Unlikely Quotes - page 2

Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience. (Erich Fromm)
At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Live Free or Die Hard may work better for an audience that doesn't know much about the series is than it will for Die Hard die hards, who will be wondering who that impersonator is and what he did with the real John McClane. The original Die Hard came out of nowhere to blitz the 1988 summer box office. The fourth installment arrives with a weight of expectations that Atlas would have trouble shouldering and, when the dust settles in September, it's unlikely that Live Free or Die Hard will be one of this year's big success stories. View quote
James Berardinelli
Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable. View quote
Stefan Zweig
Freud pointed out, in his Problem of Lay Analysis, that it is extremely unlikely that a young man who would throw the best years of his life into the cloistered drudgery of getting an M. D. degree, could possibly make a good psychoanalyst; so he preferred to look for young analysts among the writers, the lawyers, the mothers of families, those who had chosen human contact. But in their economic wisdom, the Psychoanalytic Institute of Vienna (and New York) overruled him. View quote
Paul Goodman
My heroes and heroines are often unlikely people who are dragged into situations without meaning to become involved, or people with a past that has never quite left them. They are often isolated, introspective people, often confrontational or anarchic in some way, often damaged or secretly unhappy or incomplete. View quote
Joanne Harris
A scientist is an unlikely character to put at the center of a movie. View quote
Bill Condon
Almost all paleontologists recognize that the discovery of a complete transition is in any case unlikely. View quote
George Gaylord Simpson
Similar to the telescope or the telephone, television enables us to see or hear things we never dreamed of. When you look at the details, a concrete scene between people is really something incredibly unlikely, something subtle that requires extended description. View quote
Alexander Kluge
Yet, upon the whole, the space I traversed is unlikely to become the haunt of civilized man, or will only become so in isolated spots, as a chain of connection to a more fertile country; if such a country exist to the westward. View quote
Charles Sturt
Indeed, in the present climate of mistrust of institutions, many people who yearn for a more meaningful and fulfilling life would regard the church as an unlikely place to go for guidance. (Hugh Mackay)
At one point I intended to write precursor and sequel novels, about the establishment of the Web and its next evolution, but I am very unlikely to now; they would take place in a different universe. View quote
John M. Ford
Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment. View quote
Laurence Housman
I had come to the point when I realized it was unlikely that my film career was going to move beyond a certain level of role. And I was - because I had graphic instances of it - handicapped by the success of Star Trek. A director would say, 'I don't want Jean-Luc Picard in my movie' - and this was compounded by X-Men as well. View quote
Patrick Stewart
We are told that the first part of the process is to select the very smallest seeds from the smallest plants, which is not at all unlikely, but I cannot speak to the fact from my own observation. View quote
Robert Fortune
Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis. View quote
Francis Crick
To return to the question of strategy... The Falkland Islands are unlikely to cause a major explosion. View quote
Edward Heath
Deeply as many people deplored the policy which at a critical moment in European history gave Hitler a free hand in the East to develop his ambitious schemes of domination, strongly opposed as we were to many features of the Soviet system, we had no hesitation in proclaiming that as enemies of our enemies we should do all we could to help the Russian people in their fight... It was not unlikely that Hitler hoped to be able to launch from Moscow a great peace offensive. He would like to proclaim himself the saviour of Europe from Bolshevism... He would deceive no one in the Government. The great mass of the people in this country and in the countries of the British Commonwealth and Empire would not be deceived. We would not make peace with the Nazi gang because such a peace would be no peace. It would be a betrayal of everything for which this country stood. View quote
Clement Attlee
To make a harsh but not entirely unjustified analogy, a government wedded to the ideology of competitiveness is as unlikely to make good economic policy as a government committed to creationism is to make good science policy, even in areas that have no direct relationship to the theory of evolution. View quote
Paul Krugman
Figure skating is an unlikely Olympic event but its good television. It's sort of a combination of gymnastics and ballet. A little sexy too which doesn't hurt. View quote
Andy Rooney
Convictions following the admission into evidence of confessions which are involuntary, i.e., the product of coercion, either physical or psychological, cannot stand. This is so not because such confessions are unlikely to be true but because the methods used to extract them offend an underlying principle in the enforcement of our criminal law: that ours is an accusatorial, and not an inquisitorial, system - a system in which the State must establish guilt by evidence independently and freely secured, and may not, by coercion, prove its charges against an accused out of his own mouth. (Felix Frankfurter)
...'world peace' imposed by a dominant power assisted by a few partners is unlikely... only world peace driven by a recognition of the threat to everyone's survival is the most likely source of salvation... View quote
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Mere talk makes drama and spectacle unlikely - unless the talk becomes heated and excessive. So it becomes excessive. Not every show features the Crossfire-style food-fight, but it is a tendency on all shows. View quote
Michael Crichton
Choose your allies carefully: it's highly unlikely that you'll ever be held morally, legally, or historically accountable for the actions of your enemies. View quote
L. Neil Smith
The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to. View quote
Raymond Chandler