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A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. Itโs not moral to lie to children. Itโs not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. Itโs immoral.
Christopher HitchensThe plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it.
Ralph Waldo EmersonI don't think feminism, as I understand the definition, implies the rejection of maternal values, nurturing children, caring about the men in your life. That is just nonsense to me.
Hillary ClintonThe Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!
Arthur HertzbergUsually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.
Ann CoulterIn a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables.
Catharine MacKinnonIt would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road...A stone has no interests because it cannot suffer. The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is, however, not only necessary, but also sufficient for us to say that a being has interests - at an absolute minimum, an interest in not suffering. A mouse, for example, does have an interest in not being kicked along the road because it will suffer if it is.
Peter SingerNew Zealand is a pretty no-nonsense place to work, like Australia. I mean it doesn't falter to anyone.
Dustin ClareThere is no systematic corruption in FIFA. That is nonsense. We are financially clean and clear.
Sepp BlatterIn 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.
Carl JungThis topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
Albert EinsteinPublic opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.
Ralph Waldo EmersonMy father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.
Josef AlbersMen are born to write. The gardener saves every slip, and seed, and peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him as a model, and sits for its picture. He counts it all nonsense that they say, that some things are undescribable. He believes that all that can be thought can be written, first or last; and he would report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it.
Ralph Waldo EmersonFor me, religion is serious business - a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.
Katha PollittTheodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.
Kenneth MinogueWhy should self-indulgent nonsense - whatever its professed political orientation - be lauded as the height of scholarly achievement?
Alan SokalI come from a line of self-motivated, determined folk - not grand, not high society, but no-nonsense, family-minded go-getters.
Bear GryllsClear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.
Malcolm GladwellWhy can't you harness Might so that it works for Right? I know it sounds nonsense, but, I mean, you can't just say there is no such thing. The Might is there, in the bad half of people, and you can't neglect it. You can't cut it out but you might be able to direct it, if you see what I mean, so that it was useful instead of bad.
T. H. WhiteIf men were the automatons that behaviorists claim they are, the behaviorist psychologists could not have invented the amazing nonsense called 'behaviorist psychology.'
Robert A. HeinleinI like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.
Dr. SeussThe idea is that inside every human being, however unprepossessing, there is a glorious, talented, and overwhelmingly attractive personality. Nonsense. Inside each of us is a mess of unruly, primitive impulses, and these can sometimes, under the strenuous self-discipline and dedication of art, result in notable creativity.
Margaret HalseyThe 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.
Kurt LewinIt is my experience that people who don't participate in society, who don't have jobs, who don't have friends, are just very stuck in irresponsibility and cultism and all kinds of nonsense.
Frederick LenzYou're a very difficult person to manipulate, you know." "Nonsense," he said. "You just have to promise me that I won't have to do a thing, and then I'll do anything you want." "Anything?" "Anything that doesn't require doing anything." "That's nothing, then." "Is it?" "Yes." "Well, that's something.
Brandon SandersonI've always wanted to be a writer. I've been writing since I was probably four years old - it was nonsense, but it was still my little attempts at being a storyteller.
Roxane GaySay what you will of fortitude, but show me the man who can patiently endure the laughter of fools when they have obtained an advantage over him. 'Tis only when their nonsense is without foundation that one can suffer it without complaint.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheThe politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the โwarโ against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.
Christopher HitchensI took a shot of morphine, liked it, and eventually became addicted. It takes quite a while. It took me three months the first time. This nonsense of people becoming addicted with one shot is medically unsound.
William S. BurroughsLearn to feel yourself in other bodies, to know that we are all one. Throw all other nonsense to the winds. Spit out your actions, good or bad, and never think of them again. What is done is done. Throw off superstition. Have no weakness even in the face of death. Be free.
Swami VivekanandaThe theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.
C. S. LewisIn truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
Jorge Luis BorgesSometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.
Adam DuritzI don't believe in marriage. I think at worst it's a hostile political act, a way for small-minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way, wrapped up in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best, it's a happy delusion - these two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they're about to make each other. But, but, when two people know that, and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway, then I don't think it's conservative or delusional. I think it's radical and courageous and very romantic.
Tina ModottiNonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam.
Zbigniew BrzezinskiFor quite a while I have set for myself the rule if a theoretician says 'universal' it just means pure nonsense.
Wolfgang PauliHope unbelieved is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed.
Jim Wallis...no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night.
H. L. MenckenDoes a man of sense run after every silly tale of hobgoblins or fairies, and canvass particularly the evidence? I never knew anyone, that examined and deliberated about nonsense who did not believe it before the end of his enquiries.
David HumeThe floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.
George EliotThroughout chess history, great debates have raged about the pros and cons of hanging pawns. The debates are nonsense; the answer is cut and dried. If the pawns can be attacked and forced to move forward, they are weak. If they can be defended and remain where they are, they are strong.
Yasser SeirawanIt is actually nonsense to link menswear and travel. But it is important that you have a purpose when you design menswear.
Junya WatanabeI'm quite a romantic person - everyone loves being treated a little bit special, no matter how hard you are on the surface. I live in movie land; my head is full of nonsense.
Sharleen SpiteriIt'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.
Elaine Morgan