Useful Quotes

#1. She's got no charisma of any kind [but] I can imagine her being mildly useful to a low-rank porn director.

Christopher Hitchens

#2. Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere.

Gregory Benford

#3. We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.

Frederick Douglass

#4. For all right judgment of any man or things it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Thomas Carlyle

#5. Sometimes, even if there was no useful advice to give, I saw that listening still helped.

Sonia Sotomayor

#6. A data visualization should only be beautiful when beauty can promote understanding in some way without undermining it in another. Is beauty sometimes useful? Certainly. Is beauty always useful? Certainly not.

Alberto Cairo

#7. Google has placed its faith in data, while Apple worships the power of design. This dichotomy made the two companies complementary. Apple would ship the phones and computers, while Google would provide Maps, Search, YouTube, and other web tools that made the devices more useful.

Ben Parr

#8. Knives can be quite useful to a lady of quality. Swords are for men; they are too easily caught in the skirts.

Gail Carriger

#9. What is there to confess that's worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant,

Fernando Pessoa

#10. Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant - nothing useful ... Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful - if that ever happens anymore.

Gregory Maguire

#11. The true order of learning should be first, what is necessary; second, what is useful, and third, what is ornamental. To reverse this arrangement is like beginning to build at the top of the edifice.

Lydia Sigourney

#12. He who would be useful, strong, and happy must cease to be a passive receptacle for the negative, beggarly, and impure streams of thought.

James Allen

#13. 'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.

C.S. Lewis

#14. People who are in a position of finding out that they're at risk for some illness, whether it's breast cancer, or heart disease, are afraid to get that information - even though it might be useful to them - because of fears that they'll lose their health insurance or their job.

Francis Collins

#15. It all turns on affection now," said Margaret. "Affection. Don't you see?... And affection, when reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your notebook, Mr. Mansbridge. It's a useful formula.

E. M. Forster

#16. Virtual reality is a denial of reality. We need to be open to the powers of imagination, which brings something useful to reality. Virtual reality can imprison people.

Hayao Miyazaki

#17. I never think about genre when I work. I've written fantasy, science fiction, supernatural fiction, and am now working on a suspense novel. Genres are mostly useful as a marketing tool, and to help booksellers known where to shelve a book.

Elizabeth Hand

#18. To want a job that exercises a man's capacities in an enterprise useful to society, is utopian anarcho-syndicalism; it is labor invading the domain of management. No labor leader has entertained such a thought in our generation. Management has the "sole prerogative" to determine the products.

Paul Goodman

#19. To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.

George Eliot

#20. (Propaganda) proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, by creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes - The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth

Jacques Ellul

#21. Today, I donated all my organs for use and research..
I am feeling strangely 'useful

Abha Maryada Banerjee

#22. To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.

Saint Teresa Of Avila

#23. Of all the purposes of education, I think the most useful is this: It prepares you to keep yourself entertained. It gives you a better chance of an interesting job.

Roger Ebert

#24. Of late the three of them wouldn't even let him dry the dishes because he'd dropped too many of them on the floor. He'd done that on purpose, since it was useful to be considered inept when it came to chore division,

Margaret Atwood

#25. My fundamental philosophy is that you owe it to society to transfer to them any knowledge you have that might be useful.

Leroy Hood

#26. There is a certain imperiousness, in the manner of speaking and in actions, which makes itself felt everywhere, and soon wins attention and respect. This commanding quality is useful in all affairs, and even for obtaining what we ask for.

Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

#27. However useful may be the National Parks and Forests of the West for those affording the Pullman fare to reach them, what is needed by the bulk of the American population is something nearer home.

Benton MacKaye

#28. "Freedom, individualism, authenticity and being yourself so long as you don't hurt another's physical person or property: Sustained success comes only when you take what's unique about you and figure out how to make it useful!"

Marcus Buckingham

#29. Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

Voltaire

#30. value is created when a person makes something useful and shares it with the world.

Chris Guillebeau

#31. Be careful that what you write does not offend anybody or cause problems within the company. The safest approach is to remove all useful information.

Scott Adams

#32. Take care of the waste on the farm and turn it into useful channels' should be the slogan of every farmer.

George Washington

#33. The Price of Security is Insecurity--Until It's Not Useful

Dan Harris

#34. It's simply, gentlemen" - and when she raised her dark eyes they had a slight sheen in them - "I would so like something useful to do.

Gail Carriger

#35. There is no such thing as garbage, just useful stuff in the wrong place.

Alex Steffen

#36. I found college useful for a lot of other reasons. It exposed me to a great many influences I wouldn't otherwise have encountered, and gave me a lot of time with some very intelligent people whose thoughts are still with me.

Walter Jon Williams

#37. In every case, I find pre-planning noble, but not always that useful in comedy. You know comedy once you're doing it.

John Mulaney

#38. The bright red sap of the fei plant is meant to be useful for blood ailments." "The signature of all things," Alma murmured.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#39. Place-based initiatives can provide a useful framework to judge our progress in raising people out of poverty. They allow us to see whether or not a neighborhood is improving and its residents are living better.

Henry Cisneros

#40. It is simply untrue that all our institutions are evil, ... that all politicians are mere opportunists, that all aspects of university life are corrupt. Having discovered an illness, it's not terribly useful to prescribe death as a cure.

George McGovern

#41. Grassroots organizing tends to be most available to big campaigns, but it's actually most useful to small ones. You can't win a presidential campaign without going on TV, but you can win a local election simply by organizing your community. NationBuilder levels the playing field.

Joe Green

#42. Extraordinary individuals take one step back and two steps forward with most every challenge-and sometimes two steps back to one step forward. They harvest useful lessons and knowledge from what doesn't work, and they display a remarkable resiliency; and ability to bounce back from adversity.

Jerry I. Porras

#43. The fact that my clothing has been visually available to other people I do not find upsetting. The body is another matter. It is mine; I have found it useful; but it is an avatar.

Lionel Shriver

#44. So, what do they pay you for ... exactly?"
Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things."
"What kind of things?"
"You know."
No, I can't even begin to imagine."
"Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog."
"Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?

Kate Atkinson

#45. I think there's a real tension between capitalism and morality. That's not to say these systems aren't powerful and useful, but to assume that capitalism can somehow assure moral behavior or character, that's just a pipe dream.

Michael Pollan

#46. It's obviously tricky to convert cellulose to a useful biofuel. I think actually the most efficient way to use cellulose is to burn it in a co-generation power plant. That will yield the most energy and that is something you can do today.

Elon Musk

#47. Money's fine if it enables you to enjoy your life and to be useful to other people. But as something that is a means to an end, no, it's useless.

Alan Moore

#48. I'd made her American, and something about her relationship with the luggage and the raincoat and the purse reinforced this, the casual entitlement to useful things.

Glen Duncan

#49. Square root of a cosine? How is that ever going to be useful?

Aprilynne Pike

#50. Please yourself, not others ... It must first work for you if it is ever to be useful to others.

Paul Laseau

#51. Since my high school years, I have been interested in history, especially in Roman history, a topic on which I have read rather extensively. The Latin that goes with this kind of interest proved useful when I had to generate a few terms and names for cell biology.

George Emil Palade

#52. In my case, adulthood itself was not an advance, although it was a useful waymark.

Nicholson Baker

#53. That's a queer sentiment.' William shrugged. 'Dying for your country is a good bit less useful than living for it.

Hilary Rhodes

#54. The instinct to tell our children that they are better than someone else's children, based on nothing more than the color of their skin, is now a fossilized aberration that serves no useful purpose.

Aberjhani

#55. If we have not developed a reservoir of spiritual wealth, no amount of money is likely to make us happy. Spiritual wealth provides faith. It gives us love. It brings and expands wisdom. Spiritual wealth leads to happiness because it guides us into useful or loving relationships.

John Templeton

#56. The unrealistic nature of these tales (which narrowminded rationalists object to) is an important device, because it makes obvious that the fairy tales' concern is not useful information about the external world, but the inner process taking place in an individual.

Bruno Bettelheim

#57. The savage prays to a stone that he calls a god, while the Christian prays to a god he calls a spirit, and the prayers of both are equally useful.

Robert Green Ingersoll

#58. We're not interested in anyone saying the sky's falling, but David Nabhan is a rational man who has studied earthquakes seriously and has intelligent, useful information to offer.

Whitley Strieber

#59. Reality is a flux, an endless becoming that is beyond words and language - all language is metaphor, useful to us but ultimately detached from reality.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#60. I hope the necessity will at length be seen of establishing institutions, here as in Europe, where every branch of science, useful at this day, may be taught in it's highest degrees.

Thomas Jefferson

#61. The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.

Marissa Mayer

#62. As useful as websites and journals are, there's real value in books, too.

Jamais Cascio

#63. To tell the truth is useful to those to whom it is spoken, but disadvantageous to those who tell it, because it makes them disliked.

Blaise Pascal

#64. E governance can bring minimum government and maximum governance. It is easy, effective and economic governance. It brings empowerment, equity and efficiency of the economy. It is a very useful field that can be the greatest problem solver of the people.

Narendra Modi

#65. I am convinced that in the upcoming chapter of the struggle, I can be more useful to the inevitable change that will soon come to Cuba, to Cuba's freedom, as a private citizen dedicated to helping the heroes within Cuba.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart

#66. Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Jules Verne

#67. The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths.

Giuseppe Mazzini

#68. Magic is wild, dangerous stuff. You never realize how useful limitations are until it's much too late.

Lev Grossman

#69. A potentially useful property of forecasts based on cointegration is that when extended some way ahead, the forecasts of the two series will form a constant ratio, as is expected by some asymptotic economic theory.

Clive Granger

#70. Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II.

Warren Christopher

#71. I think my favorite medium is music, with my main tools being my voice and a guitar. But I do find every other medium extremely fulfilling and useful in helping everything I do. Sometimes I need to make a song just for a comic. All of the art and mediums are connected for me.

Gerard Way

#72. Useless people are not improved by giving them the impression they are useful.

John Barnes

#73. For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion.

Florence Nightingale

#74. Hard words are very rarely useful. Real firmness is good for every thing. Strut is good for nothing.

Alexander Hamilton

#75. I think there's only so many people that can take care of themselves, and can take care of other people. And the rest of the people ... they're useful in terms of compost for the whole planet, you know.

Bill Murray

#76. One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

Edith Wharton

#77. Take what's useful, discard what is not.

Bruce Lee

#78. Another useful point to bear in mind: What qualities has nature given us to counter that defect? As an antidote to unkindness it gave us kindness. And other qualities to balance other flaws.

Marcus Aurelius

#79. There has been much debate on the matter, but the present state of understanding is that no useful information can ever emerge from a black hole."
~"Understanding Space & Time

Alastair Reynolds

#80. We live in a consumer culture, and Black Friday is like the July 4th of that culture. It might be good not to live in this culture, but it terms of what we can do to make people safer at big sales, it seems more useful to try to avoid dangerous crowd conditions.

John Seabrook

#81. Live your life significantly. Contribute to a meaningful and useful positive changes and growth towards humanity.

Angelica Hopes

#82. Melt all the tanks in the world and make them rubbish bins. They will be much more useful for the humanity!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#83. It's a useful habit never to believe more than half of what people tell you, and not to concern yourself with the rest. Rather keep your mind free and your path your own.

Halldor Laxness

#84. Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

W. Somerset Maugham

#85. Trivial, - there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation, - are useful.

Victor Hugo

#86. Of course, speed is most useful if it is in the correct direction;

David J. Anderson

#87. One major but by no means final protocol that is very useful for ministry planning is to deploy a ministry readiness worksheet (see Figure 6.1) for each educational activity of the church or Christian organization.

James Estep Jr.

#88. What an encouragement to realize that God has reserved you and me for a special task in His great work. In His hands we're not only useful, but priceless.

Joni Eareckson Tada

#89. Understanding how or why is seldom as useful as understanding that things are.

Robin Hobb

#90. One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader.

Horace

#91. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

Arthur Conan Doyle

#92. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on

Jane Austen

#93. Men seldom act from a correct sense of what may be harmful or useful to them.

Giacomo Leopardi

#94. As a rule he had found it useful as well as prudent to trust his fellow man to do the right thing only when the wrong thing failed to present itself.

Philip Caputo

#95. Nature is thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode.It offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful. Man is never weary of working it up.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#96. Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational ... architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.

Roland Barthes

#97. And last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals, Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low, requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late when justice is not done. What is useful will last, what is hurtful will sink.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#98. I want to preserve a certain unknowing about my own poems - perhaps because unknowing is in itself a useful poetic thirst. To move the perimeter of saying outside my own boundaries is one reason I write.

Jane Hirshfield

#99. Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive.
They are supersensitive.
They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas,
long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

Kurt Vonnegut

#100. It is the triumph of civilization that at last communities have obtained such a mastery over natural laws that they drive and control them. The winds, the water, electricity, all aliens that in their wild form were dangerous, are now controlled by human will, and are made useful servants.

Henry Ward Beecher