"What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever." (Arthur C Doyle, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", 1893)
"The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential fact of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and only thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world-wide States that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write." (Herbert G Wells, "Mankind in the Making", 1903)
"We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be appreciated by the statistician or the poet." (Edward M Forster, "Howards End", 1910)
"Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance." (John Updike, "Seven Stanzas at Easter", 1960)
"Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development." (Lewis Mumford, "The Conduct Of Life", 1951)
"The peace of being, of unthinking. The peace that comes from a universe ordered in a manner that men could never order it." (Thomas N Scortia, "The Armageddon Tapes - Tape 1", 1974)
"Unacceptable, maybe. But not unthinkable. Nothing's unthinkable once somebody's thought it." (Robert Silverberg, "Born with the Dead", 1974)
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. [...] A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data." (William Gibson, "Neuromancer", 1984)
"He’d used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline." (William Gibson, "Count Zero", 1986)
"Let us leave this festering hellhole. Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all." (Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency", 1987)
"That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off [...] and still have no good idea why you were really fighting." (Iain Banks, "Consider Phlebas", 1987)
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