Utility Quotes - Page 5

• Facebook is such a basic utility. It's something that is such a part of peoples' lives, I think it's hard to imagine it going away.

  Sean Parker

  Thinking, Going Away, Imagine

  "Sean Parker ‘Bored’ By Facebook — And It Seems He’s Not The Only One" By Bianca Bosker, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 6, 2012.

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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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• Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.

  Edmund Burke

  Justice, Trade, Free Trade

  "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity" by Edmund Burke, 1795.

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• There's no necessary connection between maximizing social utility or economic wealth and creating a flourishing democracy. The first does not guarantee the second. The only way to create a flourishing democracy is to find ways to reason together about the big questions, including hard questions about justice and the common good, to reason together about these questions so that we as citizens can decide how to shape the forces that govern our lives.

  Michael Sandel

  Justice, Democracy, Together

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web.

  Edwin Way Teale

  Funny, Beauty, Nature

  Edwin Way Teale (1987). “Circle of the seasons: the journal of a naturalist's year”, Olympic Marketing Corp

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• Comic strips are like a public utility. They're supposed to be there 365 days a year, and you're supposed to be able to hit the mark day after day.

  Garry Trudeau

  Years, Able, Comic

  "Trudeau Reflects On Four Decades Of 'Doonesbury'". Interview with Renee Montagne, www.npr.org. October 26, 2010.

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• The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Dream, Government, Somewhere Else

  "America, land of the free to be stupid" by Elizabeth Wurtzel, www.theguardian.com. November 5, 2010.

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• Facebook's successor will no doubt provide an easy "migration utility" through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.

  Douglas Rushkoff

  Doubt, Want, Migration

  "Facebook hype will fade" by Douglas Rushkoff, www.cnn.com. January 7, 2011.

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• On Sept 15th [1852] Mr Goulburn, Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked my opinion on the utility of Mr Babbage's calculating machine, and the propriety of spending further sums of money on it. I replied, entering fully into the matter, and giving my opinion that it was worthless.

  George Biddell Airy

  Giving, Machines, Entering

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

  James McHenry

  Scripture, Holy, Distribution

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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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• I trust in Nature for the stable laws Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant And Autumn garner to the end of time. I trust in God,-the right shall be the right And other than the wrong, while he endures. I trust in my own soul, that can perceive The outward and the inward,-Nature's good And God's.

  Robert Browning

  Beauty, Spring, Autumn

  Robert Browning, John Woolford, Daniel Karlin (1991). “The Poems of Browning: 1841-1846”, p.192, Pearson Education

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• It is the peculiar beauty of this method, gentlemen, and one which endears it to the really scientific mind, that under no circumstance can it be of the smallest possible utility.

  Henry John Stephen Smith

  Beauty, Math, Science

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