Prattle Quotes

Considering how foolishly people act and how pleasantly they prattle, perhaps it would be better for the world if they talked more and did less. (W. Somerset Maugham)
That's me," he said, motioning to the robot. "That's all of us. We prattle about free will, but we're nothing but response...mechanical reaction in prescribed grooves. View quote
Alfred Bester
It is some relief to move from the exalted realm of philosophical ethics to the mundane realm of scientific methodology. However, I rather shy away from discussions of Methodology with a capital M. To paraphrase Shaw: Those who can do science; those who can't prattle about its methodology. View quote
Paul Samuelson
I long for rural and domestic scenes, for the warbling of Birds and the Prattle of my Children. Don't you think I am somewhat poetical this morning, for one of my Years, and considering the Gravity, and Insipidity of my Employment? - As much as I converse with Sages and Heroes, they have very little of my Love or Admiration. I should prefer the Delights of a Garden to the Dominion of a World. View quote
John Adams
Who is there whom bright and agreeable children do not attract to play and creep and prattle with them? View quote
Epictetus
If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves "Christian,” patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life.” We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron. View quote
Leon Trotsky
Love - thou art Veiled - A few - behold thee - Smile - and alter - and prattle - and die - Bliss - were an Oddity - without thee - Nicknamed by God - Eternity. View quote
Emily Dickinson
Fenworth!' Yes?' You bore me with your prattle.' Oh, regrettable that. Why don't you seek the company of someone who doesn't prattle? Seems like a good solution to your problem. View quote
Donita K. Paul
I have never been impressed by the formal schools of ethics. I had sampled them - public libraries are a ready source of recreation for an actor short of cash - but I had found them as poor in vitamins as a mother-in-law's kiss. Given time and plenty of paper, a philosopher can prove anything. I had the same contempt for the moral instruction handed to most children. Much of it is prattle and the parts they really seem to mean are dedicated to the sacred proposition that a "good” child is one who does not disturb mother's nap and a "good” man is one who achieves a muscular bank account without getting caught. No, thanks! View quote
Robert A. Heinlein
You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need no morality on a desert island it is on a desert island that he would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no victims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is clothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or effort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his stock seed today and reality will wipe him out, as he deserves reality will show him that life is a value to be bought and that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it. View quote
Ayn Rand
He like the Church he serves is blind and empty and vainglorious. This God they prattle on about, where's His justice, where's His compassion? Does it please Him to see dying people hounded in His name, does He snigger at His bumbling priests, is He satisfied when men drop dead chopping stone out for His temples, twisted little God dying tepid-faced on a cross.... She thought, I'll go out and look for other gods, and maybe they'll be better and anyway they can't be worse. (Keith Roberts)
Who is not attracted by bright and pleasant children, to prattle, to creep, and to play with them. View quote
Epictetus
Time says hush by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all. View quote
Carl Sandburg
Infancy conforms to nobody all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. View quote
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The price of labor in the high-tech labor market is a function of a political, artificially created, ceaseless supply of immigrants. Prattle about the price at which American workers will do certain work is meaningless without a reference to borders and to the thing they bound-communities. Render asunder the quaint idea of borders-and the world is your labor market; communities be damned. Realize that this ceaseless supply of labor is maintained not through peaceful market forces, but through the use of political power, wielded by wealthy men and women with access. At work here is their Brave New Borderless World, not the invisible hand we love. View quote
Ilana Mercer
The enslavement of language in prattle is joined by the enslavement of things in folly almost as its inevitable consequence. View quote
Walter Benjamin
He lives not long who battles with the immortals, nor do his children prattle about his knees when he has come back from battle and the dread fray. View quote
Homer
As in a theatre, the eyes of men, After a well-graced actor leaves the stage, Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious. View quote
William Shakespeare
Children [...] had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing and how we were all going to live to be a hundred and twenty five years old in "smart" computer-controlled houses where all we had to do was speak to bump up the heat or turn on giant home theater screens in a life of perpetual leisure and comfort. It made me sick to think about. Not because there's something necessarily wrong with leisure or comfort, but because that's where our aspirations ended. And in the face of what had actually happened to us, it seemed obscenely stupid. View quote
James Howard Kunstler