There was the situation in Nicaragua where the Sandinistas had taken over a couple of years earlier. There was a civil war going on in El Salvador and there was a similar situation in Guatemala. So Honduras was in a rather precarious geographic position indeed.
— John Negroponte
Helpful Precarious quotations
Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves.
For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.
A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life.
We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.
Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.
The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain - until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.
Civil liberty is only natural liberty, modified and secured by the sanctions of civil society. It is not a thing, in its own nature, precarious and dependent on human will and caprice; but it is conformable to the constitution of man, as well as necessary to the well-being of society.
... freedom is a conquest, always partial, always precarious, always challenged. ... the freest person is the one with the most hope.
Cricket is a most precarious profession;
it is called a team game but, in fact, no one is so lonely as a batsman facing a bowler supported by ten fieldsmen and observed by two umpires to ensure that his error does not go unpunished.
Existence is no more than the precarious attainment of relevance in an intensely mobile flux of past, present, and future.
The conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living.
Thought is not a gift to man but a laborious, precarious and volatile acquisition.
For peace is not simply the absence of warfare, based on a precarious balance of power; it is fashioned by efforts directed day after day toward the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men.
It was while teaching philosophy that I saw how easily one can say .
.. what one wants to say. ... In fact, I became particularly aware if the dangers of speculation ... It's so much easier than digging out the facts. You sit in your office and build a system. But with my training in biology, I felt this kind of undertaking precarious.
The reticent volcano keeps His never slumbering plan - Confided are his projects pink To no precarious man.
Life balances itself on a precarious ledge, we can stay safe up high or propel off the edge.
Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.
Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.
Ownership is not a general feature of our society, determining its character.
On the contrary, dependence on a precarious wage at the will of others is the general feature of our society.
The life of a professional golfer is precarious at best.
Win, and they carry you to the clubhouse on their shoulders. Lose, and you pay the caddies in the dark.
Freely the subject makes himself what he is, never in this life is the making finished, always it is in process, always it is a precarious achievement that can slip and fall and shatter.
If you have given up your militia, and Congress shall refuse to arm them, you have lost every thing. Your existence will be precarious, because you depend on others, whose interests are not affected by your infelicity.
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions.
Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.
Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.
Commerce flourishes by circumstances, precarious, transitory, contingent, almost as the winds and waves that bring it to our shores.
Every relationship is just so tenuous and precarious.
The thin and precarious crust of decency is all that separates any civilization, however impressive, from the hell of anarchy or systematic tyranny which lie in wait beneath the surface .
Overcome your guilt. Care, but not too much. Take responsibility, but don't blame yourself. Protect, save, help- but know when to give up. They're precarious ledges to walk. How do I do it?
I only regret that everybody wants to deprive me of the journal, which is the only steadfast friend I have, the only one which makes my life bearable, because my happiness with human beings is so precarious, my confiding moods rare, and the least sign of non-interest is enough to silence me. In the journal I am at ease.
Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other
In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
Necessary, since every moment in our lives is marked by death, like a shadow from another realm, it appear to us like a vanishing point for everything. How can one meditate on live without meditating too on its brevity, its precariousness, its fragility?
Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.
And how can poetry stand up against its new conditions? Its position is perfectly precarious.