Top 64 Ineffectual Quotes
#1. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.
Peter Drucker
#2. I do not believe in an atonement which is admirably wide, but fatally ineffectual.
Charles Spurgeon
#3. He had the same trouble as all intellectuals - he was ineffectual. He knew too many things, and they confused him.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#4. Philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.
Jacques Ellul
#5. The fact that alienated people can be counted on to vent their spleen in ineffectual directions - by fighting among themselves - relieves the government of the need to deal fundamentally with the conditions which cause their frustrations,
Chris Hedges
#6. It's frustrating; terrorism is rare and largely ineffectual, yet we regularly magnify the effects of both their successes and failures by terrorizing ourselves.
Bruce Schneier
#7. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth.
Mark Twain
#8. [The people who run things] are so successful in the way they do it now. They could buy me off with a couple of vintage prints, they could have you do an ad, or give you a ribbon ... In capitalist countries they reward artists because we're ineffectual.
Danny Lyon
#9. Corporately contrived art product replaces inspired intellectual property with ineffectual poperty.
Vanna Bonta
#10. The greatest threat of childhood diseases lies in the dangerous and ineffectual efforts made to prevent them through mass immunisation ... There is no convincing scientific evidence that mass inoculations can be credited with eliminating any childhood disease.
Robert S. Mendelsohn
#11. We'll all be failures?"
"Yes. I don't mean only money failures, but just sort of - of ineffectual and sad, and - oh, how can I tell you?
F Scott Fitzgerald
#12. When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot. My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, My breath will not be obedient to its organs, I become a dumb man.
Walt Whitman
#13. Legislatures have no right to set up an inquisition and examine into the private opinions of men. Test-laws are useless and ineffectual, unjust and tyrannical.
Oliver Ellsworth
#14. And just then the thin boy yawned. I had labelled him as an ineffectual sort of lad but he certainly could yawn; it was a stretching, groaning, voluptuous paroxysm which drowned my words and it went on and on till he finally lay back, bleary and exhausted by the effort.
James Herriot
#15. We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed that not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#16. The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster.
Terry Eagleton
#18. Twas such a useless thing. And so unnecessary. Many had suffered for the actions of a few. Wasn't that always the way of things? The collective suffered for the actions of an inept, ineffectual leader.
Maya Banks
#19. We must go down to the very fundamentals of life. For any merely superficial ordering of life that leaves its deepest needs unsatisfied is as ineffectual as if no attempt at order had ever been made.
I-Ching
#20. She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing
F Scott Fitzgerald
#21. I've heard that phallic symbol argument before, and always from ineffectual people driven to make everyone else as helpless as they are. who's more confused, those who think weapons are sexual organs, or those who want to take everyone's sexual organs away?.
L. Neil Smith
#22. He possesses dominion over himself, and is happy, who can every day say, "I have lived." Tomorrow the heavenly father may either involve the world in dark clouds, or cheer it with clear sunshine, he will not, however, render ineffectual the things which have already taken place.
Horace
#23. Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom."
Eric Hoffer
#24. He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.
Philip K. Dick
#26. If our elaborate and dominating bodies are given to us to be denied at every turn, if our nature is always wrong and wicked, how ineffectual we are - like fishes not meant to swim.
Cyril Connolly
#27. To be absolutely honest, what I feel really bad about is that I don't feel worse. There's the ineffectual liberal's problem in a nutshell.
Michael Frayn
#28. If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
#29. I myself am a supporter of multilingualism, but multilingualism without a true understanding of universal language will only make us blind and ultimately ineffectual in realizing that very ideal.
Minae Mizumura
#30. However, let us not presume politicians are ineffectual, for whenever the bombs and napalm are falling, the mines taking off legs and the bullets punching holes in human flesh, they are always behind the firing line, deciding who should die.
Neal Asher
#32. Americans revered action and were suspicious of intellect, associating the life of the mind with the languid, ineffectual European aristocracy they had left behind.
Susan Cain
#33. I was like the Arabian who had been buried with the dead, and found a passage to life aided only by one glimmering, and seemingly ineffectual, light. I
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#34. The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
Eric Hoffer
#35. Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual
masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.
Christina Stead
#36. So hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip ... In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office.
Henry David Thoreau
#37. Probably, an increasingly desperate Bala-Tik thought as he let off yet another ineffectual blast, Solo had done it by talking all of them into a state of complete insensibility.
Alan Dean Foster
#38. The role of the patriarch is very important... Even though he may be an ineffectual one, his presence alone keeps the family together.
Siddharth Chowdhury
#39. Many very strong fathers have turned out ineffectual sons by not allowing them to grow as men.
John Noble
#40. Without intention, all these postures, these breathing practices, meditations, and the like can become little more than ineffectual gestures. When animated by intention, however, the simplest movement, the briefest meditation, and the contents of one breath cycle are made potent.
Donna Farhi
#41. [Lear] is the universal image of the unwisdom and destructiveness of paternal love at its most ineffectual, implacably persuaded of its own benignity, totally devoid of self-knowledge, and careening onward until it brings down the person it loves best, and its world as well.
Harold Bloom
#42. If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.
Paul Graham
#43. The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.
Eric Hoffer
#44. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#45. For in some ways the world was like a shopping centre, and he himself was a doubtful customer, often ineffectual, being talked into buying things he didn't want, things indeed which nobody in their right mind would want to buy.
Margaret Mahy
#46. All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
Honore De Balzac
#47. We kill with antibiotics and antiseptics, and if our slaughter is ineffectual we use surgery to expel the offending organ from our presence. We destroy the body in order to save it.
Robert Svoboda
#48. If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.
Frank Herbert
#49. But I find God to be an ineffectual shrink. He adopts the "do nothing" method of therapy. You tell him your problems and he, ah, does nothing.
Ned Vizzini
#50. Author says the ineffectual U.S. Navy of two centuries ago lost two thirds as many men to duelist bullets as to sea hazards.
Joseph Wheelan
#51. In getting older, I find myself becoming progressively more ineffectual in a lot of different ways, and part of that is down to no longer having the youthful feeling that what you're doing has any true impact.
Nick Cave
#52. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When
Henry David Thoreau
#53. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and if one of the team cannot handle the forces, everybody is going to suffer. A ritual lodge is no place for the well-meaning ineffectual.
Dion Fortune
#54. But all our attempts have proved to be singularly ineffectual, and will continue to do so as long as we try to convince ourselves and the world that it is only they, our opponents, who are all wrong, morally and philosophically.
C. G. Jung
#55. I think you have to [vote] and the reason you have to go vote is an important one, and that is because the day you vote is the day that you will feel the most ineffectual you will feel all year.
Lewis Black
#56. She closed her eyes and prayed to whichever small ineffectual god protects the hearts of women.
Kim Wright
#57. The ruthlessness born of self-seeking is ineffectual compared with the ruthlessness sustained by dedication to a holy cause. God wishes, said Calvin, that one should put aside all humanity when it is a question of striving for His glory..
Eric Hoffer
#58. The government's drug laws were at best proven ineffectual every day and at worst were misguidedly focused on supply rather than demand, randomly conceived and unevenly and unfairly enforced based on race and class, and thus intellectually and morally bankrupt. And those things all were true.
Piper Kerman
#59. For many years I have advocated 'redesigning Parliament' in a variety of ways - elect the Senate, do away with the 'confidence convention,' permit freer voting, strengthen the role of back benchers and committees, do away with ineffectual 'take note' debates, restructure question period, and so on.
Preston Manning
#60. The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative - a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see - is unacceptable.
Steve Erickson
#61. 'Nice' means nothing. Is it someone who doesn't swear and shout? I swear and shout. 'Nice' sounds ineffectual.
Michael Palin
#62. Hmm. Petty? Yes. Ineffectual? Yes. Infuriating and off-putting? Yes. Counterproductive? Yes. It's got to be a product of the French Foreign Ministry.
Glenn Reynolds
#63. People who forecast simply because "that's my job," knowing pretty well that their forecast is ineffectual, are not what I would call ethical. What they do is no different from repeating lies simply because "it's my job."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#64. There is a mortal breed most full of futility. In contempt of what is at hand, they strain into the future, hunting impossibilities on the wings of ineffectual hopes.
Pindar
