all-or-nothing

adjective

not allowing for qualification or compromise; either fully or not at all operative: an all-or-nothing approach.

Origin:
1755–65

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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WordNet

all-or-nothing
adjective
occurring completely or not occurring at all [syn: all-or-none]

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.
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00:10

All-or-nothing is always a great word to know.

So is zedonk. Does it mean:

the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

a calculus or concretion found in the stomach or intestines of certain animals, esp. ruminants, formerly reputed to be an effective remedy for poison.

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Example sentences

Among living whales, baleen is an all-or-nothing affair.

The traditional, binary, all-or-nothing approach to military missions is based

on bitter experience.

These can provide access to new products, technologies and markets, but without

an all-or-nothing gamble.

So basically your all-or-nothing model of the risk of offending people is wrong.

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Matching Quote

"The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to obtain the truth adequately, while on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed. Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit, in this way it is easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth, and not the particular part we aim at shows the difficulty of it."

-Aristotle

all-or-nothing

all-or-noth·ing