Unsettling Quotes - page 3

Most things that we and the people around us do constantly... have come to seem so natural and inevitable that merely to pose the question, 'Why are we doing this?' can strike us as perplexing – and also, perhaps, a little unsettling. On general principle, it is a good idea to challenge ourselves in this way about anything we have come to take for granted; the more habitual, the more valuable this line of inquiry. (Alfie Kohn)
Not egoists but strangers, sometimes benevolent, make for citizens of the deontological republic; justice finds its occasion because we cannot know each other, or our ends, well enough to govern by the common good alone. This condition is not likely to fade altogether, and so long as it does not, justice will be necessary. But neither is it guaranteed always to predominate, and in so far as it does not, community will be possible, and an unsettling presence for justice. View quote
Michael J. Sandel
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'. View quote
Michael J. Sandel
The worst crime of all would be that a mistake happens and no one talks about it or learns from it. So, as unsettling as it is to think about, these mistakes, complications and unexpected outcomes get discussed openly, and everyone hopefully gains something from it. View quote
Sanjay Gupta
It was so easy to disown what you couldn't recognize, to keep yourself apart from things that were foreign and unsettling. View quote
Sarah Dessen
If we continue to pardon or excuse the wrongdoers who commit acts of criminality in unsettling an elected government, we don't have any guarantee, do we, that this kind of exercise won't be repeated in the future. View quote
Graeme Leung
By suns unsettling kist. Out through the utmost gates of space, Past where the gray stars drift, To the widening Infinite, my soul Glides on, a vessel swift, Yet loses not her anchorage In yonder azure rift. View quote
Lucy Larcom
Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. . . . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all. View quote
Mark Kingwell
[Medical] science was indeed powerful, but its self-understanding left much to be desired. It knew the human parts in ever-finer detail, but it concerned itself little with the human whole. ... The art of healing does not inquire into what health is, or how to get and keep it: The word "health" does not occur in the index of the leading textbooks of medicine. To judge from the way we measure medical progress, largely in terms of mortality ­statistics and defeats of deadly diseases, one gets the unsettling impression that the tacit goal of medicine is not health but rather bodily immortality, with every death today regarded as a tragedy that future medical research will prevent. View quote
Leon Kass
There can be no too many investigations into the Mamasapano carnage if the end goal is to learn the truth. The entire nation is digging for answers in the dark. Only those with reason to fear justice and truth, will find facing the investigations and having the probes unsettling. Any probe panel which is there to do the intended job is always welcome. We must find balance in seeking for justice and learning the truth. We are all players and partners in building and strengthening the peace and in upholding justice. View quote
Francis Escudero
Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting-board logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. We are the was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved...There is grandeur in this view of life. Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept. (Robert Charles Wilson)
The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. (Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.) View quote
China Miéville