Useless Quotes - Page 12

• Most animal experimentation is useless.

  Henry Heimlich

  Animal, Cruelty, Experimentation

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• Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves.

  Friedrich Engels

  Order, People, Frightened

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1942). “Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: selected correspondence, 1846-1895: with explanatory notes”

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• If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.

  Antonin Scalia

  People, Looks, Constitution

  "Scalia Slams 'Living Constitution' Theory", www.foxnews.com. March 14, 2005.

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• If you are weak, dependent upon others, inclined to allow yourself to be dominated by opinion, to take root wherever you see a little soil, make for yourself a shield that will resist everything, for if you yield to your weaker nature you will not grow, you will dry up like a dead plant, and you will bear neither fruit nor flowers.

  Alfred de Musset

  Flower, Eye, Heart

  "Narration; The confession of a child of the century".

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• Every discoverer of a new truth, or inventor of the method which evolves it, makes a dozen, perhaps fifty, useless combinations, experiments, or trials for one successful one. In the realm of electricity or of mechanics there is no objection to this. But when such rejected failures involve a torture of animals, sometimes fearful in its character, there is a distinct objection to it.

  Henry Jacob Bigelow

  Failure, Character, Successful

  "Surgical Anaesthesia: Addresses and Other Papers". Pp. 369-370. Book by Henry Jacob Bigelow, 1894.

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• Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.

  George Eliot

  Women, Sorrow, Would Be

  'Felix Holt' (1866) ch. 2

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• Your cable television is experiencing difficulties. Please do not panic. Resist the temptation to read or talk to loved ones. Do not attempt sexual relations, as years of TV radiation have left your genitals withered and useless.

  Matt Groening

  Years, Temptation, Television

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• Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Half, Gothic

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• A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Beautiful, Ignorance, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.361, Simon and Schuster

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• Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws.

  Oscar Wilde

  Law, Resolution, Interfere

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Joseph Bristow, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: The picture of Dorian Gray : the 1890 and 1891 texts”, p.253, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Why then should women be denied the benefits of instruction? If knowledge and understanding had been useless additions to the sex, God almighty would never have given them capacities.

  Daniel Defoe

  Sex, Women, Understanding

  An Essay upon Projects "Of Academies: An Academy forWomen" (1697)

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• All professional men are handicapped by not being allowed to ignore things which are useless.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Men, Handicapped

  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1989). “Criticisms, Reflections, and Maxims of Goethe”, Richard West

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• Openness without strength is useless; strength without openness is oppression.

  Daniele Bolelli

  Oppression, Openness

  Daniele Bolelli (2013). “Create Your Own Religion: A How-To Book without Instructions”, p.108, Red Wheel Weiser

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• Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Vanity, Law

  Oscar Wilde (2007). “The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories”, p.101, Penguin

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• You know frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.

  Jed Babbin

  War, Hunting, Baggage

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• I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.

  Jonathan Swift

  Men, House, Quality

  Jonathan Swift, David Laing Purves (1871). “The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D.: Carefully Selected; with a Biography of the Author”, p.516

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• We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.

  Annie Dillard

  Life, Sleep, Water

  Annie Dillard (2016). “The Abundance”, p.29, Canongate Books

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• I'm sure the feeling of fear, as long as you can take advantage of it and not be rendered useless by it, can make you extend yourself beyond what you would regard as your capacity. If you're afraid, the blood seems to flow freely through the veins, and you really do feel a sense of stimulation.

  Edmund Hillary

  Blood, Long, Feelings

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• We are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason; if some few get above their nurses instructions, our knowledge must rest concealed and be as useless to the world as gold in the mine.

  Mary Wortley Montagu

  Art, Women, Ignorance

  Mary Wortley Montagu, James Archibald Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie Wharncliffe (1837). “The Letters and Works: In Three Volumes”, p.31

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• If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Art, Doe, Ifs

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• What a country wants to make it richer is never consumption, but production. Where there is the latter, we may be sure that there is no want of the former. To produce, implies that the producer de_sires to consume; why else should he give himself useless labor? He may not wish to consume what he himself produces, but his motive for producing and selling is the desire to buy. Therefore, if the producers generally produce and sell more and more, they certainly also buy more and more.

  John Stuart Mill

  Country, Giving, Wish

  John Stuart Mill (2007). “Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy”, p.46, Cosimo, Inc.

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• We must love stupid people better than ourselves; are they not the really unfortunate ones of this world? Do not people without taste and without ideal grow constantly weary, rejoicing in nothing, and being quite useless here below?

  George Sand

  Stupid, Ambition, People

  George Sand (2009). “Letters of George Sand”, p.13, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Not communicating saves energy; it keeps people from worrying about things they cannot do anything about; and it eliminates an enormous amount of useless talk.

  Edwin Newman

  Communication, People, Worry

  Edwin Newman (1974). “Strictly Speaking: Will america be the Death of English?”

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• Both the young and the old are almost completely useless in our modern society, and are made keenly aware of that uselessness. They have no place. They are private, isolated - and hopeless.

  Carl Rogers

  Life, Hopeless, Modern

  Carl Rogers (1995). “A Way of Being”, p.217, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.

  Barry Hannah

  Thinking, Agony, People

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