Imperative Quotes

1. "Sound Bible exposition is an imperative must in the Church of the Living God."
Author: A.W. Tozer

2. "Introverted seekers need introverted evangelists. It's not that extroverts can't communicate the gospel, either verbally or nonverbally, in ways that introverts find appealing, it's that introverted seekers need to know and see that it's possible to lead the Christian life as themselves. It's imperative for them to understand that becoming a Christian is not tantamount with becoming an extrovert."
Author: Adam S. McHugh

3. "As an old creative industry full of cruelty and moral sense, British journalism once flourished on the imperative that people required the truth in order to survive. But people don't require that now. They want sensation and they want it for nothing."
Author: Andrew O'Hagan

4. "The imperative is to define what is right and do it."
Author: Barbara Jordan

5. "Because mankind can circumvent evolutionary law, it is incumbent upon him, say evolutionary biologists to develop another law to abide by if he wishes to survive, to not outstrip his food base. He must learn restraint. He must derive some other, wiser way of behaving toward the land. He must be more attentive to the biological imperatives of the system of sun-driven protoplasm upon which he, too, is still dependent. Not because he must, because he lacks inventiveness, but because herein is the accomplishment of the wisdom that for centuries he has aspired to. Having taken on his own destiny, he must now think with critical intelligence about where to defer."
Author: Barry López

6. "The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech."
Author: Bell Hooks

7. "It is imperative for the health and safety of millions of workers that we ensure that breathing systems needed for protection are widely available, convenient and economical."
Author: Bill Shuster

8. "Calvin: I used to hate writing assignments, but now I enjoy them. I realized that the purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog! Want to see my book report? Hobbes: (Reading Calvin's paper) "The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender modes." Calvin: Academia, here I come!"
Author: Bill Watterson

9. "While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend."
Author: C.S. Lewis

10. "After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us."
Author: Carson McCullers

11. "If nothing is to be done in the given situation, he must invent plausible reasons for doing nothing; and if something must be done, he must suggest the something. The unpardonable sin is to propose nothing, when action is imperative."
Author: Charles Edward Merriam

12. "If I didn't know better, I'd think I suffer from some sort of Tourette's-autism hybrid, but Dr. Pat insists I can control the impulse to say whatever pops into my head. That it's, like, a defensive mechanism, not a biological imperative. Therapists think everything is a defense mechanism. Just my thinking that in my head, right now, is a defense mechanism."
Author: Corey Ann Haydu

13. "But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes."
Author: Daniel Dennett

14. "And I think we need a combination of a freeze, potentially, and also we need to sit down with the - with the banking industry and talk to them about ways in which we can help them be able to work those mortgages out, because it's absolutely imperative that we keep people in their homes."
Author: Debbie Wasserman Schultz

15. "Family comes first" is indeed a powerful principle, but so is the imperative for your own development. It is not a self-explanatory or self-applying principle, and it can collide with other principles."
Author: Edward Rocklin

16. "The sinful heart is never transformed by conformity to the imperatives but only by relationship with the One who cleanses hearts."
Author: Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

17. "President Obama dropped the term 'war on terror', and rightly so. Terrorism is not an enemy but a type of warfare that may or may not be adopted by an enemy. Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, an attack that relied on aircraft carriers, President Roosevelt had declared a global war on naval aviation. By focusing on terrorism instead of al Qaeda or radical Islam, Bush elevated a specific kind of assault to a position that shaped American global strategy, which left the United States strategically off-balance.Obama may have clarified the nomenclature, but he left in place a significant portion of the imbalance, which is an obsession with the threat of terrorist attacks. As we consider presidential options in the coming decade, it appears imperative that we clear up just how much of a threat terrorism actually presents and what that threat means for U.S. policy."
Author: George Friedman

18. "We must make it an imperative duty of our government to protect the gifts which Nature has bestowed on America and to insure the maintenance of a clean, healthy, wholesome environment for our people."
Author: George Lincoln Rockwell

19. "And as for the Ellison Fellow's feelings towards Katherine Potter--to be honest, they involve a good deal of confusion. He reacts before Katherine Potter, in fact, as he has reacted before all new, strange (attractive) women who happen, since a certain event, to have crossed his path. He does not know how to deal with them. He is filled with dismay, a giddy sense of arbitrariness, an apprehension that the universe holds nothing sacred; all of which is only to be stilled by the imperative of loyal resistance.He is not immune to the prickle of passing lust. But he deals defensively with it. He reacts either with disdainful dismissal (Not your type, definitely not your type) or with a rampant if covert seizure of lecherousness (Christ, what tits! What legs! What an arse!), which serves the same forestalling function by reducing its object to meat and its subject (he is past fifty, after all) to a pother of shame."
Author: Graham Swift

20. "The exact same text was slightly different to read when viewed on the printed pages rather than on the word processor's screen. The feel of the words he chose would change depending on whether he was writing them on paper in pencil or typing them on the keyboard. It was imperative to do both."
Author: Haruki Murakami

21. "There is utopia and utopia. The kind imposed by an elite in the name of a historical imperative—that utopia is hell. It must lead to terror and then, terror exhausted, to cynicism and torpor. But surely there is another utopia. It cannot be willed either into existence or out of sight, it speaks for our sense of what may yet be."
Author: Irving Howe

22. "Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first."
Author: Jim Thompson

23. "As our country increasingly relies on electronic information storage and communication, it is imperative that our Government amend our information security laws accordingly."
Author: Jo Ann Davis

24. "My imperative is to seek every moment and to live so God is in control."
Author: Joel Salatin

25. "The UN Commission on Human Rights, whose membership in recent years has included countries - such as Libya and Sudan - which have deplorable human rights records, and the recent Oil-for-Food scandal, are just a few examples of why reform is so imperative."
Author: John Linder

26. "Oh mother earthpregnant with seed and budand full-blown roseyour rich dark loamy soil a womb for what we forget predates us in His line of creationyour heart, like hers, does not wait for symbol sun, or child's voice to radiate a love that warms and holds and heals... you do not say "only when I feel the heat of orb or hand, or cradled head" will I rise andnurture,bring forth anddelightyou carry withinyou thetrue light, thelight of Loveso certainin the sure glow ofwhat isthe unshakable Truth that all is Hisand you are butthe incubus of Her Self-expression, a divine imperative to Beand so you rest beneath a blanket of snow,never ceasing to hold bud and blossom in the soft embrace of your ever-conscious vision transfixed onwholeness, perfection,beauty, potential, worthjust as he never forgot that in the summer of hisgrowingthere was also the autumn of his glory,and the springtide of his rising...for us"
Author: Kate Mullane Robertson

27. "Since September 11, 2001, the powerful coalition of nations, led by the United States, has seen many successes against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. It is imperative that we remain united and steadfast in the quest to defeat terrorism around the world."
Author: Kenny Marchant

28. "The fight against terror is a common imperative for democracies and must become so for all nations."
Author: Lionel Jospin

29. "The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous."
Author: Margot Fonteyn

30. "We come to the New Testament, where again a host of imperative verbs is mustered in support of that miserable bondage of free-choice, and the aid of carnal Reason with her inferences and similes is called in, just as in a picture or a dream you might see the King of the flies with his lances of straw and shields of hay arrayed against a real and regular army of seasoned human troops. That is how the human dreams of Diatribe go to war with the battalions of divine words."
Author: Martin Luther

31. "In a world facing the revolt of ragged and hungry masses of God's children; in a world torn between the tensions of East and West, white and colored, individuals and collectivists; in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an imperative for action"
Author: Martin Luther King Jr.

32. "Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of "credit", shot through with bad faith, [the mortgage broker's] work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the general rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life."
Author: Matthew B. Crawford

33. "I have no argument with those who see in organized religion a template or an imperative to live life according to a prescribed set of beliefs. Just give others the room, within the laws of civil society, to believe or not believe whatever they like."
Author: Michael J. Fox

34. "As soon as a woman's primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women."
Author: Naomi Wolf

35. "When someone says "I Love You," it is imperative that you know if you are loved for "WHAT you are" or "WHO you are." When the academic qualifications, professionals, positions, possessions, good look, fat bank accounts and all that has been acquired over the years are taken away, all that is left is "Who you are" - Your Personality (character, values, perceptions.)"We are never truly loved, until we are loved for WHO and not WHAT we are"
Author: Olaotan Fawehinmi

36. "Bertie, it is imperative that you marry.""But, dash it all...""Yes! You should be breeding children to...""No, really, I say, please!" I said, blushing richly. Aunt Agatha belongs to two or three of these women's clubs, and she keeps forgetting she isn't in the smoking-room."
Author: P.G. Wodehouse

37. "The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest."
Author: Peter Watts

38. "Be that as it may, we were--and no doubt, still are--held under scrutiny, with that whole Phoenix Society brouhaha. It is imperative we remain on our best behaviour, a feat that you did not exactly manage effortlessly with your shenanigans in Edinburgh."
Author: Philippa Ballantine

39. "For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water conservationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. If the Chicano intellectuals which to re-cut my "Wonderful Ice Cream Suit" so it shapes "Zoot," may the belt unravel and the pants fall."
Author: Ray Bradbury

40. "[Wild animals], and the beautiful landscapes that sustain them...possess a value and a virtue regardless of our dwindling connection with them. It seems that there is a virtue and a wisdom in keeping some things beyond our reach: that the protection of wilderness itself is imperative... We have touched, and are consuming, everything. The world is very old, and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe--what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe'--in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does."
Author: Rick Bass

41. "I think a novelist must be more tender with living or 'real' people. The moral imperative of having been entrusted with their story looms before you every day, in every sentence."
Author: Rick Bass

42. "But all the while, there was one thing we most needed even from the start, and certainly will need from here on out into the New Jerusalem: the ability to take our freedom seriously and act on it, to live not in fear of mistakes but in the knowledge that no mistake can hold a candle to the love that draws us home. My repentance, accordingly, is not so much for my failings but for the two-bit attitude toward them by which I made them more sovereign than grace. Grace - the imperative to hear the music, not just listen for errors - makes all infirmities occasions of glory."
Author: Robert Farrar Capon

43. "Angry contradiction of the patriarch is not creativity; it's delinquency calling for attention. Difference for the sake of difference is as empty an achievement as slavishly following the commercial imperative."
Author: Robert McKee

44. "If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

45. "High bankruptcy rates, increased credit card debt, and identity theft make it imperative that all of us take an active role in providing financial and economic education during all stages of one's life."
Author: Ruben Hinojosa

46. "On war and conquest: in the realm of human affairs one also needs a pretext. it is important to give it the rank of a universal imperative or of a divine commandment. The range of choices is not great; either it is that we must defend ourselves, or that we have an obligation to help others, or that we are fulfilling heaven's will. the optimal pretext would link all three of the motives."
Author: Ryszard Kapuściński

47. "What? It's not my fault I stab all the fanged people. They shouldn't look like Daimons. (Tabitha)I didn't look like a Daimon, but you stabbed me. (Valerius)Yeah, well, you looked like a lawyer so I had to kill you. It was a moral imperative. (Tabitha)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

48. "Caleb leaned forward in his seat. "So who's the meanest person you've ever arrested?""What are you doing?" Nick gasped.Caleb cracked an evil grin. "You have things you can't resist doing. This is one that is a moral imperative to me." *Must rankle bullies.**You're going to get jack-slapped.*"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

49. "He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations."
Author: Tim O'Brien

50. "Believe truth! Shun error!-these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance."
Author: William James

Imperative Quotes Pictures