Inability

The fact that educated Americans in general no longer share understandable background knowledge is a chief cause of their inability to communicate effectively.

I am impatient with his inability to make decisions.

I was surprised at her inability to do things promptly.

Out of all the attributes of the gods, the one I find most pitiable is their inability to commit suicide.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Superstitions derive from the inability of men to acknowledge that coincidences are merely coincidences.

When we hear of a divorce we assume that it was caused by the inability of those two people to agree upon fundamentals.

Spending two hours writing an email that won't even take up one page of a sheet of paper is not something you can write home about. It's more like you're writing about your own inability to write coherently.

Excessive choice results in the inability to choose.

Margaret Mead ascribes to the Balinese she studied an inability to follow complex directions. I ask, "What of her ability to express complex directions in Balinese?"