Impasse Quotes

“Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.”

“Of all the logical impasses, unknowings, paradoxes, and terrors that provoke laughter, death by its finality and unsolvable mystery is paramount.”

“The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?”

“There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.”

“A general is like a writer who wants to write a play, or a book, but whom the book itself, with the unexpected options that it reveals at one point, the impasse it presents at another, causes to deviate extensively from his preconceived plan.”

“We are like a people under [a] sentence of death, waiting for the date to be set. We sense that something is about to happen.We know that things cannot go on as they are. History has reached an impasse. We are now on a collision course. Something is about to give.”

“If there was a spectre haunting France in the 1780's, it was not that of revolution but that of state bankruptcy. The whole social and political structure of France stood in the way of tapping the wealth of the better-off, the only sure way of emerging from the financial impasse.”

“Now we’ve a real intellectual impasse. Our reason, which is supposed to make things more intelligible, seems to be making them less intelligible, and when reason thus defeats its own purpose something has to be changed in the structure of our reason itself.”

“...A legendary leader distinguishes himself as someone who gets ahead of his people from an impasse and futile general consensus, and then finds new grounds that constitute the base from which a unique course of his people’s destiny is charted...”