Quotes About Precarious

The Sword of Damocles,

Not daring to flee since my general location has just been broadcast to any killer who cares. I mean, I know it's cold out here and not everybody has a sleeping bag.

I almost fall out of the tree.

I was in a place composed of tall spires. There was a sound, not Mozartiana, but a kind of shattering, prophetic, organ-like sound, and I was walking on the vibrating spires upward from one pinnacle to another. It wasn't precarious. My footing was very stable; I was holding on to the air.

Civilization balances always on a keen and precarious point, a showman spinning a fine Spode dinner plate on a long dowel slender as a stem of hay. A puff of breath, a moment's lost attention, and it's all gone, crashed to ruination, shards in the dirt. Then mankind retreats to the caves, leaving little behind but obelisks weathering to nubs like broken teeth, dissolving to beach sand.

To be united by hatred is a fragile alliance at best.

sword of Damocles

The low and precarious economic conditions of the nineteenth-century Irish were reflected in their living conditions—perhaps the worst of any racial or ethnic group in American history.

A hole is nothing at all, but you can break your neck in it.

Living by proxy is always a precarious expedient.

Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.

It was a joint, which put it one slippery step up from a dive.

His big body was nothing but death waiting for a place to happen.

The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.

Nothing mortal is so unstable and subject to change as power which has no foundation.

The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.

Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.

Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.

The constant dangers of sudden electrocution from above or drowning in liquid shit below keep him looking up and down as well as side-to-side.

So when we have no other objective than ourselves, we cannot escape from the feeling our efforts are finally destined to vanish into nothing, since that is where we must return. But we recoil from the idea of annihilation. In such a state, we should not have the strength to live, that is to say to act and struggle, since nothing is to remain of all the trouble that we take. In a word, the state of egoism is in contradiction with human nature and hence too precarious to endure.

the Cold War has been dangerous and costly in its own right. It has bankrupted the USSR and very nearly the United States as well; led to a string of civil wars and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns in Eastern Europe; repeatedly threatened to spark a general nuclear war; and institutionalized a pattern of advanced weapons proliferation that has left most countries and peoples in a far more precarious position than they were when the conflict began.

Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous

Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious.

The end of 'Hollow City' left the peculiar children in a very precarious spot, and that's just where 'Library of Souls' begins.