Nonsense Quotes - Page 10

• Football makes nonsense of class. It may make nonsense of colour in some circumstances.

  Peter Temple

  Football, Class, May

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• Everyone says youve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!

  Bill Drayton

  Foundation, Finance, Social

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• ... the Armenian massacre was the greatest crime of the war, and the failure to act against Turkey is to condone it ... the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  War, Mean, Turkeys

  Theodore Roosevelt (1954). “Letters: The days of Armageddon, 1909-1914”

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• So, Mr. Chadband-of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave off, having once the audacity to begin-retires into private life until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade.

  Charles Dickens

  Character, Oil, Interesting

  Charles Dickens (1870). “Novels”, p.161

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• In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others.

  Stephen Burt

  Giving Up, Poetry, Personality

  Stephen Burt (2009). “Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry”, Graywolf Press

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• The persistent failures of controlled, double-blind experiments to support the claims of parapsychology suggest that what's going on is nonsense rather than sixth sense.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Support, Pseudoscience, Blind

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

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• As musicians it's often difficult. You go to a dinner party and most people treat you like some kind of exotic animal and in a way like you don't have any problems and that it's all fantastic and glamorous and that you wake up in the morning, you kick the groupies out of bed, you roll onto the floor onto a needle, right, which fills you with a lovely substance, you roll into the gutter and you stare at the moon and out comes beautiful poetry. The fact of the matter is that that's nonsense. It's a lot of hard work.

  Brian Molko

  Beautiful, Morning, Party

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• If you say to me: "Master, it would seem that you weren't too terribly wise to have written these bits of nonsense and pleasant mockeries," I respond that you are hardly more so in finding amusement in reading them.

  Francois Rabelais

  Wise, Reading, Amusement

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• Oh, that [his Thanksgiving Message] is some of Seward's nonsense, and it pleases the fools.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Atheism, Fool, Messages

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• Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

  Woody Allen

  Meaningful, Sports, Religious

  "Woody Allen's World: Whatever Works". Interview with Robert E. Lauder, www.commonwealmagazine.org. April 15, 2010.

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• Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades!
  Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
  O, might I vole to some umbrageous clump,--
  Depart,--be off,--excede,--evade,--erump!

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

  Maids, Shade, Might

  Oliver Wendell Holmes (1863). “The Poems of Oliver Wendell Holmes”, p.319

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• It's nonsense that people join the army to serve the country, like the politicians do it only for the sake of the country.

  Sam Manekshaw

  Country, Army, People

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• Why should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?

  Alan Sokal

  Self, Achievement, Political

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• The drilling idea is spherically senseless - it's senseless from whatever point of view you look at it. It'd take 10 years to bring any oil online, and it would probably go to Japan. It sure wouldn't help gasoline prices here. All the economists say gasoline is still too cheap in the United States anyway. So here we're having this huge debate over offshore drilling that is just straightforward nonsense, which won't surprise you.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Japan, Views, Years

  "Q&A: Paul Ehrlich". Interview with Jesse Finfrock, www.motherjones.com. 2008.

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• Sometimes I think the Congress feels that if you only decided tomorrow to switch to wind power that in two years we'd be getting 80 percent of our electricity from wind power. It's nonsense. Normally it takes 20 to 30 years after a new technology is demonstrated and deployed before it powers even 15 or 20 percent of the grid. There's this long lag time, and we haven't even decided which directions to go.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Technology, Thinking, Years

  "Q&A: Paul Ehrlich". Interview with Jesse Finfrock, www.motherjones.com. 2008.

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• There's all of this stuff where we have so much debate over nonsense; it could be cured if we had a better educational system, if we trained people to really try and look into things on their own. That's a tough thing to do, particularly with the educational system staggering.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Educational, People, Trying

  "Q&A: Paul Ehrlich". Interview with Jesse Finfrock, www.motherjones.com. 2008.

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• One thing I detest most about the financial press is the lack of accountability. All sorts of nonsense is said without penalty.

  Barry Ritholtz

  Accountability, Financial, Penalties

  Twitter post from Oct 28, 2016

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• The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.

  Ray Bradbury

  Real, Thinking, Mind

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• I can't negotiate and collaborate with a character to create a distilled dramatic investigation of the raw material. I need to work with an actor. That stuff about actors who stay in character all the time is nonsense.

  Mike Leigh

  Character, Needs, Raw Materials

  Interview with Chloe Veltman, www.believermag.com. March/April 2009.

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• New Zealand is a pretty no-nonsense place to work like Australia. I mean it doesn't falter to anyone. There's a nice sense of reality on the set and it's really enjoyable. There's a good camaraderie and a good banter between the obviously New Zealand and Australian rivalry.

  Dustin Clare

  Nice, Mean, Reality

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• Confidence in nonsense is required.

  Burt Rutan

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• The common wisdom is that ... managers have to learn to motivate people. Nonsense. Employees bring their own motivation.

  Tom Peters

  Motivation, People, Common

  Tom Peters, Nancy Austin (1985). “A passion for excellence”

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• Most talk about 'super-geniuses' is nonsense. I have found that when 'stars' drop out, successors are usually at hand to fill their places, and the successors are merely men who have learned by application and self-discipline to get full production from an average, normal brain.

  Charles M. Schwab

  Stars, Men, Average

  Charles M. Schwab (2005). “Succeeding With What You Have”, p.8, Cosimo, Inc.

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• The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people from religion; that amendment was written to protect religion from government tyranny. . . But now we're told our children have no right to pray in school. Nonsense. The pendulum has swung too far toward intolerance against genuine religious freedom. It is time to redress the balance.

  Ronald Reagan

  Religious, Children, School

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• Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.

  Saint Augustine

  Christian, Stars, Distance

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