Irrelevance Quotes

• If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less.

  Eric Shinseki

  Inspirational, Change, Innovation

  "No Longer a Soldier, Shinseki Has a New Mission". Article by James Dao, Thom Shanker, www.nytimes.com. November 10, 2009.

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• Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

  Eric Schmidt

  Cost, Might, Information

  "Google Executive Chairman’s 3 World-Changing Predictions" by Robert Lockard, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 12, 2013.

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• Very often the law of extremity demands an attention to irrelevance.

  Janet Frame

  Law, Attention, Demand

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• I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.

  Clive Barker

  Gay, Spectacular, Hard

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• Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

  Mary Caroline Richards

  Life, Window

  Mary Caroline Richards (2011). “Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person”, p.10, Wesleyan University Press

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• If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more.

  Eric Shinseki

  Ifs, Dislike

  "Marines Turned Soldiers". National Review Online, December 10, 2001.

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• one could drown in irrelevance.

  Ian Mcewan

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• What a country, and what a culture, when the liberals cry before they are hurt, and the reactionaries pose as brave nonconformists, while the radicals make a fetish of their own jokey irrelevance.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Country, Hurt, Brave

  Christopher Hitchens (2014). “For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports”, p.253, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

  Angela Carter

  Life, Art, Mean

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• To talk about religion except in terms of human psychology is an irrelevance.

  Aldous Huxley

  Psychology, Term, Humans

  Aldous Huxley (2000). “Complete Essays: 1926-1929”, Ivan R Dee

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• An irrelevance, and your life's altered.

  Aldous Huxley

  Altered

  Aldous Huxley “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?

  Curtis Sittenfeld

  Differences, Long, World

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• A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.

  Shashi Tharoor

  Wise, Philosophical, Fate

  "The Great Indian Novel". Book by Shashi Tharoor, August 24, 1989.

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• Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.

  Gary Hamel

  Innovation

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• We who advocate peace are becoming an irrelevance when we speak peace. The government speaks rubber bullets, live bullets, tear gas, police dogs, detention, and death.

  Desmond Tutu

  Dog, Government, Police

  Sunday Times Magazine, June 08, 1986.

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• The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion).

  David Bohm

  Truth, Science, Confusion

  David Bohm (2005). “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”, p.42, Routledge

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• Irrelevance happens when the speed of change outside an organization is greater than speed of change inside an organization.

  Rick Warren

  Leadership, Christian, Organization

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• Men have always been a prey to distractions, which arethe original sins of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity. Ours is an age of systematized irrelevances, and the imbecile within us has become one of the Titans, upon whose shoulders rests the weight of the social and economic system

  Aldous Huxley

  Men, Origin Of Life, Mind

  Aldous Huxley (1992). “Huxley and God: essays”, Harpercollins

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• Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.

  Joe Abercrombie

  Lying, People, Purpose

  Joe Abercrombie (2009). “Last Argument Of Kings: The First Law: Book Three”, p.161, Hachette UK

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• What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

  Neil Postman

  Truth, Fear, Book

  "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business". Book by Neil Postman, 1985.

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• A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

  Charles Lamb

  Family, Poor, Relation

  'Last Essays of Elia' (1833) 'Poor Relations'

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• The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.

  Jaron Lanier

  Ignorance, Clouds, Data

  Jaron Lanier (2014). “Who Owns the Future?”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

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• I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.

  Ted Nelson

  Numbers, World, Demand

  "Computer Lib/Dream Machines". Book by Ted Nelson, 1974.

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• The cumulative effect of the Romantic theory of creativity, as played out in the context of belief in the virtue of the avant-garde, is that while the art world has effectively freed itself from the tyranny of artistic tradition and its historic patronage system, it has ended up inhabiting an autonomous but perceived irrelevance.

  John Walford

  Art, Creativity, Avant Garde

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• So the experience of death is turned into that of the exchange of functionaries, and anything in the natural relationship to death that is not wholly absorbed into the social one is turned over to hygiene. In being seen as no more than the exit of a living creature from the social combine, death has been domesticated: dying merely confirms the absolute irrelevance of the natural organism in face of the social absolute.

  Theodor Adorno

  Hygiene, Dying, Culture

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.232, Verso

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