Top 1200 No Nonsense Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

We tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. ... Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on your knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves.

The aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather - not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot be thought). It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.

I am amused when goody-goodies proclaim, from the safety of their armchairs, that children are naturally prejudice-free, that they only learn to "hate" from listening to bigoted adults. Nonsense. Tolerance is a learned trait, like riding a bike or playing the piano. Those of us who actually live among children, who see them in their natural environment, know the truth: Left to their own devices, children will gang up on and abuse anyone who is even slightly different from the norm.

But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.

We also heard the usual old nonsense that banning hunting would affect employment if we abolished crime we would put all the police out of work. If we abolished ill-health we would put all the nurses and doctors out of work. Will anybody argue that we should preserve crime and ill-health in order to keep people in jobs?

The time must come inevitably when mankind shall surmount the imbecility of religion, as it has surmounted the imbecility of religion's ally, magic. It is impossible to imagine this world being really civilized so long as so much nonsense survives. In even its highest forms religion embraces concepts that run counter to all common sense. It can be defended only by making assumptions and adopting rules of logic that are never heard of in any other field of human thinking.

As musicians it's often difficult. You go to a dinner party and most people treat you like some kind of exotic animal and in a way like you don't have any problems and that it's all fantastic and glamorous and that you wake up in the morning, you kick the groupies out of bed, you roll onto the floor onto a needle, right, which fills you with a lovely substance, you roll into the gutter and you stare at the moon and out comes beautiful poetry. The fact of the matter is that that's nonsense. It's a lot of hard work.

I turned down Halloween parties every year, where people wanted zombies raised at the stroke of midnight or some such nonsense. The scarier my reputation got, the more people wanted me to come be scary for them. I'd told Bert I could always go and threaten to shoot all the partygoers, that'd be scary. Bert had not been amused. But he had stopped asking me to do parties.

Back in August, I wrote a post about the supposed race to the bottom with ebooks, refuting some nonsense written by an establishment bonehead. This meme won't die. People are still convinced that new ebooks are going to be priced at ten cents, and writers will starve, and this will cause a second Great Depression where banks will close and people will be forced to buy Kindles with food stamps, and then the earth will enter another ice age where all the bunnies will freeze to death.

The problem right now is that central banks have not normalized their balance sheet since 2009. They're trying, but it's not even close. If we had another crisis tomorrow, and you had to do QE4 and QE5, how could you do that when you're already at $4 trillion? They might have to turn to the IMF or SDR or to Gold. Then, if you go back to the gold standard, you have to get the price right. People say there's not enough gold to support a gold standard. That's nonsense. There's always enough gold, it's just a question of price.

Liberals have created, and the minority leadership has exploited, a community of dependent people, unaware of the true route to prosperity and happiness: self-reliance and self-investment. Instead, people are told that American is unjust, unfair, and full of disadvantages. They are told that their only hope is for government to fix their problems. What has happened is that generations of people have bought into this nonsense and as result have remained hopelessly mired in poverty and despair -- because the promised solutions don't work. And they will never work -- they never have.

At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

All religions, plainly and simply, cannot be true. Some beliefs are false, and we know them to be false. So it does no good to put a halo on the notion of tolerance as if everything could be equally true. To deem all beliefs equally true is sheer nonsense for the simple reason that to deny that statement would also, then, be true. But if the denial of the statement is also true, then all religions are not true.

But there is no sole person for another's heart. Souls cannot be broken and then completed by another. That's not healthy, nor wise. There are infinite possibilities as there are infinite people and some matches are better than others...Just don't say that you'll die without the other one or that you'll never love again or that you're not whole-That's the stuff of Romeo and Juliet, hasty nonsense, and you know how well that turned out...Just don't be desperate about it. That's where souls go wrong, when they think they don't have choices. The heart must make choices.

It is almost impossible to translate verbally and well at the same time; for the Latin (a most severe and compendious language) often expresses that in one word which either the barbarity or the narrowness of modern tongues cannot supply in more. ...But since every language is so full of its own proprieties that what is beautiful in one is often barbarous, nay, sometimes nonsense, in another, it would be unreasonable to limit a translator to the narrow compass of his author's words; it is enough if he choose out some expression which does not vitiate the sense.

The history of acceptance of new theories frequently shows the following steps: At first the new idea is treated as pure nonsense, not worth looking at. Then comes a time when a multitude of contradictory objections are raised, such as: the new theory is too fancy, or merely a new terminology; it is not fruitful, or simply wrong. Finally a state is reached when everyone seems to claim that he had always followed this theory. This usually marks the last state before general acceptance.

Avoid such situations in which you are unnecessarily burdened with rubbish. You already have too much as it is, you need to be unburdened of it. And you go on collecting it as if it is something precious. Talk less, listen only to the essential, be telegraphic in talking and listening. If you talk less, if you listen less, slowly slowly you will see that a cleanliness, a feeling of purity, as if you have just taken a bath, will start arising within you. That becomes the necessary soil for meditation to arise. Don't go on reading all kinds of nonsense.

Only someone as puffed up and demented as John Maynard Keynes, every left wing fascist's sainted mentor in this connection, could manage to convince himself that taxing America's Productive Class can restore it to prosperity. In point of fact, it's like screwing for chastity, guzzling alcohol for sobriety, or gorging to fight gluttony. It's like killing indiscriminately for peace - oops, Democrats, Republicans and their moral and spiritual ilk have devoutly believed that particular bit of perverse nonsense since at least the War of 1812.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Rather than put ourselves down continually, we must work hard to concentrate on our positives, focusing on that which makes us unique and likable. We all have things that we would change if we could. Even people who we think have it all, don't. Nobody has it all because no one is perfect. We all realize this and yet continue to criticize and insult ourselves. Now is the time to stop this nonsense! Change what you can change and accept the rest as a necessary part of your own unique humanity. Make peace with who you are.

A lot of lies and misinformation has been put about by eco nuts on the back of a report by an idiot economist [Sir Nicholas Stern]. Environmental head bangers are talking nonsense when they claim that aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon emissions. Coal-fired and oil-fired power stations are the biggest contributor of carbon but I have yet to hear any fearless eco warriors advocating nuclear power as they drive around in their SUVs to their next protest meeting.

But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.

Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches. Stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles; and My Lord has a very noble castle; the greatest Baron in the province should have the best house; and as pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round; consequently, those who have asserted all is well talk nonsense; they ought to have said that all is for the best.

I must say, though, that a man who has staked his whole life on the card of a woman's love and who, when that card is trumped, falls to pieces and lets himself go to the dogs -- a fellow like that is not a man, not a male. You say he's unhappy -- you know best. But all the nonsense hasn't been taken out of him yet. I'm sure he really believes he's a smart fellow just because he reads that rag Galignani and saves a muzhik from a flogging once a month.

We should stop the non-scientific, pseudo-scientific, and anti-scientific nonsense emanating from the right wing, and start demanding immediate action to reduce global warming and prevent catastrophic climate change that may be on our horizon now. We must not let the [Bush] Administration distort science and rewrite and manipulate scientific reports in other areas. We must not let it turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Pollution Agency.

In other words, the problem of empire-building is essentially mystical. It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation is great; that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such; an Englishman, to an Irishman; an American, to a Mexican: merely because the first-named countries are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. And people who have no individual stature whatever are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them a sense of importance without the trouble of any personal effort.

I don't believe in school prayer. I think it's total nonsense...who is the teacher there that is going to have them pray? And is the teacher going to be Catholic or Mormon or Episcopalian or what? It just causes all sorts of problems. And what are the kids praying about anyway? Does it really matter, does praying in school...what are you doing it for? The whole thing just opens up all sorts of elements of discussion. I think it's crazy.

Although we can talk about an Indonesian democracy, or we can talk about democratic elections and democratic rituals - the trappings of democracy - we can't genuinely talk about democracy in Indonesia because there is not rule of law, and democracy without rule of law is a nonsense.

You can keep counting forever. The answer is infinity. But, quite frankly, I don't think I ever liked it. I always found something repulsive about it. I prefer finite mathematics much more than infinite mathematics. I think that it is much more natural, much more appealing and the theory is much more beautiful. It is very concrete. It is something that you can touch and something you can feel and something to relate to. Infinity mathematics, to me, is something that is meaningless, because it is abstract nonsense.

I am 100 percent on the side of insisting that white people step up to a different level of consciousness and commitment and the great gifts of the West and the great gifts of white culture and white community be used for a better purpose than this nonsense of supporting Trump. I insist on that. I refuse to accept that. I refuse to accept that we are going to give over 60 million people over to this guy.

It is contended that those who have been bred at Eton, Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sentiment within each of those schools is high-toned and manly; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally admired, meanness despised, manly feelings and generous conduct are encouraged: that an unwritten code of honor deals to the spoiled child of rank, and to the child of upstart wealth an even-handed justice, purges their nonsense out of both, and does all that can be done to make them gentlemen.

There's nothing like being in fashion. A man that has once got his character up for a wit is always sure of a laugh, say what he may. He may utter as much nonsense as he pleases, and all will pass current. No one stops to question the coin of a rich man; but a poor devil cannot pass off either a joke or a guinea without its being examined on both sides. Wit and coin are always doubted with a threadbare coat.

Jesus Christ was God - the Personal God become man. He has manifested Himself many times in different forms and these alone are what you can worship. God in His absolute nature is not to be worshipped. Worshipping such God would be nonsense. We have to worship Jesus Christ, the human manifestation, as God. You cannot worship anything higher than the manifestation of God. The sooner you give up the worship of God separate from Christ, the better for you.

When I pick a story, I'm very much aware of the larger issues that it's illuminating. But one of the things that I, as a writer, feel strongly about is that nobody is representative. That's just narrative nonsense. People may be part of a larger story or structure or institution, but they're still people. Making them representative loses sight of that. Which is why a lot of writing about low-income people makes them into saints, perfect in their suffering.

But does Man have any 'right' to spread through the universe? Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability, against all competition. Unless one accepts that, anything one says about morals, war, politics, you name it, is nonsense. Correct morals arise from knowing what man is, not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be. The Universe will let us know - later - whether or not Man has any "right" to expand through it.

What nonsense it is, this desire to be without limitations, this wish always to be seen in the most flattering light. We are anxious, not because we think so little of ourselves, but because we think so much of ourselves. We are anxious, not that we may appear in the worst light, but that we may not appear in the best light. Anxiety is born of self-consciousness, and it is alleviated to the exact extent that we can drop consciousness of the self.

I really, really love children and I think probably among children is when I feel mostly berated. It's not like I feel like oh, there's some children here. I have to tone it down. I go nuts with children especially when I ain't got none. So when I'm round my mates' children, I jest them kids up first. I swear at them, I get more worked up, I say crazy stuff to them, fill their heads with nonsense and then I leave them.

I've realised that as long as the youth has the ability to use social media and their voice is there, people can actually cut through the nonsense and see what's really going on. People are live streaming from the ground, so everyone's starting to become more aware. When you pull back from this playground of duality, where someone is right and someone is wrong, you recognise that this is the way things have played out for years and years. And as long as the youth culture can see the madness that's going on in the world, there will eventually be a revolution.

I don't think he would have had any trouble answering Justice Sonia Sotomayor's excellent challenge in a case involving GPS surveillance. She said we need an alternative to this whole way of thinking about the privacy now which says that when you give data to a third party, you have no expectations of privacy. And [Louis] Brandeis would have said nonsense, of course you have expectations of privacy because it's intellectual privacy that has to be protected. That's my attempt to channel him on some of those privacy questions.

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle - for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.

This was nonsense, he thought. The need of her was a physical thing, like the thirsty of a sailor becalmed for weeks on the sea. He'd felt the need before, often, often, in their years apart. But why now? She was safe; he knew where she was - was it only the exhaustion of the past weeks and days, or perhaps the weakness of creeping age that made his bones ache, as though she had in fact been torn from his body, as God had made Eve from Adam's rib?

I do agree that the science is not settled on this. The idea we would put Americans' economy in jeopardy based on scientific theory that is not settled yet to me is nonsense. Just because you have a group of scientists who stood up and said this is the fact... Galileo got outvoted for a spell. To put Americans' economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country is not good economics and I would suggest is not necessarily good science.

But it certainly is a wonderful thing to wake up suddenly in the solitude of the woods and look up at the sky and see the utter nonsense of everything including all the solemn stuff given out by professional asses about the spiritual life; and simply to burst out laughing, and laugh and laugh, with the sky and the trees because God is not in words, and not in systems, and not in liturgical movements, and not in "contemplation" with a big "C," or in asceticism or in anything like that, not even in the apostolate.

If little fish get eaten by bigger fish, and bigger fish get eaten by bigger fish... what happens when there are no little fish? The world's populations of little fish are being harvested to make catfood!? This nonsense has to stop. Feed a fish a cat a day!

Only with great care. For thousands, carols will be their only link with a church. At the same time, sentimentality is perhaps the single most dangerous feature of our Church and culture-and the sentimental air is never thicker than at Christmas. The Incarnation is messy, dirty, and resonates with the crucifixion. We need a new wave of carol writing that can gradually swill out the nonsense and catch the piercing, joy-through-pain refrains of the New Testament.

People will often, almost always, prefer a male God. A male image of God gives them this sense of security, safety, order, no nonsense. So that's where their psyche is at. Probably it's something that they've got to go through. Not that there isn't a need for order in the world, but the mystical level seems to be the mature level of religion, and there the question is not order but union - divine union. And so, without some integration of the feminine, usually you never get to the mystical level.

It's just as hard for man to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the species as it was to break the habit of thinking of himself as central to the universe. He sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution, with a female satellite revolving around him as the moon revolves around the earth. This not only causes him to overlook valuable clues to our ancestry, but sometimes leads him into making statements that are arrant and demonstrable nonsense.

JACK That is nonsense. If I marry a charming girl like Gwendolen, and she is the only girl I ever saw in my life that I would marry, I certainly won't want to know Bunbury. ALGERNON Then your wife will. You don't seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none. JACK That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years. ALGERNON Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half the time.

Christ was crucified because he would have nothing to do with the crowd (even though he addressed himself to all). He did not want to form a party, an interest group, a mass movement, but wanted to be what he was, the truth, which is related to the single individual. Therefore everyone who will genuinely serve the truth is by that very fact a martyr. To win a crowd is no art; for that only untruth is needed, nonsense, and a little knowledge of human passions. But no witness to the truth dares to get involved with the crowd.

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.

If God existed (a question concerning which Jubal maintained a meticulous intellectual neutrality) and if He desired to be worshiped (a proposition which Jubal found inherently improbable but conceivably possible in the dim light of his own ignorance), then (stipulating affirmatively both the above) it nevertheless seemed wildly unlikely to Jubal to the point of reductio ad absurdum that a God potent to shape galaxies would be titillated and swayed by the whoop-te-do nonsense the Fosterites offered Him as "worship.

Sometimes I think the Congress feels that if you only decided tomorrow to switch to wind power that in two years we'd be getting 80 percent of our electricity from wind power. It's nonsense. Normally it takes 20 to 30 years after a new technology is demonstrated and deployed before it powers even 15 or 20 percent of the grid. There's this long lag time, and we haven't even decided which directions to go.

I think that a true economics thinker or a Marxist thinker would make nonsense of my argument, although I have given massive seminars and no one has demolished it so far. I did think that this idea from an artisanal and trading perception of the auratic quality of goods when they are given character and inscription, made the stories of phantasmic wealth read more powerfully in the 18th and 19th centuries than the stories of Cinderella's wealth, because they are conjured out of nothing by these magic means.

In fact, we haven't ever really recalibrated our foreign policy commitments since the end of the Cold War. We still have alliances throughout Asia and across Europe that were devised to tame the Soviet Union, which, last time I checked, ceased to exist more than 20 years ago. Today, of course, we have a commitment to go to nuclear war with Russia in case Russia invades Latvia. To me, that's complete and utter nonsense. There ought to be a reconsideration of our posture in every region of the world.

For me, making a movie is kind of like vomiting. Not that film is like vomit, but more like this mass of ideas and thoughts that you have and just have to put them out there. It's not even about making perfect sense - it's more about making perfect nonsense. I don't do too much soul-searching or self-analysis. I just enjoy making things.

There is... in our day, a powerful antidote to nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times - I mean science. Science cannot be ignored or rejected, because it is bound up with modern technique; it is essential alike to prosperity in peace and to victory in war. That is, perhaps from an intellectual point of view, the most hopeful feature of our age, and the one which makes it most likely that we shall escape complete submersion in some new or old superstition.

Germany was a parliamentary democracy with many, many humane and decent people who kept writing in their journals - I've read these journals, these memoirs - "Surely our leaders will stop this nonsense. Surely someone will take on these thugs. Surely the pendulum will swing back." Everyone was sitting at home going, "Well, they haven't come for me. This is crazy, but surely someone's going to take care of it." We all have to take care of it.

She and I just don't see eye to eye together. She's a square. She keeps telling me that I'm too interested in chess, that I should get friends outside of chess, you can't make a living from chess, that I should finish high school and all that nonsense. She keeps in my hair and I don't like people in my hair, you know, so I had to get rid of her.

Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: do not drink, answer him: I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to.