Nonsense Quotes - Page 24

• Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

  Wallace Stevens

  Strange, Relation, Pierce

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.383, Vintage

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• The nonsense that charms is close to sense.

  Mason Cooley

  Charm

  "City Aphorisms, Eleventh Selection". Book by Mason Cooley, 1993.

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• Chiropractic, which celebrated its centennial in 1995, is a curious mixture of science and pseudoscience, sense and nonsense. Much of it is based on the theory that misaligned spinal bones produce nerve interference that causes disease. Many chiropractors claim that correcting these misalignments ("subluxations") can restore health and that regular spinal adjustments are essential to maintain it.

  Samuel Homola

  Pain, Essentials, Pseudoscience

  Samuel Homola (1999). “Inside Chiropractic: A Patient's Guide”

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• Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.

  Thornton Wilder

  Doctors, Looks, Young

  unknown

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• There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.

  Anna Quindlen

  Education, School, Class

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• Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

  Neil Postman

  Revolution, Computer, Function

  Neil Postman (2011). “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, p.156, Vintage

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• I claim the right to contradict myself. I don't want to deprive myself of the right to talk nonsense, and I ask humbly to be allowed to be wrong sometimes.

  Federico Fellini

  Change, Time, Want

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• At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Simple, Thinking

  Charles Darwin (1896). “Charles Darwin's Works: The life and letters of Charles Darwin... ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2v”

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• I've never cared that much for cementing my place in history. Sports is so transitory, so ephemeral. It just seems like so much nonsense comparing me to Helen Wills Moody or Suzanne Lenglen or anybody else from some other time. One lesson you learn from sports is that life goes on without you.

  Billie Jean King

  Sports, History, Goes On

  FaceBook post by Billie Jean King from Jun 01, 2010

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• Are you more likely to tolerate drivel than you were four years ago? I think the answer is yes. Four years of Reagan has deadenedthe senses against a barrage of uninterrupted nonsense.

  Alexander Cockburn

  Thinking, Years, Answers

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• You can keep counting forever. The answer is infinity. But, quite frankly, I don't think I ever liked it. I always found something repulsive about it. I prefer finite mathematics much more than infinite mathematics. I think that it is much more natural, much more appealing and the theory is much more beautiful. It is very concrete. It is something that you can touch and something you can feel and something to relate to. Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense.

  Doron Zeilberger

  Beautiful, Science, Thinking

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• With a metric you can really go to town, otherwise it is just abstract nonsense.

  Jennifer Tour Chayes

  Science, Metrics, Towns

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• Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Talking, Privilege

  "Crime and Punishment". Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1866.

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• I ignore all the doomsaying nonsense. I'm in a business where the odds of ever earning a living are a zillion to one, so I know itcan be done. I know the impossible can become possible.

  Marcia Wallace

  Odds, Optimism, Done

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• As soon as one of my records goes on, it makes a vast portion of the public nervous. They get spooked by it. To some people who have ears to hear, it's a delightful, refreshing change. But to most of the public, it's a load of homemade-sounding nonsense.

  Nick Lowe

  People, Records, Ears

  Source: www.gq.com

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• I really, really love children and I think probably among children is when I feel mostly berated. It's not like I feel like oh, there's some children here. I have to tone it down. I go nuts with children especially when I ain't got none. So when I'm round my mates' children, I jest them kids up first. I swear at them, I get more worked up, I say crazy stuff to them, fill their heads with nonsense and then I leave them.

  Russell Brand

  Children, Crazy, Kids

  MoviesOnline Interview, www.moviesonline.ca.

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• Theology is that discipline whereby we stop talking nonsense about God.

  Herbert McCabe

  Talking, Discipline, Theology

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• I have heard a good many pretend that they are going to die; or that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them to do it. They have n't got life enough in them.... Only half a dozen or so have died since the world began.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Life, Good Man, Dying

  Henry David Thoreau (1906). “Journal”

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• Men are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Believe, Writing, Men

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Ernest Spiller, Alfred Riggs Ferguson, Wallace E. Williams, Joseph Slater (1987). “The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men: seven lectures”, p.152, Harvard University Press

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• The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Serious, Parody, Heard

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• The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Marriage, Children, Work

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1993). “Self-reliance, and Other Essays”, p.89, Courier Corporation

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• Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Eugenics, May, Confession

  "What I Saw in America". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1922.

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• Music says nothing to the reason: it is a kind of closely structured nonsense.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Kind, Reason

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• My belief is that everything that's written about you is actually secondary showbiz nonsense, and you shouldn't take any notice of it.

  Martin Amis

  Belief, Written, Showbiz

  1985 Quoted in John Haffenden Novelists in Interview (1985).

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• lovers, it is well known, carry the art of tautology to its utmost perfection, and even the most impatient of them can both bear to hear and repeat the same things times without number, till the sound becomes the echo to the sense or the nonsense previously uttered.

  Susan Edmonstone Ferrier

  Art, Numbers, Echoes

  Susan Edmonstone Ferrier (1841). “The inheritance, by the author of Marriage. By the author of 'Marriage'. Revised by the author”, p.316

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