Useless Quotes - Page 11

• I have to confess here that I am a useless cook.

  Jasper Carrott

  Cooks

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• I am convinced that in the arts, committees are useless. What is necessary are people like Karajan, [fellow recording producer John] Culshaw and me; we know not only how to achieve the best artistic results but how to attract the public and carry out the whole operation with carefully chosen collaborators. Democracy is fatal for the arts; it leads only to chaos or the achievement of new and lower common denominators of quality.

  Walter Legge

  Art, People, Achievement

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• Who is more amateurish, more vulnerable---those who rely on machines that need to be plugged in, or logged on, or in some other way connected in order to be more than a useless slab of plastic ... or those who have learned to master life without?

  Anne Fortier

  Order, Needs, Machines

  Anne Fortier (2014). “The Lost Sisterhood: A Novel”, p.532, Ballantine Books

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• The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.

  Virginia Postrel

  Smart, Thinking, Skills

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• First, the constitution ought to secure a genuine and guard against a select militia, by providing that the militia shall always be kept well organized, armed, and disciplined, and include, according to the past and general usuage of the states, all men capable of bearing arms; and that all regulations tending to render this general militia useless and defenceless, by establishing select corps of militia, or distinct bodies of military men, not having permanent interests and attachments in the community to be avoided.

  Patrick Henry

  Military, Past, Men

  "Additional Letters From The Federal Farmer", 169, 1788.

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• The minute I start being afraid of what people might say is the minute I become useless to God.

  Steven Furtick

  People, Might, Minutes

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• I dislike nothing more than finding fault with a man's nature or talent; it only depresses and worries and does no good; one cannot add a cubit to one's stature, all striving and struggling are useless there, so one has to be silent about it, and let the responsibility rest with God.

  Felix Mendelssohn

  Depressing, Struggle, Responsibility

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• From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

  David Nicholls

  Views, Desire, Purpose

  David Nicholls (2014). “Us”, p.336, Hachette UK

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• High descent and meritorious deeds, unless united to wealth, are as useless as seaweed.

  Horace

  Deeds, Wealth, Descent

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• Go, all of you poor people, in the name of God the Creator, and let him forever be your guide. And henceforth, do not be beguiledby these idle and useless pilgrimages. See to your families, and work, each one of you, in your vocation, raise your children, and live as the good Apostle Paul teaches you.

  Francois Rabelais

  Wisdom, Children, Names

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• Thee are such horrible weapons. And so no sane leader would ever want to cross that line to using nuclear weapons. And, if you are not going to cross that line, then these things are basically useless.

  Colin Powell

  Leader, Want, Weapons

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• It is useless to put news agency stories behind the paid curtain because they are available in thousands of other places that will be free.

  Robert G. Picard

  Agency, News, Stories

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• When I was a young stunt guy the director would say: "You're useless..." But I wanted to be the best, I wanted to be a super stunt guy. That's how I built myself, because of martial arts and everything.

  Jackie Chan

  Art, Guy, Directors

  "The Karate Kid - Jackie Chan interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.

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• In New England they once thought blackbirds useless, and mischievous to the corn. They made efforts to destroy them. The consequence was, the blackbirds were diminished; but a kind of worm, which devoured their grass, and which the blackbirds used to feed on, increased prodigiously; then, finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds.

  Benjamin Franklin

  Loss, Effort, Saving

  Benjamin Franklin, Walter Isaacson (2003). “A Benjamin Franklin Reader”, p.156, Simon and Schuster

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• Anything that one imagines of God apart from Christ is only useless thinking and vain idolatry.

  Martin Luther

  Art, Thinking, Imagination

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• Life is but short; no time can be afforded but for the indulgence of real sorry, or contests upon questions seriously momentous. Let us not throw away any of our days upon useless resentment, or contend who shall hold out longest in stubborn malignity. It is best not to be angry; and best, in the next place, to be quickly reconciled.

  Samuel Johnson

  Sorry, Real, Anger

  Samuel Johnson (2014). “The Letters of Samuel Johnson, Volume II: 1773-1776”, p.360, Princeton University Press

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• Forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance. Ideas are retained by renovation of that impression which time is always wearing away,and which new images are striving to obliterate. If useless thoughts could be expelled from the mind, all the valuable parts of our knowledge would more frequently recur, and every recurrence would reinstate them in their former place.

  Samuel Johnson

  Ideas, Remembrance, Mind

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”

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• Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favours, they are consequently for the most part, very prone to credulity.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Men, Religion, Favour

  Baruch Spinoza (2017). “A Theologico-Political Treatise”, Jovian Press

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• We live a pleasant life shopping at the Food Shoppe . . . taking the kids to the Weinery-Beanery, . . . and eating bran flakes . .. and then, with no warning, we wake up one morning stricken with middle age, full of loneliness, dumb, in pain. Our work is useless, our vocation is lost, and nobody cares about us at all. This is not bearable. In despair, we go do something spectacularly dumb, like run away with Amber the cocktail waitress, and suddenly all the women in our life look at us with unmitigated disgust.

  Garrison Keillor

  Running, Morning, Pain

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• Profundity often goes past the issue to some deep but useless truth.

  Mason Cooley

  Truth, Past, Issues

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• One grows out of pity when it's useless.

  Albert Camus

  Pity, Grows

  ALBERT CAMUS (1971). “NOBEL PRIZE LIBRARY”

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• Now that I have written many words,
  and let out so many loves, for so many,
  and been altogether what I always was
  a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
  I find the effort useless.

  Anne Sexton

  Poetry, Effort, Greed

  Anne Sexton, “Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women”

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• I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Hate, Night, Vanity

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• I would introduce myself if it were not useless. The name I had last night will not be the same as the name I have tonight. For the moment, then, let me say that I am thinking of Sam Slovoda.

  Norman Mailer

  Night, Thinking, Names

  Norman Mailer (2013). “Advertisements for Myself”, p.115, Odyssey Editions

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• There are moods in which one feels the impulse to enter a tacit protest against too gross an appetite for pure aesthetics in this starving and sinning world. One turns half away, musingly, from certain beautiful useless things.

  Henry James

  Beauty, Beautiful, Useless Things

  Henry James (2016). “Italian Hours”, p.192, Youcanprint

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