To overcome this handicap, the government has simply impressed employers into its service as involuntary and unpaid tax collectors. It is a form of conscription. Disregarding the right of privacy, which is an essential of liberty, the government's agents may, under the law, invade the employer's office, demand his accounts, and punish him for any infraction which they believe he has committed; they can impound his property and inflict a penalty for not having collected taxes for the government. ~ Frank Chodorov

There exists in our society widespread fear of judging ... [B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done ... Who has ever maintained that by judging a wrong I presuppose that I myself would be incapable of committing it? ~ Hannah Arendt

Conformity makes us blind. Our unwillingness to change keeps us blind. ~ Debasish Mridha

The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is inconsistency. ~ James C. Collins

Fear thou the judgments of God, fear greatly the wrath of the Almighty. Shrink from debating upon the works of the Most High, but search narrowly thine own iniquities into what great sins thou hast fallen, and how many good things thou hast neglected. There are some who carry their devotion only in books, some in pictures, some in outward signs and figures; some have Me in their mouths, but little in their hearts. Others there are who, being enlightened in their understanding and purged in their affections, continually long after eternal things, hear of earthly things with unwillingness, obey the necessities of nature with sorrow. And these understand what the Spirit of truth speaketh in them; for He teacheth them to despise earthly things and to love heavenly; to neglect the world and to desire heaven all the day and night. ~ Thomas A Kempis

The albino found himself brooding upon the nature of all unholy bargains, of his own dependency upon the hellsword Stormbringer, of his willingness to summon supernatural aid without thought of any spiritual consequences to himself and, perhaps most significant, of his unwillingness to find a way to cure himself of the occult's seductive attraction; for there was a part of his strange brain that was curious to follow its own fate; to learn whatever disastrous conclusion lay in store for it - it needed to know the end of the saga: the value, perhaps, of its torment. ~ Michael Moorcock

Perhaps there is nothing wrong with being childish and naïve. Perhaps naivety is simply the unwillingness to learn one's lesson. It is the decision to speak and live the truth, the beautiful truth of who we are and what we're capable of, against all odds and in the face of all opposition. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

To blame my failures on the lack of resources is less about the lack of resources and more about my unwillingness to access those resources. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Attention is our first duty whenever we want to know what is our second duty. There is no such cause of confusion and worry about what we ought to do, and how to do it, as our unwillingness to hear what God would tell us on that very point. ~ Henry Clay Trumbull

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever, shrewd men, and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn't able to endure being at a disadvantage and, given this unwillingness, I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard, jaunty body. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There is no reticence nor any limit to a 'Majique.' Only the unwillingness of the mind to open itself to the limitless power of possibilities that exist within the unbelievable. ~ Rob Shepherd

It's one thing to make a pronouncement in a moment of inspiration about what you intend to manifest in your life or what kind of person you intend to become. It's quite another thing to make a commitment to holding that vision regardless of what difficulties or obstacles may surface. Holding the vision involves an unwillingness to compromise what you're visualizing for yourself. It means being willing to suffer through criticism and what appears to be an uncooperative universe. ~ Wayne Dyer

Whether it's their Sharia law and birther conspiracies or their unwillingness to buck Grover Norquist's no-tax pledge, the Tea Partiers have hijacked their party and carried it all the way to the right. ~ Jennifer Granholm

It is important to learn the difference between staying with an experience until it is completed and hanging on, trying to get something more-anything more-from a situation which is either finished or barren. The basic clues are whether attention to the issue is loose, unfixed, mobile attentiveness or whether it is an attentiveness which feels glued to its object. The people with the bug-eyed stare, the clinging grasp, the insistent preoccupations, the sense of desperation, the ready-made sermons, the unwillingness to leave when conversations are finished, the quoting of authorities, etc. are all hanging on. ~ Erving Polster

Abortion is one of the most shocking, yet entirely logical, extensions of this obsession with comfort, convenience and luxury. Less dramatic, but just as deadly to millions of lost souls in our world, is our unwillingness to make even small sacrifices to reach them with the Gospel. ~ K.P. Yohannan

Women retain their dependence needs long past the developmental point at which those needs are normal and healthy. Unbeknownst to others - and worse, unbeknownst to ourselves - we carry dependency within us like some autoimmune disease. We carry it with us from kindergarten through college and graduate school, into our careers, and into the convenient "arrangement" of our marriages. (...) Much of the time - for many of us, all of the time - our unwillingness to stand on our own two feet goes unnoticed because it's expected. Women are relational creatures. They nurture and need. This, we have been told for many, many years, is nature.
And although it cripples us, we have to let it go unquestioned. ~ Colette Dowling

I want to suggest to you that citizens of free societies, democracies, do not preserve their freedom by pussyfooting around their fellow-citizen's opinions, even their most cherished beliefs. In free societies, you must have the free play of ideas. There must be argument, and it must be impassioned and untrammeled. A free society is not calm and eventless place - that is the kind of static, dead society dictators try to create. Free societies are dynamic, noisy, turbulent, and full of radical disagreements. Skepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked; and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove-it unwillingness to be impressed, that is perhaps their most important contribution to the freedom of the free world. It is the disrespect of journalists-for power, for orthodoxies, for party lines, for ideologies, for vanity, for arrogance, for folly, for pretension, for corruption, for stupidity, maybe even for editors-that I would like to celebrate...and that I urge you all, in freedom's name, to preserve. ~ Salman Rushdie

Brilliant blue gazes met. "I swear before you and God that I will. But if something should happen, and this morning should go awry, promise me you'll take care of her. Promise me you'll tell her ... " Ralston paused.
"Tell her what?"
Ralston took a deep breath, the words bringing a tightening in his chest. "Promise me you'll tell her that I was an idiot. That the money didn't matter. That, last night, faced with the terrifying possibility that I had lost her ... I realized that she was the most important thing I had ever had ... because of my arrogance and my unwillingness to accept what has been in my heart for too long ... " He trailed off. "What the hell have I done?"
"It appears that you've gone and fallen in love. ~ Sarah MacLean

Frederick Douglass, former slave, extraordinary speaker and writer, wrote in his Rochester newspaper the North Star, January 21, 1848, of "the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion." Douglass was scornful of the unwillingness of opponents of the war to take real action (even the abolitionists kept paying their taxes): The determination of our slaveholding President to prosecute the war, and the probability of his success in wringing from the people men and money to carry it on, is made evident, rather than doubtful, by the puny opposition arrayed against him. No politician of any considerable distinction or eminence seems willing to hazard his popularity with his party . . . by an open and unqualified disapprobation of the war. None seem willing to take their stand for peace at all risks; and all seem willing that the war should be carried on, in some form or other. ~ Howard Zinn

Here's what I think: the five most
unattractive traits in people are cheapness, clinginess, neediness, unwillingness to change and
jealousy. Jealousy is the worst, and by far the hardest to conceal. ~ Douglas Coupland

Today, women have access to the technological capacity to do anything to our bodies in the struggle for "beauty", but we have yet to evolve a mentality beyond the old rules, to let them imagine that this combat among women is not inevitable. Surgeons can now do anything. We have not yet reached the age in which we can defend ourselves with an unwillingness to have "anything" done. This is a dangerous time. New possibilities for women quickly become new obligations. ~ Naomi Wolf

Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

We live in a world where we can no longer claim ignorance - only an unwillingness to learn. ~ Todd Nesloney

Some people's unwillingness to think for themselves represents accurate self-evaluation. ~ Arthur D. Hlavaty

No anesthetic was necessary for the people who ordered the killings; they had the misleading language of technocratic bureaucracy to distance them from the killings. Thus "mass murder" becomes "the final solution," "world domination" becomes "defending the free world," the War Department becomes the Department of Defense, and "ecocide" becomes "developing natural resources." No one needs to get drunk to do any of this. A good strong ideology and heavy doses of rationalization are all it takes. But it may require little more than a simple unwillingness to step outside the flow of society, to think and act and most importantly experience for ourselves - and to make our own decisions. ~ Derrick Jensen

The Democrats and Republicans need to come together. I've criticized Democrats for their unwillingness to address entitlement reform and Social Security and Medicare. Republicans, on the other hand, never saw a tax that they liked, even when it meant closing tax loopholes. They don't want to in any way support any revenue enhancements. ~ Antonio Villaraigosa

Fasting is the only method of suicide permitted by the Catholic Church. All other ways imply despair, a distrust of God's wisdom, an unwillingness to bear the hardships with which God tests his children. An absolute sin, suicide's punishment is eternal damnation in the fires of Hell. But fasting is undertaken for the purpose of penance, meditation, and spiritual ecstasy. It purifies the spirit by denying the body. It brings a soul closer to God. ~ David Morrell

Shackleton's unwillingness to succumb to the demands of everyday life & his insatiable excitement w/ unrealistic ventures left him open to the accusation of being basically immature & irresponsible. & very possibly he was-by conventional standards. But the great leaders of historical record-the Napoleons, the Nelsons, the Alexanders-have rarely fitted any conventional mold, & it is perhaps an injustice to evaluate them in ordinary terms. There can be little doubt that Shackleton, in this way, was an extraordinary leader of men. ~ Alfred Lansing

The unwillingness of most leaders to set standards, to administer feedback when standards are not met, to praise clearly when standards are met, stands in the way of the development of excellence. The leader who makes no demands of his disciples cannot really lead them at all. The sense of new excitement and new challenge generated by the gospel will be blunted by leaders who shield followers from the full demands of fellowship. ~ Neal A. Maxwell

In a city composed wholly of good men there would be a great unwillingness to rule ~ Plato

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering. ~ Carl Jung

We are nature. Our every tinkering is nature, our every biological striving. We are what we are, and the world is ours. We are its gods. Your only difficulty is your unwillingness to unleash your potential fully upon it. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

I didn't know it then, but my persistence, perseverance, and unwillingness to accept defeat when things looked all but hopeless were part of the very character traits I would need to make it through World War II alive. ~ Louis Zamperini

Common sense was exactly what kingship, almost by definition, lacked: when the king's orders were executed no one dared to tell him honestly how they had turned out. With the absolute powers bestowed by kingship came an arrogance, a ruthlessness, an inflexibility, a habit of compulsion, an unwillingness to listen to reason, that no small community would have endured from any of its members-though the aggressive and humanly disagreeable qualities that make for such ambitious leadership might be found anywhere-as Margaret Mead discovered among the Mundugumor, whose leaders were known to the community as "really bad men," aggressive, gluttonous for power and prestige. ~ Lewis Mumford

The unwillingness to accept anything short of victory, that underlying fury, is the fundamental building block of my bottomless motivation to succeed. It is my credo in all that I do in life from battling cancer to bicycle racing. ~ Lance Armstrong

A meeting is a collective tacit confession of participants' unwillingness to work. ~ Pawan Mishra

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history. ~ Winston S. Churchill

This inclination to ignore problems is once again a simple manifestation of an unwillingness to delay gratification. Confronting problems is, as I have said, painful. To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful. It is choosing to suffer now in the hope of future gratification rather than choosing to continue present gratification in the hope that future suffering will not be necessary. ~ M. Scott Peck

Civilization means, above all, an unwillingness to inflict unnecessary pain ... those of us who heedlessly accept the commands of authority cannot yet claim to be civilized men. ~ Harold Laski

I feel some unwillingness to quit the remembrance of the past. With all the hope of the new I feel that we are leaving the old. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

While one should never underestimate the ability of risk-besotted financiers to wreak havoc, the real threat to capitalism isn't unfettered financial cunning. It is, instead, the unwillingness of executives to confront the changing expectations of their stakeholders. ~ Gary Hamel

The biggest difference between a writer and a would-be writer is their attitude toward rewriting ... Unwillingness to revise usually signals an amateur. ~ Sol Stein

There is no such thing as failure for an artist, unless failure is the refusal to attempt, the unwillingness to dream. ~ Laurence Overmire

If there is something I will always carry in my heart it is this earnest unwillingness to be part of the bunch, ~ Eileen Myles

An important distinction needs to be made in politics between allowing your values to guide you and keeping religion and government separate. Liberals are rightly concerned about government-established and government-supported religion, especially in our religiously polyglot society. But their unwillingness to engage on policy at the level of transcendent and timeless values, for fear of something too moralistic or religious, yields too much ground to the radical political right, which has come to claim Christianity in particular to advance a deeply non-Christian agenda. Theirs is a faith based on intolerance, a faith without compassion. Hating homosexuals and despising immigrants instead of hating poverty and despising homelessness seems to miss the point of a life of faithfulness. ~ Deval Patrick

Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting. It is a sign of our unwillingness to move on, to flow with life ~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

The chief enemy of peace is the spirit of unreason itself: an inability to conceive alternatives, an unwillingness to reconsider old prejudices, to part with ideological obsessions, to entertain new ideas or to improve new plans. ~ Lewis Mumford

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth - or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives - they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don't believe that they deserve any better - so they don't go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don't want the trouble of better. Freud called this a "repetition compulsion." He thought of it as an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past - sometimes, perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes, perhaps, because no alternatives beckon. People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It's partly fate. It's partly inability. It's partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn? ~ Jordan B. Peterson

I think that we live in a very timid age, and a part of our timidity arises from our unwillingness to offend people. And as a result there are whole tribes of people now who define themselves by their offendedness. I mean, who are you if you are not offended by anything? You're kind of nobody or even worse, you are a liberal. And I just think that whole business defining yourself by anger is very problematic. And then the fact that we all kind of bend over backwards not to induce that anger becomes very often also a problem and a kind of cowardice, if you like. And I think we just need to live in a more robust society in which people say things that other people don't like and the answer to that is not to throw a bomb at them, but to say "I don't like that much" and then get on with the next business. ~ Salman Rushdie

A peculiar side of credulity is that it is often joined with a proneness to imposture. The association of believing and lying is not characteristic solely of children. They inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promotes both gullibility and charlatanism. ~ Eric Hoffer