A Quote by Margaret Atwood

Oppression involves a failure of the imagination: the failure to imagine the full humanity of other human beings.

Margaret Atwood

Quote Topics

Beings Failure Full Human Human Being Human Beings Humanity Imagination Imagine Involves Oppression Other

Quote Author

Margaret Atwood
Canadian - Novelist
Born: November 18, 1939

The failure of modern living is the failure of the imagination...Literature is the royal road that enables us to enter the realm of the imagination.

Julius Lester

Failure is built into creativity... the creative act involves this element of 'newness' and 'experimentalism,' then one must expect and accept the possibility of failure.

Saul Bass

Novels are routinely denigrated when characters are not found to be likable. Is Raskolnikov likable? Is King Lear? The plethora of such naive readers testifies to a failure of imagination - the capacity to see into unfamiliar lives, motives, feelings - and this failure must, at least in part, be the failure of the teaching of literature in the schools.

Cynthia Ozick

Failure is ultimately very liberating. Once you come out the other side of it, you just might have faced one of your biggest fears and lived. The other side of failure is a big elimination of fear of failure. Trust me, that is an amazing gift.

Julie Wainwright

It's a failure of imagination if you can only write what you know - we have to be able to imagine different worlds.

Dee Rees

What a shame to be so afraid of failure that you stop living. My wife has a great one-liner about failure: "Never consider yourself a failure-you can always serve as a bad example." She is right. Failure can be a better teacher than success.

Bernie Siegel

The most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility.

Bill Moyers

Cultivate your desire for success to be greater than the fear of failure; Failure is merely a pitstop between where you stand and success. Failure allows you to learn the fastest; Failure inspires winners and defeats losers.

Fran Tarkenton

You may be saying: 'I have failed in life and shall always be a failure.' That is because you are ever looking back, living in your failure and thereby bringing to you more failure. Reverse this attitude of mind; work it the other way and live in future success.

Prentice Mulford

Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.

Vaclav Havel

The Great Depression was not a sign of the failure of monetary policy or a result of the failure of the market system as was widely interpreted. It was instead a consequence of a very serious government failure, in particular a failure in the monetary authorities to do what they'd initially been set up to do.

Milton Friedman

Jesus' power is the power of human wholeness that ultimately opens, invites and enables human beings to step beyond defense lines where incomplete humanity always hides in order to experience full humanity.

John Shelby Spong

War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

Adrienne Rich

Failure's relative. I've always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something's not right about that. It's how you treat failure, too. There's something to learn from it. I've had movies that have failed colossally, so you kind of analyze your failures: What kind of failure was it? A failure because it's misunderstood by others? A failure because you misunderstood it yourself?

Al Pacino

I was deeply interested in conveying what is a deeply felt conviction of my own. This is simply to suggest that human beings must involve themselves in the anguish of other human beings. This, I submit to you, is not a political thesis at all. It is simply an expression of what I would hope might be ultimately a simple humanity for humanity's sake.