Popular quotes about Nonsense! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 88
We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.
John F. Kennedy'Totally mad,' he said, 'utter nonsense. But we'll do it because it's brilliant nonsense.'
Douglas AdamsFootball makes nonsense of class. It may make nonsense of colour in some circumstances.
Peter TempleTo have or not to have [chemical weapons] is a possibility, but to depend on what media says is nonsense, or to depend on some of the reports of the intelligence is nonsense and that was proven when they invaded Iraq ten years ago and they said "Iraq has stockpiles of WMD" and it was proven after the invasion that this was false ; it was fraud. So, we can't depend on what one magazine wrote.
Bashar al-AssadThe record companies fell apart - quite deservedly. Their corrupting, all-binding contract nonsense had to stop.
John LydonThe important thing is not whatever nonsense the voices are saying, but what the voices are feeling.
John GreenWhen people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.
Samuel ButlerOh! And they read English novels! David! Did you ever look into an English novel? Well, do not trouble yourself. It is nothing but a lot of nonsense about girls with fanciful names getting married.
Susanna ClarkeOften 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.
Saint AugustineThe tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.
Nick HarkawayPublic 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 EmersonQuarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
George EliotSkeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Carl SaganWhy 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?
Dmitri MendeleevI think the must-have power qualities for a female or male power leader are really the ability to focus, to work hard, to be extremely goal oriented and to not let the noise and the nonsense interfere with your mission - what you really feel you want to do with your career and your life.
Anne SweeneyLive in constant gratitude. No matter what the condition today, no matter how dark, how dreary, how painful and difficult....to day is merely the passing outcome of yesterday's nonsense. How you feel today, and what you give your attention to, builds tomorrow.
James Arthur RayYou don't have to be the best guitar player, or have the best voice, or even be the best looking person - writing a song that moves people is worth more than all the other nonsense. (Just look at Bob Dylan - he's got almost no vocal range at all, but his songs are deeply moving and iconic.) If I had to offer one piece of advice: Write a song that moves people, and write it from within yourself. Your personal narrative is more engaging and moving than anything else you can imagine in your mind.
Ryan RossMy father would always tell me that creativity didn't matter at the diner. When I was probably 14 or 15, I would put - I mean, it was a no-nonsense place - but I would try to put a sprig of parsley or orange curl on the omelets, or something like that. He'd be like "Don't do that!"
Grant AchatzIf people become ecstatic the whole society will have to change, because this society is based on misery. If people are blissful you cannot lead them to war -- to Vietnam, or to Egypt, or to Israel. No. Someone who is blissful will just laugh and say: This is nonsense!
RajneeshChristianity works while infidelity talks. She feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, visits and cheers the sick, and seeks the lost, while infidelity abuses her and babbles nonsense and profanity. 'By their fruits ye shall know them.'
Henry Ward BeecherIt's nonsense to say that it's not in the bill. The reality is that the bill they will have passed to the Senate will have this language in it.
David KeatingAbsolute freedom is absolute nonsense! We gain freedom in anything through commitment, discipline, and fixed habit.
Richard J. FosterIt is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I've learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the 'grammelot.'
Dario FoLeaders of the world, my message to you is simple: to achieve universal peace and understanding on this planet you have only to speak plainly, even though you may look foolish. This is a thousand times better than looking good and talking nonsense.
David SmallThey don't understand the multi-life sequences. Anything they can't see in a laboratory, they think is nonsense.
Frederick LenzOne problem I have with talking about myself in the context of class divisiveness is that I can be - and indeed have been - used by others to demonstrate its absence and that it's only a matter of hard work to move upward socially. After all, how could I complain about anything, if the retort is: "But look where you got to? It can't be all that bad." But this is nonsense as an argument quite aside from its empirical absurdity because no single case can invalidate a statistical claim.
Zia Haider RahmanThe venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.
Samuel DaviesWhy do we go through all the nonsense with security at our airport? It's not because the Catholic Church is falling apart.
Michael T. FlynnIt was not noisy prejudice that caused the work of Mendel to lie dead for thirty years, but the sheer inability of contemporary opinion to distinguish between a new idea and nonsense.
Wilfred TrotterThe secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify. Statistical terms and statistical methods are necessary in reporting the mass data of social and economic trends, business conditions, 'opinion' polls, the census. But without writers who use the words with honesty and understanding and readers who know what they mean, the result can only be semantic nonsense.
Darrell HuffThe North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English - the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish immigrants.
Camille PagliaThe popular image that Hollywood is ruined by difficult prima donna actors is nonsense. They're certainly very nice to directors. I can't say the same about producers, who I found difficult, paranoid, and certifiably insane, mostly.
Nigel ColeSometimes 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 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.
Van JonesYou've always been free. You've always been bright and shining. Everything else is just nonsense.
Robert AdamsSometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. Itโs usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.
Anne CarsonThe theme of the dance was "Great Romances," or some such nonsense. There were projections of supposedly great couples from the past on the walls of the gym. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Hermione and Ron, Bonnie and Clyde, etc.
Gabrielle ZevinIts obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. Its vanity of a grotesque kind to believe that mankind, and our carbon footprint, has more impact on the future of Earth than Nature, which bends our planet to its will, as it sees fit.
Charles SaatchiSince science's competence extends to observable and measurable phenomena, not to the inner being of things, and to the means, not to the ends of human life, it would be nonsense to expect that the progress of science will provide men with a new type of metaphysics, ethics, or religion.
Jacques MaritainMan feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. Kierkegaard too saw that there is this running up against something, and he referred to it in a fairly similar way (as running up against paradox). This running up against the limits of language is ethics.
Ludwig WittgensteinIt is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
John Kenneth GalbraithDoes 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 HumeWhen the doubters tell you it can't be done and all kind of tragedies will come your way, I say nonsense. If you can get to the very root of who you are and make something happen from it, my sense tells me you are going to surprise yourself.
Vidal SassoonThe 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.
Paul R. EhrlichThroughout 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 Seirawan