Top 1200 No Nonsense Quotes & Sayings - Page 19

Explore popular No Nonsense quotes.
Last updated on December 18, 2024.
Be as pissed off as you want to be. Don’t hold back because you think it’s unladylike or some such nonsense. We shouldn’t be shamed out of our anger. We should be using it. Using it to make change in our own lives, and using it to make change in the lives around us. (I know, I’m cheesy.) So the next time someone calls you emotional, or asks if you’re PMSing, call them on their bullshit.
Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.
It wasn’t like in the storybooks. No witches lurked at crossroads disguised as crones, waiting to reward travelers who shared their bread. Genies didn’t burst from lamps, and talking fish didn’t bargain for their lives. In all the world, there was only one place humans could get wishes: Brimstone’s shop. And there was only one currency he accepted. It wasn’t gold, or riddles, or kindness, or any other fairy-tale nonsense, and no, it wasn’t souls, either. It was weirder than any of that. It was teeth.
As a military man who has given half a century of active service I say in all sincerity that the nuclear arms race has no military purpose. Wars cannot be fought with nuclear weapons. Their existence only adds to our perils because of the illusions they have generated. There are powerful voices around the world who still give credence to the old Roman precept - if you desire peace, prepare for war. This is absolute nuclear nonsense.
Jerry Sloan was a guy that I always respected, but I thought he was mean. Like, he was a guy that was just no nonsense. When coach and I got closer during the Olympics, I said, 'Coach, I always just thought you were this mean guy, but it was really nice to get to know you and your family.'
There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation's public school system entitled "Savage Inequalities," Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.
I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.
The people of Ankh-Morpork had a straightforward, no-nonsense approach to entertainment, and while they were looking forward to seeing a dragon slain, they'd be happy to settle instead for seeing someone being baked alive in his own armour. You didn't get the chance every day to see someone baked alive in their own armour. It would be something for the children to remember.
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order... we are caught and entangled in aimless experience... Only when all props and crutches are broken, and no cover from the rear offers even the slightest hope of security, does it become possible for us to experience an archetype that up till then had lain hidden behind the meaningful nonsense played out by the anima. This is the archetype of meaning, just as the anima is the archetype of life itself.
I believe that. But I want you to know something — when it comes to all this enemies nonsense, I’m out. I am a neutral country. I am Switzerland. I refuse to be affected by territorial disputes between mythical creatures. Jacob is family. You are . . . well, not exactly the love of my life, because I expect to love you for much longer than that. The love of my existence. I don’t care who’s a werewolf and who’s a vampire. If Angela turns out to be a witch, she can join the party, too.
Over the past eighteen years I have acted as a scientific consultant to the U.S. Air Force on the subject of unidentified flying objects - UFO's. As a consequence of my work on the voluminous air force files and, to a greater extent, of personal investigation of many puzzling cases and interviews with witnesses of good repute, I have long been aware that the subject of UFO's could not be dismissed as mere nonsense.
Some critics of racing witlessly claim that spectators only attend to see someone die. This is utter and complete nonsense. I have been at numerous races where death is present. When a driver dies, the crowd symbolically dies, too. They come to see action at the brink: ultimate risk taking and the display of skill and bravery embodied in the sport's immortals like Nuvolari, Foyt, and thousands of others who operate at the ragged edge.
I think age is sometimes just a number. But it's a real joy. Young actors don't come with any of the baggage that we load ourselves up with. They're not worried about their profile, they're not worried about how good they look, or all the nonsense. They just tell the story and ask: "What happens in this scene?" Well, I'll do that then. And professionally it's good for you because it means that you're forced to do the same thing, and that's always a good thing.
As the field of coaching finds its way to becoming a mature discipline, James Flaherty's dedicated field research, study, and sound articulation offers a definitive ground and a sensibility of genuine care. At the core this book offers a way of thinking about human beings that makes action and practice central to learning. This is a no-nonsense, generous, pragmatic book that belongs on the shelf every coach, novice or veteran.
We Marxists believe that a revolution will also take place in other countries. But it will take place only when the revolutionaries in those countries think it possible, or necessary. The export of revolution is nonsense. Every country will make its own revolution if it wants to, and if it does not want to, there will be no revolution.
I rang Brian [Mulroney] up. I said, "What's this bloody nonsense. You've got a wheat trade with Iraq and you won't come aboard?" I said, "We've got a bloody big wheat trade too, so get your priorities right." And he said, "Okay, Bob. I'll come." I rang George and he was very appreciative.
Imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have a chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.
Calvin: Isn't it strange that evolution would give us a sense of humor? When you think about it, it's weird that we have a physiological response to absurdity. We laugh at nonsense. We like it. We think it's funny. Don't you think it's odd that we appreciate absurdity? Why would we develop that way? How does it benefit us? Hobbes: I suppose if we couldn't laugh at things that don't make sense, we couldn't react to a lot of life.
Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It's time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth's climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.
There is no greater power on this earth than story.” Will paced the length of the room. “People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense—words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions—words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.” Will grabbed the sheaf of newspaper clippings he kept in a stack on his desk. “This, and these”—he gestured to the library’s teeming shelves—“they’re a testament to the country’s rich supernatural history.
People often talk about Hispanics. You know, I have more Hispanics come up to me telling me, 'Listen, I can't wait for your father to be president. He's gonna bring jobs back to the United States. He's gonna end the nonsense. He's gonna create good trade deals. He's gonna create better education. He's gonna create a better family structure.'
Then she told herself to stop her nonsense. If you looked for things to make you feel hurt and wretched and unnecessary, you were certain to find them, more easily each time, so easily, soon, that you did not even realize you had gone out searching. Women alone often developed into experts at the practice. She must never join their dismal league.
Films take too long. There's too much BS, too much nonsense. If I want to do a play, I just call the theater, whether it's here, or in Paris or Mexico or Spain or London or whatever, and say, "I want to do this, are you interested?" They'll answer the next day. With a movie, it's all, "Oh, I see this film as blah blah blah." They don't know what you're talking about, they don't care.
The claim that democracy and efficiency are contradictory is nonsense. That's evident in the history of democracy itself, because it is only democrats who were and continue to be capable of learning from mistakes. A more appropriate question is to ask whether a country like China, which has been so incredibly successful economically, is actually inefficient in light of its environmental destruction and its corruption. In China's perception, however, the democratic model is doubtlessly inferior.
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense. — © Vladimir Nabokov
The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.
This is all very fine, but it won't do-Anatomy-botany-Nonsense! Sir, I know an old woman in Covent Garden, who understands botany better, and as for anatomy, my butcher can dissect a joint full as well; no, young man, all that is stuff; you must go to the bedside, it is there alone you can learn disease! Comment to Hans Sloane on Robert Boyle's letter of introduction describing Sloane as a 'ripe scholar, a good botanist, a skilful anatomist'.
Yeah, we don't consider many stupid things. I mean, we get rid of 'em fast...Just getting rid of the nonsense -- just figuring out that if people call you and say, 'I've got this great, wonderful idea', you don't spend 10 minutes once you know in the first sentence that it isn't a great, wonderful idea...Don't be polite and go through the whole process.
Ring around the rosie. A pocket full of posie. Ashes ashes, we all fall down. Some people say that this poem is about the Black Death, the fourteenth-century plague that killed 100-million people... Sadly, though, most experts think this is nonsense... How can I be so sure about this rhyme when all the experts disagree? Because I ate the kid who made it up.
One good thing that comes from living the nomadic life demanded by an expedition is that one sheds the fake skin donned from living too closely among society. For those of us who live for the freedom of such a lifestyle, that skin is dry and itchy and ill fitting. From my observances, that skin is much like a callus caused by the pure irritation of being forced to spend so much time with one's fellow man. Thank God I am spared such nonsense.
To his enemies the householder must be a hero. Them he must resist. That is the duty of the householder. He must not sit down in a corner and weep, and talk nonsense about non-resistance. If he does not show himself a hero to his enemies he has not done his duty.
We are all so immersed in our own technology bubbles that we're ignoring so many important things. We're all online arguing over nuance and nonsense, and everybody's so incensed and upset about things that ultimately mean nothing while we are destroying our environment. While we're racing towards Armageddon, we're all online arguing about what Beyonce said at some award.
Everyone from the pope to some hobo thinks, "I'm a human being. What am I doing here?" You can't get carried away with fame and fortune and all that. It's all nonsense. The whole pop-star side of it is all fun and good, but you don't get anywhere without putting in the hours. I get so fulfilled when we play a song live that we spent hours working on. It's all cool. Fame is something to have fun with, but you shouldn't take it too seriously because it is bollocks.
To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.
The truth was that I'd been spending years running away from myself. I hid myself in drama, silliness, stupidity, banality. So afraid to grow up. So afraid to involve myself in relationships where I might be expected to give the same love I got - instead of sixth-grade shenanigans. I bored myself with all the when I grow up nonsense, but I was worried it would never happen even as I longed for it.
You must make your choice: either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Man has got to take charge of Man.... Then real education, including pre-natal education. By real education I mean one that has no 'take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense. A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly: whatever he or his parents try to do about it. Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain.
It's nonsense. If, in fact, putting one out of four people in the state of Kentucky on Medicaid created 12,000 jobs and $30 billion in economic prosperity, why wouldn't we put every single person in the state of Kentucky on Medicaid? We'd create 48,000 jobs by that logic and $120 billion worth of economic advantage.
I, too, have felt that the war goes on and on. When my son, Ian, died at El Alamein-- side by side with... visitors offering their condolences, thinking to comfort me, said, "Life goes on." What nonsense, I thought, of course it doesn't. It's death that goes on; Ian is dead now and will be dead tomorrow and nexe year and forever. There's no end to that. But perhaps there will be an end to the sorrow of it.
What does it mean to be yourself?” he asked. “If it means to do what you think you ought to do, then you’re doing that already. If it means to act like you’re exempt from society’s influence, that’s the worst advice in the world; you would probably stop bathing and wearing clothes. The advice to ‘be yourself’ is obviously nonsense. But our brains accept this tripe as wisdom because it is more comfortable to believe we have a strategy for life than to believe we have no idea how to behave.
Donald Trump claims - he did interview after the debate where he said, well, gosh, you can't find Americans to do these jobs to be waiters or waitresses or bellhops.What ridiculous nonsense. "The New York Times" reported roughly 300 Americans applied for those jobs. He only hired 17. Instead, he brought in foreign workers, because they're captive workers, because you can pay them less because they can't leave.
Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.
People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it.
My dreams are the usual incoherent nonsense. Like most writers, at some point in my career I thought, well, I have these great dreams but I always forget them in the morning so I’ll leave a pad on my bedside table so I can write it down, and then you have some incredible dream and you write it down and the next morning you wake up and you’ve written ‘purple socks’.
The idea that a reporter has to be 'fair and balanced' is ridiculous. The fact is, the truth usually is not fair and it's not balanced. Truth stands by itself. And the idea that something called fair and balanced is a substitute for truth and fact is mindless nonsense that has captured much of the national media.
Why keep in touch with them? That's what I want to know,' asked Larry despairingly. 'What satisfaction does it give you? They're all either fossilized or mental.' 'Indeed, they're not mental,' said Mother indignantly. 'Nonsense, Mother... Look at Aunt Bertha, keeping flocks of imaginary cats... and there's Great-Uncle Patrick, who wanders about nude and tells complete strangers how he killed whales with a penknife...They're all bats.
I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.
Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions, on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.
There is no mission, nor interest to convert, and yet I believe that if this state of consciousness could become more universal, the pretentious nonsense which passes for the serious business of the world would dissolve in laughter. We should see at once that the high ideals for which we are killing and regimenting each other are empty and abstract substiutes for the unheeded miracles that surround us - not only in the obvious wonders of nature but also in the overwhelming uncanny fact of mere existence.
Bes had indeed put on his ugly outfit. He climbed onto the roof of the limbo and stood there, legs planted, arms akimbo, like superman-exept with only the underwear. I wasn't sure what to say except: "Put some clothes on!" "These children are under my protection," Bes insisted. "I don't know you," I said, "I never met you before today." "Nonsense. You expressly asked for my attention." "I didn't ask for the Speedo Patrol!
Human beings act in a great variety of irrational ways, but all of them seem to be capable, if given a fair chance, of making a reasonable choice in the light of available evidence. Democratic institutions can be made to work only if all concerned do their best to impart knowledge and to encourage rationality. But today, in the world's most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.
Have you ever considered how much pure stuff and nonsense surrounds this subject of interior decoration? Probably not. Almost everyone believes that there is something deep and mysterious about it or that you have to know all sorts of complicated details about periods before you can lift a finger. Well, you don't. Decorating is just sheer fun: a delight in color, an awareness of balance, a feeling for lighting, a sense of style, a zest for life and an amused enjoyment of the smart accessories of the moment.
Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I cannot soon give a solution to these questions ... It was clear that in the United States there was a development not of the best, but of the middle and worst sides of European civilization; the notorious general voting, the tendency to politics... all the same as in Europe. A new dawn is not to be seen on this side of the ocean.
They've gotta stop reporting wind chill. That's nonsense. It really is. I don't know where they came up with it, why they came up with it, but it's a lie. They come on, "Well, it's 27 degrees today, but with the wind chill, it's minus 3." Well, then it's minus 3, asshole! I don't need to know what the weather was like if the conditions were perfect!
We're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.
The last level of metaphor in the Alice books is this: that life, viewed rationally and without illusion, appears to be a nonsense tale told by an idiot mathematician. At the heart of things science finds only a mad, never-ending quadrille of Mock Turtle Waves and Gryphon Particles. For a moment the waves and particles dance in grotesque, inconceivably complex patterns capable of reflecting on their own absurdity.
The 'Rise, Rebel, Resist' video is a reflection of the outrage the American people are feeling at the absurd hypocrisy, and overwhelming nonsense and balderdash plaguing Washington D.C. It uses a bit of satire and a bit of wishful thinking to form this powerful amalgam of imagery that nourishes and empowers the living art of the song. Our message is clear: Either these elected officials do their job and protect the rights and lives of ALL Americans or be prepared to face the consequences.
What happens a lot with songwriting is that a melody or rhythm or something stays with you like catching a cold. And during that time what happens is that I can then fit things on to it, it all fits and glues together. Sometimes it's crazy cos it can almost be anything. But if you catch the cold then the nonsense makes sense. It's like you're getting beamed it, like with a ouija board and something's pushing your hand. It's not a pleasant experience necessarily.
The drilling idea is spherically senseless - it's senseless from whatever point of view you look at it. It'd take 10 years to bring any oil online, and it would probably go to Japan. It sure wouldn't help gasoline prices here. All the economists say gasoline is still too cheap in the United States anyway. So here we're having this huge debate over offshore drilling that is just straightforward nonsense, which won't surprise you.
It is better to use this available energy for your observation, inner observation. Just watch everything - and it is good because you have nothing much to do. You have not to go here and there and visit people and become a member of the Rotary Club. You are saved from so much nonsense that I felt really jealous of you! Enjoy it! And feel sorry for everybody else! They are poorer and you can become immensely rich. And the art of that richness is witnessing. Witnessing is another name for meditation.
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