Irrelevant Quotes - Page 8

• We were to be forever at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally irrelevant.

  Gore Vidal

  War, Stupid, Fighting

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• My home is such a powerfully imaginative place that the space is almost irrelevant. I think the house I live at on the Hudson is where I belong because it's the only place where I am that I never think about when I'm leaving.

  Toni Morrison

  Home, Thinking, Space

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• Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, the greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: "Ports have names they call the sea." Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use -- high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject -- there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

  Richard Rodriguez

  Book, Beer, Names

  Richard Rodriguez (2003). “Brown: The Last Discovery of America”, p.17, Penguin

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• The general point that a political theory is, among other things, a partisan intervention, is well taken. So question about the actual political implication of a theory cannot be excluded as, in principle, irrelevant.

  Raymond Geuss

  Taken, Political, Principles

  "Philosophy and Real Politics". Book by Raymond Geuss, 2008.

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• We define boredom as the pain a person feels when he's doing nothing or something irrelevant, instead of something he wants to do but won't, can't, or doesn't dare. Boredom is acute when he knows the other thing and inhibits his action, e.g., out of politeness, embarrassment, fear of punishment or shame. Boredom is chronic if he has repressed the thought of it and no longer is aware of it. A large part of stupidity is just the chronic boredom, for a person can't learn, or be intelligent about, what he's not interested in, when his repressed thoughts are elsewhere.

  Paul Goodman

  Pain, Blessing, Intelligent

  "Growing Up Absurd" by Paul Goodman, (pp. 71-72), 1956.

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• Either you’re going to tell stories that spread, or you will become irrelevant.

  Seth

  Stories, Spread

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• Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds,
  insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a
  real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who
  lost this game; now it is the planet.

  Ronald Wright

  Running, Real, Past

  Ronald Wright (2010). “A Short History Of Progress”, p.124, Canongate Books

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• My sexual nature is irrelevant. I'm an actor, I play roles, fragments of myself.

  David Bowie

  Play, Roles, Actors

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• Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice-compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food.

  Kingsley Amis

  Filling Up, Ice, Wife

  Kingsley Amis (2010). “Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis”, p.38, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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• The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Animal, Men

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• I know one day I'll be irrelevant. No matter how hard you try there is a cultural moment, but eventually that window's gone, your time on Earth is finished, and you might as well leave. I could absolutely die tomorrow - I would not care. I feel like I've lived, I feel like I've had a great life.

  Tom Ford

  Trying, One Day, Gone

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• Life has to be in the moment, spontaneous and venerable. There isn't any winning or losing. Life itself, as it flowers in depth and subtlety, is the reward, and it isn't always an easy or fun process. We must learn to see that the issue of happiness is irrelevant. The relevant quest is the expansion of consciousness.

  Richard Moss

  Fun, Flower, Winning

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• When we look through the lens of each others' weaknesses, we make others' strengths irrelevant and their weaknesses more evident.

  Stephen Covey

  Weakness, Lenses, Looks

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• Exceptional talent and extraordinary creativity are irrelevant! It's what you do with what little you have that counts big time in the end.

  Ernie J Zelinski

  Creativity, Littles, Talent

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• In other words, science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong.

  Michael Ruse

  Uncles, Saint, Fiction

  "Adam and Eve Didn’t Exist. Get Over It!" by Michael Ruse, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 10, 2011.

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• Although no one said so, intuitively I knew they were my celestial welcoming committee. It was as if they had all gathered just outside heaven's gate, waiting for me. The first person I recognized was Joe Kulbeth, my grandfather. He looked exactly as I remembered him, with his shock of white hair. ...as I stared into his face, an ecstatic bliss overwhelmed me. ... I couldn't get past the joy of our reunion. How either of us reached heaven seemed irrelevant.

  Don Piper

  Past, Hair, White

  Don Piper, Cecil Murphey (2015). “90 Minutes in Heaven: A True Story of Death and Life”, p.27, Baker Books

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• Maybe evolution is irrelevant at dinnertime.

  Jeffrey Steingarten

  Evolution

  Jeffrey Steingarten (2008). “It Must've Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything”, p.84, Vintage

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• It is in fact necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. There is no reason why we shouldn't spend our vacations on (the North Sea island of) Sylt instead of in the Seychelles, or drive more economical cars - for the sake of preserving increasingly scarce resources if nothing else. But that won't enable us to stop climate change. As long as China, India and the United States continue the way they have been, what we Germans do is more or less irrelevant.

  Hans von Storch

  Vacation, Islands, Sea

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The Arab-Israeli conflict is the biggest problem, but small problems shape the daily lives of Israelis. Unless there happens to be a war going on, the Arab-Israeli conflict is irrelevant in daily life.

  Yair Lapid

  War, Small Problems, Arab Israeli Conflict

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.

  Robert Hughes

  Choices, Leader, Library

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• A successful revolution establishes a new community. A missed revolution makes irrelevant the community that persists. And a compromised revolution tends to shatter the community that was, without an adequate substitute.

  Paul Goodman

  Successful, Community, Adequate

  Paul Goodman (2011). “Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized Society”, p.195, New York Review of Books

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• When you get to the point where Baghdad is basically isolated, then what is the situation you have in the country? .. You have a country that Baghdad no longer controls; that whatever's happening inside Baghdad is almost irrelevant compared to what's going on in the rest of the country.

  Richard Myers

  Country, Baghdad, Situation

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• Almost everything about a human creature is ridiculous, except its ability to suffer bravely and die gallantly for whatever it loves and believes in. The validity of that belief, the appropriateness of that love, is irrelevant; it is the bravery and the gallantry that count.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Believe, Love Is, Bravery

  Robert A. Heinlein (1985). “Job, a Comedy of Justice”, Del Rey

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• The bottom line is that if politicians weren't in the business of granting favors and exacting tribute, every single issue surrounding campaign finance reform would be irrelevant. After all, why would anyone spend money for influence, access, favors and tribute if the only thing that politicians do is to live up to their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution?

  Walter E. Williams

  Issues, Reform, Would Be

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• The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.

  Robert Graves

  Art, Lying, Believe

  Robert Graves (1960). “Food for Centaurs: Stories, Talks, Critical Studies, Poems”

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