Perilous Quotes

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

It is often more important to act than to understand… there are times… when two conflicting opinions, though one happens to be right, are more perilous than one opinion which is wrong.

Donald Trump, in my judgment, would make a perilous world even more dangerous. I worry that his tendency to lash out and his ill-informed comments would cause dangerous events to escalate and possibly spin out of control at a time when our world is beset with conflicts.

The United States, to state the obvious, is greatly concerned by the startling number of unaccompanied minors that – children and teenagers who are making a very perilous journey through Central America to reach the United States.

The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny, and that’s why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright.

Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.

Bilingualism is a great asset for any individual, but it has perilous consequences for a nation.

Luxury! more perilous to youth than storms or quicksand, poverty or chains.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

I was born in Budapest, Hungary, and moved to the United States in 1956. It was during the Hungarian Revolution when Russian tanks rolled into Budapest, and my family – me, my brother, and my parents – escaped over the border to Austria. We just took whatever we could carry. It was perilous, but we made it across.

One of my uncles was actually a sapper who cleared land mines for Anzacs, Australian soldiers, and we had to flee Vietnam. There were 40 of us on a 9-meter fishing boat. We were at sea for five days, a very perilous journey. We were attacked by pirates twice.

We have not given science too big a place in our education, but we have made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a preponderance in method in every other branch of study.

During my childhood, Washington was a segregated city, and I lived in the midst of a poor black neighborhood. Life on the streets was often perilous. Indoor reading was my refuge, and twice a week, I made the hazardous bicycle trek to the central library at Seventh and K streets to stock up on supplies.

Conspiracies, since they cannot be engaged in without the fellowship of others, are for that reason most perilous; for as most men are either fools or knaves, we run excessive risk in making such folk our companions.

Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.

People only attempt perilous journeys like crossing the Channel because they are desperate. It is deeply concerning that men, women, and children feel they have no choice but to put their lives at risk in their search for a safe place to live.

We are in perilous territory the stronger Iran gets. And they’re getting stronger. We should make them weaker.

I fear we might be losing the basic human facility to be alone – and with that you throw out independent decision-making, what to trust, what not to trust; key stuff – a perilous loss.

The initial spark, your affection for the characters, all those things can disappear. It’s a perilous thing.

In LA, where I live, it’s all about perfectionism. Beauty is now defined by your bones sticking out of your decolletage. For that to be the standard is really perilous for women.

Deliberately modifying the earth‘s atmosphere would be a desperate gamble with significant risks. Yet the more likely climate change is to cause devastation, the more attractive even the most perilous attempts to mitigate those changes will become.

I know the world is pretty intense, but in my opinion, there’s nothing more perilous than being a teenager and watching a raunchy comedy with your parents.

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Rereading one’s own novels after many years is always a fraught business, but when a novel has fallen out of print – ‘The Very Model of a Man’ is the only novel of mine that has – and so crops up infrequently in conversations with readers or indeed with oneself, revisiting it can be perilous.