Usefulness Quotes - page 6
Therefore it is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analysing long-held commonplace concepts and showing the circumstances on which their justification and usefulness depend, and how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience. Thus their excessive authority will be broken.
Albert Einstein
The younger you are, the easier it will be for you to adapt to a new lifestyle or to a new profession. The older you are, the more difficult it is. The thing to watch out for is, being eaten by the system. So if you look at our politicians now, you will see that the older ones have a harder time letting go. And when that happens, they lose their usefulness. The younger ones can handle change, and they can accept losing a position.
Francis Escudero
In the Descriptio the author published only so much of the reasoning on which his calculations rested as was necessary to enable the mathematical world to appreciate the nature and use of the tables which are to be found there. Indeed, we find Napier expressly stating in it that he does not propose to publish to the world the manner in which the tables were calculated until he finds that they have justified their existence by their acknowledged usefulness. The Descriptio therefore bears evidence of being written all at one time, to serve as an introduction and guide to the tables which were printed with it.
John Napier
They [the Conservatives] say that we-that is, the Liberal party-have disturbed classes and interests unnecessarily, that we have harassed almost all sorts of people, and have made ourselves very unpopular thereby. Without doubt, if they had been in the Wilderness, they would have condemned the Ten Commandments as a harassing piece of legislation, though it does happen that we have the evidence of more than thirty centuries to the wisdom and usefulness of those Commandments.
John Bright
Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute out of reach, beyond our control. Or perhaps it is immediately at hand, waiting to be released, disguised now, in our kind of civilization as affection or friendship or attachment. I can't see why it should be unreasonable for all human beings to have strands of DNA coiled up in chromosomes, coding out instincts for usefulness and helpfulness. Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.
Lewis Thomas
The will of the nation, speaking with the voice of battle and through the amended Constitution, has fulfilled the great promise of 1776 by proclaiming 'liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof.' The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. NO thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than 5,000,000 people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness.
James A. Garfield
He was, according to students, an extraordinary teacher, rigorous, picky, not mean-but a teaser. Sometimes. "What did he really mean by that?" a student whispered to me once when I visited his class. "You can write anything you want but you may not mention the weather," he told his classes at City College in New York and at the University of Houston. The weather, the very geography of platitude. Still, he knew about those easy clichés. He knew their ancient usefulness and perseverance. He grabbed them, gave them a good half turn to laugh a social truth into a sentence-he was certainly a sentence maker.
Donald Barthelme
Now that I, and those with me, are working to rebuild the work of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad as a means of reforming our people and transforming their lives into lives of service and usefulness to themselves and others, the same fear of the government that was seen in times past, is now seen again in the work of members of the FBI's anti-terrorist task force and the organized crime racketeering task force, that have been working night and day to cripple and destroy the Nation of Islam, culminating in an attack on Louis Farrakhan, with the purpose of discrediting, embarrassing and ultimately causing the death of Louis Farrakhan, preferably by heightening tensions within the movement exacerbated by government agents posing as Muslims. This is the aim of the United States government, and it appears to be the aim of the President of the United States President George Bush.
Louis Farrakhan
Our experience hitherto justifies us in trusting that nature is the realization of the simplest that is mathematically conceivable. I am convinced that purely mathematical construction enables us to find those concepts and those lawlike connections between them that provide the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Useful mathematical concepts may well be suggested by experience, but in no way can they be derived from it. Experience naturally remains the sole criterion of the usefulness of a mathematical construction for physics. But the actual creative principle lies in mathematics. Thus, in a certain sense, I take it to be true that pure thought can grasp the real, as the ancients had dreamed.
Albert Einstein
