Example sentences of "we can [not/n't] [verb] to [be] " in BNC.
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| 1 | None of these difficulties are likely to trouble us much in daily life , but they remain genuine difficulties none the less and raise issues of fundamental importance ; for if there can be no absolutely reliable and unequivocal criteria for deciding whether any given existent remains numerically , and not merely qualitatively , the same from one moment in time to the next , then we can not hope to be able to " define " the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity in terms of the criteria of particular-identification . |
| 2 | but we can not demand to be desired , for desire operates in complex , often unconscious ways . |
| 3 | By the textuality of history , I mean to suggest , firstly , that we can have no access to a full and authentic past , a lived material existence , unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question — traces whose survival we can not assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes of preservation and effacement ; and secondly , that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the ‘ documents ’ upon which historians ground their own texts , called histories . |
| 4 | As a PLC we would have the greater freedom and flexibility vitally needed to match the increasing pace of change and to provide new or different services — and we can not afford to be too slow or too late . |
| 5 | But we can not afford to be so self-indulgent and dismissive . |
| 6 | The argument for feminist education , free from male control , is not as a remedial exercise , it is because we have important work to do together , from which we can not afford to be distracted by the interference and destruction we know happens when men remain in control . |
| 7 | We can not afford to be complacent , but I do not believe complacency is in the vocabulary of any one of you . |
| 8 | Economically , we can not afford to be excluded from a group that includes most of our main trading partners , including our biggest partner of all , the Federal Republic of Germany . |
| 9 | They know perfectly well that we can not afford to be left out . |
| 10 | Contractors will reluctantly say , ’ No , we simply can not do your work because we can not afford to be out of the money for that period . ’ |