Top 73 Utilitarian Quotes
#1. Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
Claude Debussy
#2. Unlike the messier MySpace, Facebook has a cleaner and easier-to-customize interface and is much more, as Zuckerberg once described it to me, 'utilitarian.' I would call it useful and more relevant than other competitors, and a white-label version would likely be a hit.
Kara Swisher
#3. More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
Michel De Certeau
#4. It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
Charles Baudelaire
#5. To put it most simply, the evangelical ethos is activistic, populist, pragmatic, and utilitarian. It allows little space for broader or deeper intellectual effort because it is dominated by the urgencies of the moment.
Mark A. Noll
#6. A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the lot of the masses.
Irving Babbitt
#7. The examination system, and the fact that instruction is treated mainly as a training for a livelihood, leads the young to regard knowledge from a purely utilitarian point of view as the road to money, not as the gateway to wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
#8. Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age.
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe
#9. No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly."
Edmund Snow Carpenter
#10. His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism.
Andrew Pettegree
#11. Helen was beautiful in the way a supercomputer was beautiful: sleek with elegant but utilitarian styling, full of top-notch technological know-how, far too expensive for most people to possess.
Maggie Stiefvater
#12. I am not one of these people who spend a ton of time in front on my computer; I see it as very utilitarian.
Donny Deutsch
#13. Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.
David Lodge
#14. Another ethical ideal, the utilitarian principle, maintains that the ultimate criterion of an ethical decision is the balance of positive consequences over negative consequences produced by an action.
Philip A. Becnel IV
#15. I've always dressed the same. I've never made a fashion mistake. I've always worn utilitarian. I started my collection because I wanted certain specific things, but before that it was vintage and classic Brooks Brothers.
Thom Browne
#16. Our society is so fragmented, our family lives so sundered by physical and emotional distance, our friendships so sporadic, our intimacies so 'in-between' things and often so utilitarian, that there are few places where we can feel truly safe.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
#17. The dining hall in our section of campus was like something out of an Ayn Rand novel: big, utilitarian, and impersonal.
Kirstie Collins Brote
#18. The only constant in the soul of man is inconstancy; anything and everything else can pass out of fashion
even something as utilitarian as a hill stuffed full of corpses.
Scott Lynch
#19. Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life.
Aristotle.
#20. Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself.
Jonathan Kozol
#21. I would, if I could, always feed to music. The singularly graceless action of thus filling one's body with roots and dead animals and powdered grain is given some significance then. One can perform as a ritual what one is shamed to do as a utilitarian action ...
Winifred Holtby
#22. The manager comes to see all relationships with others by a strict utilitarian calculus and, insofar as he dares, breaks friendships and alliances accordingly.
Robert Jackall
#23. I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art.
John D'Agata
#24. Books were not quite an escape for me. And they were never my friends. They were so much more than that - utilitarian and unbreakable. They were my armor, my wall against the world.
Annika Martin
#25. CONCERNED AS HE is that the usable be put to use, that there be no waste, still there is nothing utilitarian or mechanistic about Mr. Lapp's farm - or his mind. His aim, it seems, is not that the place should be put to the fullest use, but that it should have the most abundant life.
Wendell Berry
#26. To recognize that automobiles are there to get you from point A to point B. They are utilitarian devices, not expressions of social status.
Randy Pausch
#27. Have you ever taken a good look at a public garbage can in Paris, a paving stone in Rio de Janeiro, or a doorway in Dublin? Trust me -- the man or woman responsible for making those utilitarian objects was creating art.
Shawn Coyne
#28. I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener.
Sufjan Stevens
#29. I'd be the first person to say I can't write dialogue. My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward. I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic.
George Lucas
#30. The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#32. I do all the cooking in our family. I'm a utilitarian cook, rather than an adventurous one - I only have about 15 recipes in my repertoire that I rotate - but I love being able to go down to the river and catch a 30 lb. salmon, then grill it on the barbecue.
Patrick Duffy
#33. James: Mugs can be used for all sorts of things. Tea, soup, ice cream. But after my mug stage, I kept with my utilitarian impulse and pursued plate making.
Lucy: How big were your plates?
James: They were plate-size.
Kristen Tracy
#34. I have a utilitarian approach to dressing; as long as I quite like it and it covers me up, I don't care what it is.
Jo Brand
#35. Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.
Aristotle.
#36. As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
Terry Teachout
#37. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.
Nicholas G. Carr
#38. Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren't entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself.
Jonathan Kozol
#39. I really like the idea of being utilitarian. My dream is to edit down my wardrobe and be very Japanese, where you have one rolling rack and it's like your four T-shirts, your five dresses, your two pairs of jeans.
Erin Wasson
#40. A votary of ahimsa cannot subscribe to the utilitarian formula (of the greatest good of the greatest number). He will strive for the greatest good of all and die in the attempt to realize that ideal.
Mahatma Gandhi
#42. In other words, knowledge of the external world begins with an immediate utilisation of things, whereas knowledge of self is stopped by this purely practical and utilitarian contact.
Jean Piaget
#43. If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him.
Evelyn Waugh
#44. I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise.
Peter Singer
#45. Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A
Kevin Kelly
#46. The utilitarian morality does recognise in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. It only refuses to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good. A sacrifice which does not increase, or tend to increase, the sum total of happiness, it considers as wasted.
John Stuart Mill
#47. The ability to expend energy, especially in the form of other people's labour, in non-utilitarian ways, is the most basic and universally understood symbol of power.
Bruce G. Trigger
#48. The utilitarian argument against fiestas, parades, carnivals, and general public merriment is that they produce nothing. But they do: they produce society. They renew the reasons why we might want to belong and the feeling that we do.
Rebecca Solnit
#49. We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing. We have forgotten that water can cleanse, that fire can purify, and that the Earth is mother to us all.
Oscar Wilde
#50. I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.
Dave Eggers
#51. I think New York style is unique because there's something resourceful about it. Utilitarian. Whereas in Los Angeles, I find people make their cars a day closet. Which, I guess, is resourceful in a different way.
Vincent Piazza
#52. In a utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.
(Frauds on the Fairies, 1853)
Charles Dickens
#53. Somebody who eats twice as much factory-farmed products as he or she needs to is clearly doing twice as much damage to the planet. From a utilitarian point of view, that's twice as bad.
Peter Singer
#54. For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.
Ama Ata Aidoo
#55. To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality
John Stuart Mill
#56. There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#57. When he adopted Western methods, it was in a purely utilitarian spirit. He gave no thought to the principles on which our civilisation is based. It was the finished product he was after and not the process.
Homer B. Hulbert
#58. It's music as wallpaper, utilitarian, music as Prozac or Xanax to control how you feel. Music as aerosol room freshener.
Chuck Palahniuk
#59. [Science] is the literature of God written on the stars-the trees-the rocks-and more important because [of] its marked utilitarian character.
James A. Garfield
#60. A cheap, utilitarian clock hung on the wall; its secondhand clicked inconsistently - slow, fast, fast, slow - as if it were spitting out Morse code.
Anonymous
#61. To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.
Peter Singer
#62. And what's Cristiano's style? With his constant search for perfection, he fits the 'classical' mould. He has constantly refined his play, eliminating even the tiniest flourishes to perfect the most utilitarian form and winning formula. Both he and Messi are products of their footballing
Luca Caioli
#63. Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom.
John Carroll
#64. During that year by the railroad embankment, at the time of my father's complete disaster, distance meant for us not only some faraway lyrical splendor but also the exceedingly utilitarian idea of running away, the deliverance from fear and hunger.
Danilo Kis
#65. The practical common-sense of modern society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#66. Nature and Passion are powerful, but they are also full of grief. True happiness would have the calm and order of bourgeois routine without its utilitarian ignobility and boredom.
W. H. Auden
#67. But on a utilitarian level, I realize that to try to accomplish the greatest good for the greatest number of people, sometimes we have to become salesmen for what we believe, and part of being a salesman is being effective.
Moby
#68. However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college's senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber
Bill Bryson
#69. Forests, beyond offering us their plainly utilitarian wealth, have to perform vast physiological functions in the great economy of nature, by contributing predominantly in the empire of vegetation to the liberation of oxygen.
Ferdinand Von Mueller
#70. You might argue on utilitarian grounds that the best way for the world to work is for everybody to take care of themselves first. And people have made that argument. But I just think we would be so much better off if we could care for distant others even a little bit more.
Paul Bloom
#71. No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice.
John C. Wright
#72. The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality.
John Rawls
#73. If I live to be old enough, I may sit down under some bush, the last left in the utilitarian world, and feel thankful that intellect in its march has spared one vestige of the ancient forest for me to die by.
Thomas Cole
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