Utility Quotes - Page 8

• The freedom to own and carry the weapon of your choice is a natural, fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and Constitutional right - subject neither to the democratic process nor to arguments grounded in social utility.

  L. Neil Smith

  Choices, Fundamentals, Weapons

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• To treat programming scientifically, it must be possible to specify the required properties of programs precisely. Formality is certainly not an end in itself. The importance of formal specifications must ultimately rest in their utility -in whether or not they are used to improve the quality of software or to reduce the cost of producing and maintaining software.

  Jim Horning

  Learning, Quality, Cost

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• Public utility pleads most forcibly for the general distribution of the Holy Scriptures.

  James McHenry

  Scripture, Holy, Distribution

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• ... In a free society, skeptics are the watchdogs against irrationalism - the consumer advocates of ideas. Debunking is not simply the divestment of bunk; its utility is in offering a better alternative, along with a lesson on how thinking goes wrong.

  Michael Shermer

  Thinking, Offering, Ideas

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• A ‘liberal paradise’ would be a place where everybody has guaranteed employment, free comprehensive health care, free education, free food, free housing, free clothing, free utilities and only law enforcement personnel have guns. And, believe it or not, such a liberal utopia does indeed exist. ... It’s called prison.

  Joe Arpaio

  Education, Food, Believe

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• The major asset in this category is gold, currently a huge favorite of investors who fear almost all other assets, especially paper money (of whose value, as noted, they are right to be fearful). Gold, however, has two significant shortcomings, being neither of much use nor procreative. True, gold has some industrial and decorative utility, but the demand for these purposes is both limited and incapable of soaking up new production. Meanwhile, if you own one ounce of gold for an eternity, you will still own one ounce at its end.

  Warren Buffett

  Two, Gold, Use

  "Berkshire’s Corporate Performance vs. the S&P 500". www.berkshirehathaway.com. 2012.

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• I don't ever think about the utility of fiction. I don't believe in it or certainly don't require anybody to consider it. A novel or short story might be useful to a reader in all kinds of ways, many of which no writer would ever foresee, which is a good thing.

  Francisco Goldman

  Believe, Thinking, Kind

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think we should be clear: Companies will still need software that furthers their corporate goals and even gives them competitive advantage. That would be purchased and developed, if necessary, in house, or on a proprietary basis. But it needs to run on the company's computer system eventually, and its perfectly possible that system/network can be "rented out" from a utility.

  Steven Pearlstein

  Running, Thinking, Giving

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

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• Where the world comes in my way - and it comes in my way everywhere - I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but - my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.

  Max Stirner

  Cheer, Air, Order

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• That choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.

  Matthew Zapruder

  Choices, Purpose, Language

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Facebook's a wonderful, incredible way to bring humanity together. They've brought together 2 billion people in the largest fictional family in history. So young people are starting to empathize with each other through Facebook across the globe. This is wonderful. However, when everyone needs Facebook because it's so successful that everyone's on it, then it starts to look like a global public utility, a public good. Same with Amazon.

  Jeremy Rifkin

  Successful, People, Humanity

  Source: www.businessinsider.com

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• We are not getting rid of carriers any time soon. This is both because of their utility and also because of their role in Navy culture and in the defense-industrial complex. It is an academic debate.

  P. W. Singer

  Navy, Culture, Debate

  Source: www.bloomberg.com

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• When we have an experience -- hearing a particular sonata, making love with a particular person, watching the sun set from a particular window of a particular room -- on successive occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less pleasure each time. Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage

  Daniel Gilbert

  Yield, Making Love, Hearing

  Daniel Gilbert (2006). “Stumbling on Happiness”, Vintage

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• We were doing the same thing. We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us. Nuevo-mexicanos have done it very well for hundreds of years, inventing words where they don't have them. I think the future of our language is where we claim our bilingualism for its utility.

  Ana Castillo

  Fighting, Thinking, Special

  Source: www.english.illinois.edu

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• Philosophers should resist the temptation to be publicly virtuous. Given an unjust society, from the vantage of what counts as the public good, they are corrupters, not edifiers. The desire to be seen to be virtuous, to make a positive contribution, is a deleterious symptom of professionalization. Philosophy's social utility is an ersatz for its duty to mount challenges to the entire social order.

  Ray Brassier

  Challenges, Temptation, Desire

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Clinton provided the final transition between decaying old-style liberalism and the new neoliberalism and neoconservatism - which are kind of incestuous first cousins. That goes for trade policy; for deregulation of major industries, from the utilities to communications companies to the banking industry to the insurance industry; all the way to continuing to wage war on Iraq. All of that is a living artifact of Clinton Time.

  Jeffrey St. Clair

  Cousin, War, Communication

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• In all determinations of morality, this circumstance of public utility is ever principally in view; and wherever disputes arise, either in philosophy or common life, concerning the bounds of duty, the questions cannot, by any means, be decided with greater certainty, than by ascertaining, on any side, the true interests of mankind. If any false opinion, embraced from appearances, has been found to prevail; as soon as farther experience and sounder reasoning have given us juster notions of human affairs, we retract our first sentiment, and adjust anew the boundaries of moral good and evil.

  David Hume

  Determination, Philosophy, Mean

  David Hume (2010). “Moral and Political Philosophy”, p.221, Simon and Schuster

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• This country has achieved its commercial and financial supremacy under a regime of private ownership. It conquered the wilderness, built our railroads, our factories, our public utilities, gave us the telegraph, the telephone, the electric light, the automobile, the airplane, the radio and a higher standard of living for all the people than obtains anywhere else in the world. No great invention ever came from a government-owned industry.

  George B. Cortelyou

  Country, Airplane, Light

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• I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.

  Sally Mann

  Spiritual, Children, Spring

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• Renewable energy fits well into the conservative mindset by allowing competition into the energy markets so that consumers have choice. The system as it is, with big utilities monopolizing the energy playing field or fossil fuel energy being given massive subsidies so that they are on a kind of corporate welfare, is the antithesis of conservative principles.

  Mark Ruffalo

  Choices, Competition, Fuel

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• The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Men, Long, Use

  Michel de Montaigne “Annotated Essays of Michel de Montaigne with English Grammar Exercises: by Michel de Montaigne (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, Powell Publications, LLC

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• There are respectable individuals, who from a just aversion to an accumulation of Public debt, are unwilling to concede to it any kind of utility, who can discern no good to alleviate the ill with which they suppose it pregnant; who cannot be persuaded that it ought in any sense to be viewed as an increase of capital lest it should be inferred, that the more debt the more capital, the greater the burthens the greater the blessings of the community.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Blessing, Community, Debt

  United States. Department of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton (1791). “Report of the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, on the Subject of Manufactures: Presented to the House of Representatives, December 5, 1791”, p.25

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• The basic skill of an actor is, in fact, empathy, and that's maybe not a skill, it's a disposition. I am an assistant storyteller. I enjoy feeling useful to a team effort. It's my way of finding a use for myself, a utility in this world.

  Harrison Ford

  Team, Skills, Effort

  "Star Wars Archive: Harrison Ford, Solo Artist". Interview with William Thomas, www.empireonline.com. June, 2002.

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• For an infrequent action to become a habit, the user must perceive a high degree of utility, either from gaining pleasure or avoiding pain.

  Nir Eyal

  Pain, Degrees, Action

  Nir Eyal (2014). “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products”, p.23, Penguin Canada

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• What the customer buys and considers value is never a product. It is always utility, that is, what a product or a service does for the customer.

  Peter Drucker

  Doe, Customers, Products

  Peter Drucker (2012). “Management”, p.57, Routledge

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