Quotes about inevitable
page 3

“My will broke at the sound of his voice, and my head turned
with as much inevitability as a sunflower turning its face to
the sun.”

Patricia Briggs book Silver Borne

Source: Silver Borne

Sun

“I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.”

Sherwood Anderson book Winesburg, Ohio

Source: Winesburg, Ohio

Love, Lovers, Understanding

“But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

War, Nature, Parting

“Love is random; fear is inevitable.”

Orson Scott Card book Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

Source: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (1996)

Love, Fear

“Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.”

Jim Butcher book Death Masks

Source: Death Masks

Death, Hope, Future, Despair

“No marriage stays in the same pattern forever. It is both the best feature of marriage and the worst, that it inevitably changes.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Love in the Afternoon

Marriage, Change

“Fate is just another word for people's choices coming to a head. Destiny, coincidence, whatever you name it. It inevitably lies in our hands.”

Tiffanie DeBartolo (1970) American writer

Source: How to Kill a Rock Star

Fate, People

“Work joyfully and peacefully, knowing that right thoughts and right efforts inevitably bring about right results.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

Effort

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Address to Latin American diplomats at the White House (13 March 1962) http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=9100&st=&st1= 1962

Peaceful, Peace

“There is absolutely no inevitability, so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

The Medium is the Message (1967), A chapter sub-heading attributed by McLuhan to Alfred North Whitehead

“Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art. XI: "Éloge du maquillage" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%89loge_du_maquillage Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Nature, Effort, Evil

“Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

Source: The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir

Fear

“The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.”

Salman Rushdie book Shalimar the Clown

Source: Shalimar the Clown

Truth, History, Reality

“Persistence guarantees that results are inevitable.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

“With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.”

Clive Barker (1952) author, film director and visual artist

Source: Books of Blood: Volume Two

Pain, Fear

“Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.”

Mo Yan book Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Source: Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996)

Life, Death, Fear

“And don't you let your guard down for a second because you think anything's inevitable.”

Suzanne Collins book Gregor and the Code of Claw

Source: Gregor and the Code of Claw

Thinking

“We spend precious hours fearing the inevitable. It would be wise to use that time adoring our families, cherishing our friends and living our lives.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Fear, Family, Time

“The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Life, Death

“The message of "The Winner Takes It All" is straightforward: It argues that the concept of relationships ending on mutual terms is an emotional fallacy. One person is inevitably okay and the other is inevitably devastated.”

Chuck Klosterman Eating the Dinosaur

Source: Eating the Dinosaur

Personality

“As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

War

“Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.”

Salman Rushdie book Midnight's Children

Source: Midnight's Children

Question, Reality, Past

“Arm yourself, my heart: the thing that you must do is fearful, yet inevitable.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Source: Medea and Other Plays: Medea / Alcestis / The Children of Heracles / Hippolytus

Deep, Fear, Heart

“I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don't remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Source: Life Itself

Life

“All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.”

David Nicholls book Starter for Ten

Source: Starter for Ten

Life, People, Age, Nature

“Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destory?”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Life, Death

“Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.”

James W. Sire (1933–2018) American writer

Truth, Lie

“When purpose is not known, abuse is inevitable”

Myles Munroe (1954–2014) Bahamian Evangelical Christian minister

Source: Understanding the Purpose and Power of Woman

“An annoying thing about depression is that thinking about life is inevitable. Depression makes thinkers out of all of us.”

Matt Haig book Reasons to Stay Alive

Source: Reasons to Stay Alive

Life, Thinking

“I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me.”

Wendy McClure (1971) American writer

Source: I'm Not the New Me

Hate, Truth

“…he remembered being very happy. But things change. People change. Change was one of the inevitable laws of nature, exacting its toll on people's lives. Mistakes were made, regrets form, and all the was left were repercussions that made something as simple as rising from the bed seem almost laborious.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Travis Parker, Proloque, p. 3
2000s, The Choice (2007)

People, Law, Nature, Change

“There are girls who do not like real life… Some of these girls are innocent enough to think that these unreal friendships [with homosexuals] will lead to true love — a kind of sexual intercourse that will happen to them without their having to take too horribly much notice. Even those who are sufficiently sophisticated to know that this will not be so persist in these relationships. They provide an opportunity to lavish emotion on a pseudo-man without paying the price that in heterosexual circumstances would be inevitable.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 19

Love, Life, Friendship, Girl

“This is the great day. This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. That is — today is New Year's Day of the Year One. If we don't change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race — this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from the change of our infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we're going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars; we're going to spread. I don't know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have — I'm an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it's utterly inevitable: we're going to spread through the entire universe.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

In a live interview with Walter Cronkite of CBS News, on the day of the first moonwalk (20 July 1969)
Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, Volume I (1907–1949): Learning Curve (2010)

Hope, History, Star, Universe

“Life from nonlife, like wine from water, has long been considered a miracle wrought by gods or God. Now it is seen to be the near-inevitable consequence of our thermal and chemical circumstances.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 28

Life, God, Water, Wine

“Will saw the cruelty now as the fierce inevitability of nature. It was not from malice that the Light and the servants of the Light would ever hound the Dark, but from the nature of things.”

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), The Dark Is Rising (1973), Chapter 12 “The Hunt Rides” (pp. 224-225)

Nature, Light

“As a full-time longshoreman I am necessarily more a scribbler than a writer. But I am also so by inclination. The writing I can enjoy is the sketching of an idea in a few dozen words — two hundred at most. Elaboration and expansion are for me hard going. An article of several thousand words becomes inevitably a mosaic of ideas — a series of ideas stuck together.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1962)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Idea, Time

“We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as he wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages, when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty, when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now"”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled.
2000s, 2005, Second Inaugural Address (January 2005)

Hunger, God, Age, Peace

“Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declared Thomas Hobbes. Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man"—"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful English leviathan King and Mortal God, whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen.”

Marvin Harris (1927–2001) American anthropologist

Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going (1989)

Life, Death, God, War

“As China is the one nation with the size, population, ideology and power to contest the United States for hegemony in Asia, is war inevitable? Answer: No more inevitable than was war between Germany and Great Britain in 1914.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2000s, Where the Right Went Wrong (2004)

War

“Turned the wrong way around, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied in "History", harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.”

Philip Roth book The Plot Against America

Source: The Plot Against America (2004), Chapter 3, "June 1941 – December 1941: Following Christians", pp. 113–114 ISBN 0547345313.

Way, History, Study, Science

“Before the story he refused to even think about it; after the story, it became conceivable to him, and, once he could conceive of it, it soon became inevitable.”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Enchantment (1999)

Thinking

“When we ask ourselves by what means a certain moral level can be maintained in a human or animal society, we find only three such means: the repression of anti-social acts; moral teaching; and the practice of mutual help itself. And as all three have already been put to the test of practice, we can judge them by their effects.
As to the impotence of repression — it is sufficiently demonstrated by the disorder of present society and by the necessity of a revolution that we all desire or feel inevitable. In the domain of economy, coercion has led us to industrial servitude; in the domain of politics — to the State, that is to say, to the destruction of all ties that formerly existed among citizens, and to the nation becoming nothing but an incoherent mass of obedient subjects of a central authority.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)

Feeling, Help, Animals

“The term organization, and the principles that govern it, are inherent in every form of concerted human effort, even where there are no more than two people involved. For example take two men who combine their efforts to lift and move a stone that is too heavy to be moved by one. In the fact of this combination of effort we have the reality of human organization for a given purpose. Likewise in the procedure necessary to this end we find the fundamental principles of organization. To begin with, the two lifters must lift in unison. Without this combination of effort the result would be futile. Here we have co-ordination, the first principle of organization. Likewise one of these two must give the signal "heave ho!" or its equivalent, to the other, thus illustrating the principle of leadership or command. Again the other may have a suggestion to make to the leader in the matter of procedure, which involves the vital staff principle of advice or counsel. And so on. Thus in every form of concerted effort principles of organization are as essential and inevitable as organization itself.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: "The principles of organization", 1937, p. 90

Men, People, Reality, Effort

“The worst thing about all this staining power of the world is the way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. … It is not true. … Social life is lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes of many a pure man or woman who walks through its very midst.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

"Unspotted from the World"

Life, World, Way, Thinking

“People are often reproached because their desires are directed mainly to money and they are fonder of it than of anything else. Yet it is natural and even inevitable for them to love that which, as an untiring Proteus, is ready at any moment to convert itself into the particular object of our fickle desires and manifold needs. Thus every other blessing can satisfy only one desire and one need; for instance, food is good only to the hungry, wine only for the healthy, medicine for the sick, a fur coat for winter, women for youth, and so on. Consequently, all these are only … relatively good. Money alone is the absolutely good thing because it meets not merely one need in concreto, but needs generally in abstracto.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 347
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Love, Women, Money, People

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Thomas Gray (1716–1771) English poet, historian

St. 9 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=elcc (written 1750, publ. 1751)

Beauty, Wealth

“In the summer of 1928, Hitler aged 39, was the Nazi party leader, and he fell in love with Geli Raubal, his 20 year old niece, the daughter of his widowed half-sister, Angela Raubal. He took her everywhere, to meetings and conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to the cafés and theaters in Munich. Gossip about the party leader and his beautiful blond niece was inevitable in Munich and throughout Nazi circles in southern Germany. By 1931, some deep rift whose origins and nature have never been fully ascertained grew between them.”

William L. Shirer book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960)

Love, Age, Beauty, Mountain

“The free creativeness of mind is possible because, […] the world ultimately exists, not of material stuff, but of patterns, of organization, the evolution of which involves no absolute creation of an alien world of material from nothing. The purely structural character of reality thus helps to render possible and intelligible the free creativeness of life and mind, … The energy which is being dissipated by the decay of physical structure is being partly taken up and organized into life structures … Life and mind thus appear as products of the cosmic decline, … Our origin is thus accidental, our position is exceptional and our fate is sealed, with the inevitable running down of the solar system. Life and mind, […] are thus reduced to a very casual and inferior status in the cosmic order […] – a transient and embarrassed phantom in an alien, if not hostile universe. […] The human spirit is not a pathetic, wandering phantom of the universe, […] but meets with spiritual hospitality and response everywhere. Our deepest thoughts and emotions are but responses to stimuli which come to us not from an alien, but from an essentially friendly and kindred universe.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Smuts expounding a confrontation of opposites in his presidential address to the British Association in September 1931, as cited by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 2: The Fields of Force 1919-1950, p. 232-234

Life, Hostility, Fate, World

“What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 32 (p. 327)

Death, Men, God, Reality

“There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Beyond a Boundary (1963)

Pain, Game

“Some scholars have argued strenuously against the idea that the organization is determined by its situation and have instead asserted that managers have free choice and are thereby to be held morally accountable (Bourgeois 1984; Whittington 1989). Contingency theory appears to some critics to be a managerially convenient ideology that justifies as inevitable organizational characteristics that are not really inevitable, because they are not really required for organizational effectiveness, and that injure the interests of employees *Schreyogg, 1980). Thus contingency theory is opposed by free choice.
An intermediate position within this debate is that propounded by Child (1972), which he terms “strategic choice” (though he is talking about choice regarding structure). This takes the contingency theory of organizational structure but shows that some degree of choice can nevertheless enter in at several stages in the process.”

Lex Donaldson (1947) British-Australian organizational sociologist

Source: The contingency theory of organizations, 2001, p. 127.

Idea, Appearance

“In order for a slave--or, for that matter, a slaveholder--to become free, a series of successive perceptions must be realized. First, the person must perceive that the owners (and slaves) are merely human, that is, putting all rhetoric aside, that there exists a dichotomy of privilege and exploitation, and that the privilege is a result of exploitation. … The second realization is, once again, that the owners and slaves are merely human, meaning this time that the exploitation and consequent privilege are not inevitable, but the result of social arrangements and force (as well as a huge dollop of bad luck on the part of those enslaved). … The third realization is yet again that the owners are merely human, by which I now mean they are vulnerable. Wealth does not protect them.”

Derrick Jensen book The Culture of Make Believe

Source: The Culture of Make Believe (2003), p. 63

Bad luck, Time, Success, Parting

“The evolution toward Communism is inevitable.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) eighteenth President of the French Republic

Reported in the National Review (November 1962) as a misattribution created by extreme rightists. See Paul F. Boller, John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (1990), p. 33.
Misattributed

Communication

“If you look at early shamanic texts and cultures, the magical powers that the shaman hopes the gods might give him, flying, turning into animals, invisibility, poetry – as if poetry was a magic power. As if it was the equivalent of turning into a dog or flying. As if. What does this tell us? Maybe there was a time when we could legitimately ask the gods for it as a gift. But we know there aren’t any gods, and that they can’t give those gifts, so the best thing we can do is go to church, listen to the lesson and hope we don’t burn. Have no direct contact with whatever form of god we choose to worship. It’s like the magical or spiritual equivalent of the big flaw in Marxism. Karl Marx, lovely geezer, very humane, a bit middle class but we’ll gloss over that, but his big flaw was that when he said “The reins of society will inevitably rest in the hands of those who control the means of production” didn’t take into account middle management. All the people who get between those with the means of production and the society. That translates onto a spiritual level as the shift from our earliest beliefs, which are all shamanic.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Love, God, People, Dogs

“Mistakes are the inevitable lot of mankind.”

George Jessel (jurist) (1824–1883) British politician

In re Taylor's Estate (1882) 22 Ch.D. 495, 503.

“The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most restricted but most demanding of the necessities of the world, the most inevitable but the simplest of the legislations of nature.
This was a law that excluded all dialectics and all reconciliation, consequently laying the foundations for the smooth unity of knowledge as well as the uncompromising division of tragic existence. It reigns on a world without darkness, which knows neither effusiveness nor the gentle charms of lyricism. All is waking or dreams, truth or error, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

Truth, World, Law, Dreams

“Blackjack does possess a memory (the interdependence of the cards) and a conscience (inferior play will inevitably be penalized) and is not democratic (the mental agility and retentiveness of the player are significant factors).”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Seven, Blackjack, p. 215

Memory

“This influx of Arab money is a natural and inevitable phenomenon because, in the last analysis, Islamism is only another name for Arab imperialism which had, at one stage of its history, pillaged and populated with its own progeny many foreign lands and which even today keeps many non-Arab nations spiritually enslaved.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

Hindu Society under Siege (1981, revised 1992)

Money, History, Nature

“Protocols:
supplementary budget, and all this ends up in accordance with the sum of the total addition, the annual departure from the normal reaches up as much as 50 percent in a year, and so the annual budget is trebled in ten years….
Every kind of loan proves infirmity in the State and a want of understanding of the rights of the State. Loans hang like a sword of Damocles over the heads of rulers, who, instead of taking from their subects by a temporary tax, come begging with outstretched palm of our bankers…the Goy states go on in persisting in putting more on to themselves to that they must inevitably perish, drained by voluntary blood-letting.
Graves: Their interest calculations are the same to support the financial dangers of loans!”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.84

Departure, Understanding, Support

“Tell mother that however dogs and samovars might behave themselves, winter comes after summer, old age after youth, and misfortune follows happiness (or the other way around). A person can not be healthy and cheerful throughout life. Losses lie waiting and man can not safeguard against death, even if he be Alexander of Macedonia. One must be prepared for anything and consider everything to be inevitably essential, as sad as that may be.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to his sister Maria Pavlovna Chekhov (November 13, 1898)
Letters

Life, Death, Lie, Youth

“Francis Fukuyama seized on the ignominious collapse of the Soviet system as proof that “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” was “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” and Marxism’s “death as a living ideology of world historical significance.” That conclusion was, to say the least, premature, not only because it reckoned without the rise of an Islamist theocracy or the fallout from the 2008 worldwide recession, which provoked a renascence of Marxist advocacy in the writings of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Alain Badiou, the Occupy Movement, and Thomas Picketty. This pattern is, again, an echo of what happened in Reconstruction, and it warns those who yet believe that liberal democracy is the most desirable political future to be wary of Whiggish assumptions about democracy’s inevitability. Human society has oscillated between desires for stability, security, and reciprocity—which is what feudalism, Marxism, and theocracy promise—and desires for mobility, liberty, and profit—which is what the Enlightenment offered on a world-historical scale. There is nothing that can be declared permanent in a bourgeois revolution, and our own Reconstruction, not to mention a good deal of recent history, is the unhappy proof.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Defending Reconstruction (2017)

Death, World, Democracy, History

“there is an irrepressible tendency in every man to develop himself according to the magnitude which Nature has made him of; to speak out, to act out, what nature has laid in him. This is proper, fit, inevitable; nay it is a duty, and even the summary of duties for a man. The meaning of life here on earth might be defined as consisting in this: To unfold your self, to work what thing you have the faculty for.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero As King

Life, Nature

“In terms of earthly life as you understand it, it is overly optimistic to imagine that eventually all illnesses will be conquered, all relationships be inevitably fulfilling, or to foresee a future in which all people on earth are treated with equality and respect.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), Chapter 9

Life, People, Imagination, Understanding

“How can anyone be interested in war? — that glorious pursuit of annihilation with its ceremonious bellowings and trumpetings over the mangling of human bones and muscles and organs and eyes, its inconceivable agonies which could have been prevented by a few well-chosen, reasonable words. How, why, did this unnecessary business begin? Why does anyone want to read about it — this redundant human madness which men accept as inevitable?”

Margaret Caroline Anderson (1886–1973) American magazine editor

The Strange Necessity (1969), part 1.

Men, War, Business, Reading

“Perhaps I was too dumb, or just too interested in cricket or in girls, to ask myself any questions about religion. If I had not been, I might have, inevitably, asked myself questions that have troubled skeptics and unbelievers for as long as men and women have been skeptical or have lacked belief. "Is there really no God? And if there really is no supernatural dimension to the universe, why have so many people throughout history and in so many different cultures thought there was?"”

Jonathan Miller (1934–2019) British theatre director (born 1934)

Episode one: "Shadows of Doubt".
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief (2004)

Women, Men, God, People

“As I said, it was inevitable, and I don’t let laws of nature upset me.”

Larry Niven book The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 47 “Homeward Bound” (p. 445)

Law, Nature

“It can not be denied that the present tendency is not in harmony with this spirit. The individual, instead of working out his own salvation and securing his own freedom by establishing his own economic and moral independence by his own industry and his own self-mastery, tends to throw himself on some vague influence which he denominates society and to hold that in some way responsible for the sufficiency of his support and the morality of his actions. The local political units likewise look to the States, the States look to the Nation, and nations are beginning to look to some vague organization, some nebulous concourse of humanity, to pay their bills and tell them what to do. This is not local self-government. It is not American. It is not the method which has made this country what it is. We can not maintain the western standard of civilization on that theory. If it is supported at all, it will have to be supported on the principle of individual responsibility. If that principle be maintained, the result which I believe America wishes to see produced inevitably will follow.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

Way, Support, Freedom, Country

“The way out of the maze of whiteness and blackness that led inevitably, repeatedly, to violent conflict was through the simple recognition of and respect for blacks and whites as not two races but one: the human race.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Whiteness and Race Relations, p. 82)).
Book Sources, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)

Way

“I find it nearly impossible free ice to write about jeep axle my work. The concept I plantatarium struggle to deal with ketchup is opposed to the logical continuity lift tab inherent in language horses and communication. My fascination with images open 24 Hrs. is based on the complex interlocking of disparate visual facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliche. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object Freight-ways by this, I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built-in..”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

Quote from 'Note on Painting', Robert Rauschenberg, in Pop Art Redefined, October/November 1963, J. Rusell and Suzi Gablik, Praeger Publishers, New York, 1969
1960's

Fate, Way, Communication, Chance

“The question rises whether in the middle of all these manifold, exciting labors and Party-assignments I could still find rime for intimate experiences, for the pangs and joys of love. Unfortunately, yes! I say unfortunately because ordinarily these experiences entailed all too many cares, disappointments, and pain, and because all too many energies were pointlessly consumed through them. Yet the longing to be understood by a man down to the deepest, most secret recesses of one's soul, to be recognized by him as a striving human being, repeatedly decided matters. And repeatedly disappointment ensued all too swiftly, since the friend saw in me only the feminine element which he tried to mold into a willing sounding board to his own ego. So repeatedly the moment inevitably arrived in which I had to shake off the chains of community with an aching heart but with a sovereign, uninfluenced will. Then I was again alone. But the greater the demands life made upon me, the more the responsible work waiting to be tackled, the greater grew the longing to be enveloped by love, warmth, understanding. All the easier, consequently, began the old story of disappointment in love, the old story of Titania in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Love, Life, Pain, Secret

“It is easier to bear suffering when one clearly understands all its causes, and distinguishes just how great a part of it is inevitable and how great a part may be avoided or mitigated.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

Don Orsino (1891)

Understanding, Suffering, Parting

“One always feels that a merely educated man holds his philosophical views as if they were so many pennies in his pocket. They are separate from his life. Whereas with a cultured man there is no gap or lacuna between his opinions and his life. Both are dominated by the same organic, inevitable fatality. They are what he is.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 19

Life, Education, Feeling

“Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and choose not to know we're even making a choice. Violent ideologies are structured so that it is not only possible, but inevitable, that we are aware of an unpleasant truth on one level while being oblivious to it on another. Common to all violent ideologies is this phenomenon of knowing without knowing.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

And it is the essence of carnism.
Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), p. 71

Truth, Business, Animals

“Religion, as embodied in the character and conduct of its disciples, cannot survive without doctrinal purity. In the absence of this element, religious feeling inevitably decays; while even religious necessity becomes a thing of naught.”

John McClellan Holmes (1834–1911) US Christian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 194.

Religion, Feeling

“You Westerners simply don't understand the philosophy behind my power. The Iranians think of their sovereign as a father. What you call 'my celebration' was to them the celebration of Iran's father. The monarchy is the cement of our unity. In celebrating our twenty-five hundreth anniversary, all I was doing was celebrating the anniversary of my country, of which I am the father. Now, if to you, a father is inevitably a dictator, that is your problem, not mine.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

As quoted in Gérard de Villiers (1975), The Imperial Shah: An Informal Biography, page 284
Attributed

Understanding, Problem, Thinking, Country

“Faith and its attendant rituals sound like a good deal, the whole eternal salvation thing, but inevitably they lead to fear, oppression, the rack and flames.”

Kage Baker book Mendoza in Hollywood

Prologue (p. 2)
Mendoza in Hollywood (2000)

Fear, Faith

“It is not here necessary to examine in detail the causes which led to the American Revolution. In their immediate occasion they were largely economic. The colonists objected to the navigation laws which interfered with their trade, they denied the power of Parliament to impose taxes which they were obliged to pay, and they therefore resisted the royal governors and the royal forces which were sent to secure obedience to these laws. But the conviction is inescapable that a new civilization had come, a new spirit had arisen on this side of the Atlantic more advanced and more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual than that which characterized the Old World. Life in a new and open country had aspirations which could not be realized in any subordinate position. A separate establishment was ultimately inevitable. It had been decreed by the very laws of human nature. Man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Life, World, Law, Nature

“I have always believed that successes would be the inevitable result if the two services, the army and the navy, had fair play, and if we sent the right man to fill the right place.”

Austen Henry Layard (1817–1894) British politician (1817–1894)

Speech in Parliament (January 15, 1855), reported in Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, Third Series, vol. cxxxviii. p. 2077; this can be contrasted witho Sydney Smith's statement "The officer and the office, the doer and the thing done, seldom fit so exactly that we can say they were almost made for each other" in Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1806).

Success

“The Establishment Clause, unlike the Free Exercise Clause, does not depend upon any showing of direct governmental compulsion and is violated by the enactment of laws which establish an official religion whether those laws operate directly to coerce nonobserving individuals or not. This is not to say, of course, that laws officially prescribing a particular form of religious worship do not involve coercion of such individuals. When the power, prestige and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. But the purposes underlying the Establishment Clause go much further than that. Its first and most immediate purpose rested on the belief that a union of government and religion tends to destroy government and to degrade religion. The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs. That same history showed that many people had lost their respect for any religion that had relied upon the support of government to spread its faith. The Establishment Clause thus stands as an expression of principle on the part of the Founders of our Constitution that religion is too personal, too sacred, too holy, to permit its "unhallowed perversion" by a civil magistrate. Another purpose of the Establishment Clause rested upon an awareness of the historical fact that governmentally established religions and religious persecutions go hand in hand. The Founders knew that only a few years after the Book of Common Prayer became the only accepted form of religious services in the established Church of England, an Act of Uniformity was passed to compel all Englishmen to attend those services and to make it a criminal offense to conduct or attend religious gatherings of any other kind-- a law which was consistently flouted by dissenting religious groups in England and which contributed to widespread persecutions of people like John Bunyan who persisted in holding "unlawful [religious] meetings... to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom...."”

Hugo Black (1886–1971) U.S. Supreme Court justice

And they knew that similar persecutions had received the sanction of law in several of the colonies in this country soon after the establishment of official religions in those colonies. It was in large part to get completely away from this sort of systematic religious persecution that the Founders brought into being our Nation, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights with its prohibition against any governmental establishment of religion.
Writing for the court, Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

People, Books, Faith, Religion

“To err is human. AI software modeled after humans will inevitably make mistakes. It is fine as long as the software learns from its errors and improves itself, which is something that humans ought to learn from AI. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, wrote in "Case of Voluntary Ignorance" in Collected Essays (1959): "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

Men, World, Error, History

“What has begun in this evening will not stay for a long time, and because you represent the forces of the world of labour, you, forces of the youth, your victory is inevitable.”

François Mitterrand (1916–1996) 21st President of the French Republic

Château-Chinon (1974)

Youth, World, Time, Victory

“Each of us inevitable;
Each of us limitless—each of us with his or her right upon the earth.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Salut au Monde, 11
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organization, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence…”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1960s, I am Prepared to Die (1964)

Hostility, War, People, Law

“Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.”

Juan Gris (1887–1927) Spanish painter and sculptor

Response to a questionnaire, from "Chez les cubistes," Bulletin de la Vie Artistique, ed. Félix Fénéon, Guillaume Janneau et al (1925-01-01); trans. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Juan Gris, His Life and Work (1947)

“The purpose of his [the Philistine’s] life is to procure for himself everything that contributes to bodily welfare. He is happy enough when this causes him a lot of trouble. For if those good things are heaped on him in advance, he will inevitably lapse into boredom.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Sich Alles, was zum leiblichen Wohlseyn beiträgt, zu verschaffen, ist der Zweck seines Lebens. Glücklich genug, wenn dieser ihm viel zu schaffen macht! Denn, sind jene Güter ihm schon zum voraus oktroyirt; so fällt er unausbleiblich der Langenweile anheim.
E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 344
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Life, Happiness

“On the longest of timescales, over millions of years, the workings of chance defied human intuition. Humans were equipped with a subjective consciousness of risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifespan of less than a century or so. Event that came much less frequently than that—such as asteroid impacts—were place, in human minds, in the category not of rare, but of never. But the impacts happened even so, and to a creature with a lifespan of, say, ten million years, would not have seemed so improbable at all.
Given enough time even such unlikely events as ocean crossings from Africa to South America would inevitably occur, over and again, and would shape the destiny of life.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 6 “The Crossing” section IV (p. 185)

Life, Chance, Time

“I believe, like you, that civilization is a natural and inevitable consequence, whether good or evil I am not prepared to state.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

From a letter to H. P. Lovecraft (c. August 1930)
Letters

Nature, Evil

“[Engineering] is a great profession. There is the fascination of watching a figment of the imagination emerge through the aid of science to a plan on paper. Then it moves to realization in stone or metal or energy. Then it brings jobs and homes to men. Then it elevates the standards of living and adds to the comforts of life. That is the engineer’s high privilege.

The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope that the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny that he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned. That is the phantasmagoria that haunts his nights and dogs his days. He comes from the job at the end of the day resolved to calculate it again. He wakes in the night in a cold sweat and puts something on paper that looks silly in the morning. All day he shivers at the thought of the bugs which will inevitably appear to jolt its smooth consummation.

On the other hand, unlike the doctor his is not a life among the weak. Unlike the soldier, destruction is not his purpose. Unlike the lawyer, quarrels are not his daily bread. To the engineer falls the job of clothing the bare bones of science with life, comfort, and hope. No doubt as years go by people forget which engineer did it, even if they ever knew. Or some politician puts his name on it. Or they credit it to some promoter who used other people’s money with which to finance it. But the engineer himself looks back at the unending stream of goodness which flows from his successes with satisfactions that few professions may know. And the verdict of his fellow professionals is all the accolades he wants.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

Excerpted from Chapter 11 "The Profession of Engineering"
The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874-1929 (1951)

Life, Men, Money, People

“That statement can not be too much emphasized. The country's growth has compelled the Federal establishment to exceed by far the Government plants of even the greatest States. With this growth in physical extent, in revenue, in personnel, there has inevitably been the suggestion that the Federal Government was overshadowing the States. Yet the State governments deal with far more various and more intimate concerns of the people than does the National Government. All the operations of the minor civil divisions, parishes, wards, school districts, towns, cities, counties, and the like, are dependencies of the State. The maintenance of order through police, the general business of enforcing law, is left to the States. So is education.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

People, Education, School, Law

“I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that inevitably will be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

The small god in Ch. 44 : the visitor
The Visitor (2002)

“In regard to…action in the South Atlantic, we all desire to join in the tribute paid to the gallantry of our sailors. It is one of the almost inevitable conditions of sea warfare that so much of the fighting is done between adversaries of very different strengths, and the way in which our ships, despite their smaller gun-power, tackled and stuck to this very powerful enemy vessel and forced her to take refuge, is worthy of the highest traditions of the British Navy.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1939/dec/14/the-war#S5CV0355P0_19391214_HOC_265 in the House of Commons (14 December 1939) after the Battle of the River Plate where the German cruiser Admiral Graf Spee was forced to harbour by the Royal Navy Leader of the Opposition

Way, Fight, Sea

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life, Children, Books, Youth

“I say thank you in advance to us all working together to achieve great victories, not just electorally for Labour but emotionally for the whole of our society to show we don't have to be unequal, it doesn't have to be unfair, poverty isn't inevitable, things can and they will change. Thank you very much.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/sep/12/jeremy-corbyns-victory-speech-as-labour-leader-video Jeremy Corbyn’s victory speech as Labour leader (11 September 2015). 2000s

Change, Victory

“When I started my public life, twelve years ago, I understood the media might be interested in what I did. I realized then their attention would inevitably focus on both our private and public lives. But I was not aware of how overwhelming that attention would become. Nor the extent to which it would affect both my public duties and my personal life, in a manner, that's been hard to bear. At the end of this year, when I've completed my diary of official engagements, I will be reducing the extent of the public life I've lead so far.”

Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997) First wife of Charles, Prince of Wales

Speech to the Headway lunch (3 December 1993) http://www.settelen.com/diana_time_and_space.htm

Life, Personality

“This, then, is the gain of the Good Fight in this war, first, that the nation has attained a living consciousness of its inevitable unity, second, that it has proved its enormous power, and third, that in the terrible struggle it has used that united power for, and not against, equal rights. And the spirit of caste which it has disabled it will now utterly destroy. For the Good Fight is not a crusade against a section or a State, but against caste everywhere in the country. This is now entrenched in the bitter prejudice against the colored race, which is as inhuman and unmanly as the old hatred and contempt of Christendom for the Jews. Lifting their heads from bloody defeat in the field, the wan and wasted States of the South say in terms caste must be maintained, and by every kind of vagrant law and hostile legislation they will try to maintain it.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

Hostility, War, Law, Color

“Why should we put up with the present evils in our society? As opposed to the society we are visualizing, the present one can be described as a diseased one. The evils are there on all levels, international and national, and even within the smaller units such as towns and families. Of course, the disease did not appear like a bolt from the blue, either yesterday, or last year. It is the result of factors that have deep roots and long lives. These consist of privations, discriminations oppressions, bigotries, hatreds, and hostilities; poverty, ignorance, hunger, and illiteracy. Each and all of these have been left to us as ar evil heritage from the past. The fundamental difference between our situation today and that of our forefathers is that now knowledge has enabled us to realize that these evils are neither natural nor inevitable in the same way as we have found that cholera or the bubonic plague are not necessary calamities.”

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) Shah of Iran

The Shah's Address to Harvard University - Creation of the Universal Welfare Legion - June 13, 1968 http://members.cybertrails.com/~pahlavi/harvard.html Speeches, 1968

Hunger, Hostility, Disease, Family