Imperative can mean:
- Imperative mood, a grammatical mood expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions (syntax)
- A morphological item expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions (morphology)
- Imperative programming, a programming paradigm in computer science
- Moral imperative, a philosophical concept relating to obligation
- Imperative logic
Famous quotes containing the word imperative:
“Because humans are not alone in exhibiting such behavior—bees stockpile royal jelly, birds feather their nests, mice shred paper—it’s possible that a pregnant woman who scrubs her house from floor to ceiling [just before her baby is born] is responding to a biological imperative . . . . Of course there are those who believe that . . . the burst of energy that propels a pregnant woman to clean her house is a perfectly natural response to their mother’s impending visit.”
—Mary Arrigo (20th century)
“The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)