Utilitarian Quotes - Page 3

• The only constant in the soul of man is inconstancy; anything and everything else can pass out of fashion-even something as utilitarian as a hill stuffed full of corpses.

  Scott Lynch

  Fashion, Men, Soul

  Scott Lynch (2006). “The Lies of Locke Lamora”, p.5, Spectra

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• The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking. ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Eye, Thinking, Everyday

  "History as a System". Book by Jose Ortega y Gasset, 1962.

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• The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  New York, Character, People

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• No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly."

  Edmund Snow Carpenter

  Art, Attitude, Men

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• And the greatest praise to India is this: not only are her people beautiful; not only are her daily life and cult beautiful; but, in the midst of the utilitarian, humanitarian, dogmatic world of the present day, she keeps on proclaiming the outstanding value of Beauty for the sake of Beauty, through her very conception of Godhead, of religion and of life.

  Savitri Devi

  Beautiful, People, India

  Savitri Devi, G. D. Savarkar (1939). “A Warning to the Hindus”

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• More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

  Michel de Certeau

  Oddities, Cities, Opaque

  Michel de Certeau, Pierre Mayol (1998). “The Practice of Everyday Life: Living and cooking. Volume 2”, p.134, U of Minnesota Press

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• We thought [with Alix MacKenzie], if those are the kinds of pots from every culture that interest us, why would we think that it should be any different in mid-North America 20th century? And we decided then that our work would center around that sort of utilitarian pottery, and that's what I've done ever since.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, America, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Only those are called liberal or free which are concerned with knowledge; those which are concerned with utilitarian ends... are called servile...The question is... can man develop to the full as a functionary and a worker and nothing else; can a full human existence be contained within an exclusively workaday existence? Stated differently and translated back into our terms: is there such a thing as a liberal art?

  Josef Pieper

  Art, Men, Ends

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• The idea of having more technology solving this idea of hyperactive lifestyle is not really the mainstream problem. I think the real innovation that’s going to be rewarded will be on things like, let’s convert our computers from being tools to being companions. Let’s convert our computers from being utilitarian to being enlightening. These are human needs.

  Horace Dediu

  Real, Technology, Thinking

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• Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Reading, Writing, Emotional

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Spiritual, Mean, Government

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• Design is not art. Design is utilitarian, art is not.

  Massimo Vignelli

  Art, Design, Art Is

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• The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.

  Henry Miller

  Dream, Artist, Men

  Henry Miller (1970). “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare”, p.24, New Directions Publishing

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• They will speak of things that are spiritual and beautiful and of things that are practical and utilitarian; they will mix up angels and engines, sunsets and spark plugs, fraternity and frequencies in one all-encompassing comradeship of interests that makes for the best and most lasting kind of friendship any man can have.

  Percy Knauth

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Sunset

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• Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life.

  Aristotle

  Business, Toil, Doe

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• Unless the fundamental categories of economics such as 'property' were to be redefined in a radically personal way the liberal rationalist curse which had established economics as a scientific discipline cut off from human interests would proliferate. Economic models ... have failed to incorporate any meaningful index of individual benefit other than the original utilitarian one, ... the index of increasing income or an increasing flow of commodities.

  John Carroll

  Meaningful, Cutting, Economic Models

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• Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man?

  Charles Darwin

  Powerful, Men, Animal

  Charles Darwin (1872). “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex”, p.68

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• Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.

  John Carroll

  Men, Boredom, Tangled

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.119, Taylor & Francis

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• Modern anthropology ... opposes the utilitarian assumption that the primitive chants as he sows seed because he believes that otherwise it will not grow, the assumption that his economic goal is primary, and his other activities are instrumental to it. The planting and the cultivating are no less important than the finished product. Life is not conceived as a linear progression directed to, and justified by, the achievement of a series of goals; it is a cycle in which ends cannot be isolated, one which cannot be dissected into a series of ends and means.

  John Carroll

  Believe, Mean, Goal

  John Carroll (2010). “Break-Out from the Crystal Palace: The Anarcho-Psychological Critique: Stirner, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky”, p.121, Taylor & Francis

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• As the dolphin becomes just another victim of humanity's utilitarian attitudes towards the earth, it seems as though the ancient friendship between our respective species is no longer entirely reciprocal. Such exploitation is nowhere more evident than in the capture and display of cetaceans for profit. Stripped of their natural identity, deprived of their own culture and environment, the dolphin and whale incarcerated within the oceanarium not only symbolizes an abuse of that ancient relationship, but above all our estrangement from nature as a whole.

  Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan

  Attitude, Whales, Humanity

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• I would, if I could, always feed to music. The singularly graceless action of thus filling one's body with roots and dead animals and powdered grain is given some significance then. One can perform as a ritual what one is shamed to do as a utilitarian action.

  Winifred Holtby

  Animal, Roots, Body

  Winifred Holtby, Alice Holtby (1941). “Letters to a friend”

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• I really like the idea of being utilitarian. My dream is to edit down my wardrobe and be very Japanese, where you have one rolling rack and it's like your four T-shirts, your five dresses, your two pairs of jeans.

  Erin Wasson

  Dream, Jeans, Ideas

  "The close-up". Interview with Simon Chilvers, www.theguardian.com. March 22, 2009.

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• The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.

  John Rawls

  Mistake, Doctrine, Faults

  John RAWLS (2009). “A Theory of Justice”, p.190, Harvard University Press

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• If the flower were not attached to its stem, it would flee at the approach of man, like the insect or the bird; for the attribute of man on the earth, at least as long as he does not better understand his role, is to worry and frighten what he is not interested in taming for utilitarian purposes. Man is skillful in mistreating everything he can use

  Andre Gide

  Flower, Men, Worry

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• I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Hard Times, Thinking, Listening

  Interview with Jason Crock, pitchfork.com. May 15, 2006.

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