Useful Quotations

'Downton' has really pushed me to a new level in my career, but it's not like I have a big career plan. They are about as useful as a birth plan; they should be burned.

'Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.

A common measure of poverty is how much money you have in relation to other people - that is useful as far as it goes, but that excludes the case of, say, a hunter in the rainforest who has no money but is not poor. And there can be a number of people with money but who can consider themselves unwanted or invisible or estranged from society.

Perhaps the most useful lesson which has come out of the work on penicillin has been the demonstration that success in this field depends on the development and coordinated use of technical methods.

How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.

I was quite convinced that I didn't want to be a lawyer. But I felt that law school would be a useful way to understand public policy and to understand business in this environment.

Cancer is a growth hormone for empathy, and empathy makes us useful to each other in ways we were not, could not have been, before.

The objective of producing useful devices has strongly influenced the choice of the research projects with which I have been associated.

Twitter didn't make up the hashtag. Twitter didn't make up the retweet. It's our users. And people started using them so much that we decided to weave them into the product. I can't think of another company that has taken its users' actions and said, 'We're going to make them useful to everybody.'

Archaeologists gave the military the idea to use aerial photographs for spying and field survey. We are fortunate that the spatial and spectral resolutions of the imagery available to us are so broadly useful for archaeology.

The less friendly your relationship is on camera, the more useful it is to be friends with them off camera.

I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social.

I have to read something positive every single day. I have to have faith that the day is unfolding in a way that is going to be useful to somebody else... For me, living every day in gratitude has been profound for me.

The idea of taking what's useful and discarding the rest is something I say to myself almost on a daily basis.

Wouldn't it be great if you could put all the published works online? The Internet Archive is trying to become useful as a modern-day digital library.

I get much more information about the rest of the world from people who are not Americans. You get a distance from America that is useful for a journalist; useful for my perspective on the world.

Really take the time to focus on finding your voice and making sure that whatever you're creating is of high quality and is useful for people in their everyday lives.

As others have recently suggested, the term 'gamer' is no longer useful as an identity because games are for everyone. These days, even my mom spends an inordinate amount of time gaming on her iPad. So I'll take a cue from my younger self and say I don't care about being a 'gamer,' but I sure do love video games.

Some people are like wheelbarrows; useful only when pushed, and very easily upset. The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.

Temperance is essential, if the services of men and women are to be employed to the best and most useful effect according, to the physical capacity and ability of each. Nothing less will assure a total effort.

Fungible goods in economics can be extended and traded. So, half as much grain is half as much useful, but half a baby or half a computer is less useful than a whole baby or a whole computer, and we've been trying to make computers that work that way.

To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.

Be passionate and bold. Always keep learning. You stop doing useful things if you don't learn.

Am I as experienced, or mature, or smart as others CEOs? No probably not, but there's something, I think, very useful about having a founder as the CEO.

I'm trying to grow more limbs in order to multitask at a greater rate and I'm also investigating the possibilities of cloning. Because nothing would be more useful than having multiples of me, and that way, I could do all of the things I'd like to do in the short amount of time we all have here.

Semiconductor research and the Nobel Prize in physics seem to be contradictory since one may come to the conclusion that such a complicated system like a semiconductor is not useful for very fundamental discoveries.

Since my high school years, I have been interested in history, especially in Roman history, a topic on which I have read rather extensively. The Latin that goes with this kind of interest proved useful when I had to generate a few terms and names for cell biology.

Rob Engle and I are concerned with extracting useful implications from economic data, and so the properties of the data are of particular importance.

You can make clothing as art, but I like the idea of my clothes actually being worn and being useful to women.

The Anti-Slavery public have generously responded to our appeal, and sent the means to enable us to fit them out well, to pay their passages, supply them with many useful articles and give the Missionaries money to sustain themselves for a while.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge; history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

In an age when many of our citizens casually reveal information about themselves in social media wildly beyond anything imaginable only a decade ago, it would seem to be a useful exercise in civics to re-educate the public about the value and purpose of protecting against unwarranted government intrusion.

Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.

Young children need to develop good habits that will be useful to them the rest of their lives. It is important to keep the lessons age-appropriate. For example, when your children start earning allowances, that would be a good time to teach them how to put some money in the bank instead of spending it all.

I tell my micro students everything I teach them is important, but the truth is that some things are more useful than others, and opportunity cost is near the top.

The government will see that human spaceflight is useful - for science and the economy - and inspirational.

From the point of view of many scientists, gods represent an explanation for the unknown. Scientists are focused on trying to understand the unknown, so there is a fundamental conflict. That said, some scientists find religion useful and perhaps even fulfilling.

A potentially useful property of forecasts based on cointegration is that when extended some way ahead, the forecasts of the two series will form a constant ratio, as is expected by some asymptotic economic theory.

Part of my plan was not only to introduce all useful animals that I possibly could into this part of Australia, but also the most valuable plants of every description.

Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break.

Twitter and Facebook are brilliant tools, the journalistic uses of which are still being plumbed. They are great for disseminating interesting material. They are useful for gathering information, including from places that are inaccessible.

Useful as a war against France, undertaken by the Government against the will of the people would be for our revolutionary development, just so dangerous must be the effect upon our democratic development of a war supported by blind popular enthusiasm.

Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.

Being able to jump off a swing is actually a useful and meaningful thing for a child to do... those are the tests that help us understand the limits of our body. That's a positive learning experience that we deny children on a regular basis.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

Training to be a therapist teaches you to shut up and listen, and that is certainly useful as a writer.

I have never personally seen a hand transplant that is more useful than a prosthesis.

Perhaps if I knew I would be stranded on an island with but one book, I would choose the Bible. For no religious reason whatsoever, but because of the varieties of stories, which might be useful as the days pass.

Even during my youth, I can recall very few black people living on any kind of public assistance. People were working, doing some kind of job that was useful to the community.

My father believed strongly, and taught me, that you can't let yourself get too high on a success or too low on a failure. In this volatile business, that's useful to know.

What 'SNL' taught me that was useful on 'The Watch' was, only put in bad words if they can get a laugh - there was no need for swear words and beeps in places that weren't necessary. Those beeps should only be in there when they mean something and it's important to the joke.

I seem to get totally wrapped up in teaching and working with students during the school year. During the summer, I try to spend time in the real world, writing code for therapy and perhaps for some useful purpose.

I'm very grateful I went to school to study law, particularly tax law, which really is interesting to me and very useful to me now with my position. Music, however, will always be my number one passion; I like how it connects everyone.

I grew up in Birmingham, where they made useful things and made them well.

I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.

Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons.

Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a political aspect.

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.

A duty is to be chosen from what is virtuous, and from what is useful, and also from the comparison of the two, one with the other; but nothing is recognized by Christians as virtuous or useful which is not helpful to the future life.

I've hidden behind my hair more than clothes. Sometimes having long hair with a fringe is very useful when you don't want to look at people. I used to have very short hair, but long hair is my thing - a black nocturnal shield.

I suppose if I went to Turkey - I mean, I can't imagine going that far away, but if I did go to Turkey, yes, I would probably try to know 'please' and 'sorry' and 'thank you', and 'a beer please', and all the useful words.

Not only does the summer bring warm weather and tons of summer activities, but it also yields a fresh crop of increasingly useful avocados!

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

The mistake people keep making is that if they find a wonderful new tool, like email, they have to give up all others. They don't. You have simply added another very useful means to your communications repertoire.

I think there's a reason that horror appeals to teens. There's a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again.

By creating useful job descriptions and making clear what qualifications should be expected, the Department aims to help improve schools' ability to recruit the right people.

Sometimes in my class I have people come in and do monologues inspired by people they know and I always find that to be useful to do specifics about somebody and then you're actually doing a character and not doing some random old lady or something.

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority. To invent is to discern, to choose.

I believe the reason we sleep is not just to allow our body to rest but that it is to allow this inner wisdom to speak to us through symbols. This includes the body or somatic problems as well as psychological ones. Dreams and drawings are useful in diagnosing physical conditions.

We want to build technology that everybody loves using, and that affects everyone. We want to create beautiful, intuitive services and technologies that are so incredibly useful that people use them twice a day. Like they use a toothbrush. There aren't that many things people use twice a day.

Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious.

Organizations like the ACLU fought and won the good fight back in the 1960's, but it's clear that nowadays they've run out of useful things to do since they now spend most of their time defending the scum of the Earth from getting what they rightly deserve.

It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused.

When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.

I wanted to reveal how genetic code is translated into protein. I knew a great application could be for antibiotics, since half of the useful ones target the ribosomes, but I didn't believe I could contribute to it. It was like the next Mount Everest to conquer. It was my dream to contribute something to humanity.

Habits like blogging often and regularly, writing down the way you think, being clear about what you think are effective tactics, ignoring the burbling crowd and not eating bacon. All of these are useful habits.

I went to high school in Columbia. I met my first wife, Richards, whom I married while I was working on a B.S. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. She bore Louise, and I studied. I learned most of the useful technical things - math, physics, chemistry - that I now use during those four years.

Imagination is Reality Lite - a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky, or too much work.

I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

Before they got vengeful, conservatives had some useful points to make about welfare. Government 'help' is too often guilt-assuaging gesture. It creates layers of wasteful bureaucracy. Too much help of the wrong sort creates a culture of dependency that swamps our ability to provide.

I want to make it clear that the lobbying sector does an important job. It is very useful to the government to hear the views of a broad range of groups to make sure we get the best.

Imagination tends to be truly useful if accompanied by the power of mental control - if the worlds in one's head can be purposefully manipulated and distinguished from the real one outside it.

While it may be disappointing, I have to confess to people who ask for my insights on the meaning of it all that astronomy doesn't provide any clearly useful data on matters of sin and souls.

The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.

Many authors hate to go on grinding book tours. But I've always found it a useful way to be a foreign correspondent in America and take the pulse of the country.

There have been many people whom I have admired, emulated and even modeled parts of my life after. I study how they do things, and then I go through a period of 'trying on' those same thinking patterns and behaviors. After awhile, what is not essentially me falls away while the useful parts remain.

A certain amount of impatience may be useful to stimulate and motivate us to action. However, I believe that a lack of patience is a major cause of the difficulties and unhappiness in the world today.

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

Money's fine if it enables you to enjoy your life and to be useful to other people. But as something that is a means to an end, no, it's useless.

A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position.

Freedom has invented every useful machine, from the lowest to the highest, from the simplest to the most complex.

One should live between extravagance and meanness. Don't save money by starving your mind. It is false economy never to take a holiday, or never to spend money for an evening's amusement or for a useful book.

Presidents are always also storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies. And surprisingly enough, Richard Nixon, this awkward man who didn't even really like people, had not been so bad at this duty - at least in the first four years of his presidency.

Although it's the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth.

I do not doubt that we would become more useful if we praised God more, and others would join us, for they would see that God has blessed us.

Precepts or maxims are of great weight; and a few useful ones on hand do more to produce a happy life than the volumes we can't find.

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve - developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one - and enabled better solutions to old problems.

Consult your friend on all things, especially on those which respect yourself. His counsel may then be useful where your own self-love might impair your judgment.

When we are thinking about stuff like embeds, we are not thinking about how we are competing with YouTube. We are thinking about how are we going to make it more useful for people to share stuff on Facebook.

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.