Utility Quotes - Page 3

• It is rather astonishing how little practical value scientific knowledge has for ordinary men, how dull and commonplace such of it as has value is, and how its value seems almost to vary inversely to its reputed utility.

  G. H. Hardy

  Knowledge, Science, Men

  G. H. Hardy (1992). “A Mathematician's Apology”, p.117, Cambridge University Press

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• Flowers are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty out values all the utilities of the world. If dandelions were hard to grow, they would be most welcome on any lawn.

  Andrew Mason

  Flower, Dandelions, Rays

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• What meaning has such meditation? There is no meaning; there is no utility. But in that meditation there is a movement of great ecstasy which is not to be confounded with pleasure. It is this ecstasy which gives to the eye, to the brain and to the heart, the quality of innocency. Without seeing life as something totally new, it is a routine, a boredom, a meaningless affair. So meditation is of the greatest importance. It opens the door to the incalculable, to the measureless.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Heart, Eye, Doors

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• To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Government, Names, Annoyed

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• It is the censor's business to make a judgment about the propriety of the content or message of the proposed expressive activity. The regulation here does not authorize any judgment about the content of any speeches. ... A park is a limited space, and to allow unregulated access to all comers could easily reduce rather than enlarge the park's utility as a forum for speech. Just imagine two rallies held at the same time in the same park area using public-address systems that drowned out each other's speakers.

  Richard Posner

  Government, Two, Space

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• Explaining why he was forced to cut a utility player: You just got caught in a position where you have no position.

  Sparky Anderson

  Cutting, Player, Justice

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• We need a new law that owners of SUVs (Sport Utility Vehicles) are automatically in the military reserve. Then they can go get their own goddamn oil.

  Jello Biafra

  Sports, Military, Law

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• Modern science has its value in terms of utility, but it cannot open up existence to human experience.

  Jaggi Vasudev

  Love, Life, Meditation

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• It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Men, Two, Goal

  Martin Luther King (1992). “The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr”, p.124, Univ of California Press

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• Indeed, the best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly. And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest, exile, or kill users in response.

  Clay Shirky

  Powerful, Believe, Thinking

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• The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context.

  Tom Turner

  Mean, Garden, Cities

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• In that, we agreed with Andrew Carnegie, who said that huge fortunes that flow in large part from society should in large part be returned to society. In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.

  Warren Buffett

  Country, Enormous Quantities, Society

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• The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.

  Gregor Mendel

  Purpose, Determined, Plant

  William Bateson, Gregor Mendel (1902). “Mendel's Principles of Heredity: A Defence”

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• The potential for Home Star to create jobs is proven and real. In Vermont, our statewide energy efficiency utility, Efficiency Vermont, created more than 430 jobs in 2007 and 2008, generating more than $40 million in income.

  Peter Welch

  Stars, Jobs, Real

  "Creating Jobs by Investing in Energy Efficiency" by Peter Welch, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 5, 2010.

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• There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility.

  Karl Lehmann

  Agency, Church, Yardsticks

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• If you wanted to create jobs in a way that has minimal effect on the deficit but has government action, the two best things you could do are the infrastructure bank and a simple SBA-like loan guarantee for all building retrofits, where the contractor or the energy-service company guarantees the savings. So that allows the bank to loan money to let a school or a college or a hospital or a museum or a commercial building unencumbered by debt to loan it on terms that are longer, so you can pay it back only from your utility savings. You could create a million jobs doing that.

  William J. Clinton

  Jobs, School, Simple

  "Bill Clinton: Someone We Can All Agree On". Interview with Charles P. Pierce and Mark Warren, www.esquire.com. January 18, 2012.

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• Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. In this great balance of utility, the spiritual service of art has no weight, and, deprived of all encouragement, it vanishes from the noisy Vanity Fair of our time.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Spiritual, Encouragement, Art

  "Literary and philosophical essays: French, German, and Italian", Collier, Volume 32, sourcebooks.fordham.edu. 1910.

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• The Plagiarism of orators is the art, or an ingenious and easy mode, which some adroitly employ to change, or disguise, all sorts of speeches of their own composition, or that of other authors, for their pleasure, or their utility; in such a manner that it becomes impossible even for the author himself to recognise his own work, his own genius, and his own style, so skilfully shall the whole be disguised.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Art, Style, Genius

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 598-600, Curiosities of Literature, Professors of Plagiarism and Obscurity, 1922.

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• We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility; no button reading "positive attitude" protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Attitude, Reading, Heart

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Full House”, p.47, Harvard University Press

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• Every institution goes through three stages - utility, privilege, and abuse.

  François-René de Chateaubriand

  Abuse, Privilege, Three

  "Culture and Progress". Book by Wilson Dallam Wallis, 1930.

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• In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.

  Edward J. Fraughton

  Art, Block, Civilization

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• An important question to ask is, 'Where and when did decoration and utility first meet?

  Edward J. Fraughton

  Important, Firsts, Decoration

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• Simperium seems like a genuine utility for our own apps, and for other people as a service. And Simplenote, as a product, I love, and it's just darn handy.

  Matt Mullenweg

  People, Genuine, Apps

  "Automattic Buys Simperium, Maker of Simplenote" by Liz Gannes, allthingsd.com. January 24, 2013.

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• I rank myself no higher in the scheme of things than a policeman - whose utility would disappear if there were no criminals.

  Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury

  Criminals, Disappear, Schemes

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• I'm obsessed with the form of a toolbox. The idea of a portable kit that has everything you might need ignites something inside me. It's like Batman's utility belt.

  Adam Savage

  Ideas, Needs, Might

  "Inside Adam Savage's toolbox". www.wired.com. August 22, 2012.

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