Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
Abraham Lincoln
Without knowledge action is useless and knowledge without action is futile.
Abu Bakr
I have always thought that pandas, in evolutionary terms, are the most sophisticated animals in the world. They cannot look after themselves; they are useless at reproducing. But to compensate, they have managed to persuade the most advanced creatures on the planet - human beings - to care for their every need.
Adam Curtis
A life once spent is irrevocable. It will remain to be contemplated through eternity. If it be marked with sins, the marks will be indelible. If it has been a useless life, it can never be improved. Such it will stand forever and ever. The same may be said of each day.
Adoniram Judson
We are all human beings, immigrant or non-immigrant. We all feel fear. We all love and become confused when we don't act as well as we would like to. We all get depressed and have feelings of uselessness. All of these things are true and have always been true.
Akhil Sharma
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.
Alan Moore
Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.
Albert Camus
Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.
Albert J. Nock
Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.
The university's business is the conservation of useless knowledge; and what the university itself apparently fails to see is that this enterprise is not only noble but indispensable as well, that society can not exist unless it goes on.
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.
Doubt, the essential preliminary of all improvement and discovery, must accompany the stages of man's onward progress. The faculty of doubting and questioning, without which those of comparison and judgment would be useless, is itself a divine prerogative of the reason.
Albert Pike
Gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent development of the normal.
Alexis Carrel
When the world changed, people were different. Towns closed, cities were boarded up, communities abandoned, their governments collapsed. They seemed to have no qualms that were obvious to you or me about walking away from what they called a useless pile of rubbish, and never looking back.
Alexis Wright
Stories are the only thing that I can be bothered with. It's the only way that I can do anything, even if I'm quite useless. It's the only area in being human where I could be a little useful.
Alice Englert
Molecular gastronomy is not bad... but without sound, basic culinary technique, it is useless.
Alton Brown
I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.
Amy Waldman
An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn't exist, for the artist doesn't live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn't look for harmony but would simply live in it.
Andrei Tarkovsky
We try to get the best performance out of the artists. There is no point in saying to them, 'You're useless.'
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Starting a business is similar to an athletic endeavor, like serving a tennis ball. Telling you how to do it is useless. You actually get better through a combination of practice, coaching, and repetitions with money on the line.
Andrew Yang
I think Yelp is neither good nor bad for the food industry. I find it useless.
For six years, from 1985 to 1991, I felt pretty weak and useless.
Writing books can be very individual - one might strike you as helpful that someone else found useless, or that you might not have appreciated at some other time in your life.
To not be self-conscious of your appearance is huge, and something that I desperately hope to carry into film at some point in my useless life - to not be thinking, 'My ear looks weird from this angle, why is the camera over there?'
I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.
A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
I didn't really have a favourite subject at school as I was useless at everything.
Life does not agree with philosophy: There is no happiness that is not idleness, and only what is useless is pleasurable.
If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.
Multicolored stones and paintings, walkways, and theaters are useless in a city unless it also contains wisdom and law. Such things are the subject of wisdom and law, not equivalent to them.
Let who will boast their courage in the field, I find but little safety from my shield, Nature's, not honour's law we must obey: This made me cast my useless shield away.
The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.
Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.
Global warming, the ongoing destruction of the planet, Third World debt, the uselessness of the railways, the takeover by the corporations, the scary George Bush person: all these things are important and should be animating me into outrage. Yet somehow they do not.
Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy.
I don't want to be fake. I'm just being me. And I have the power to break stereotypes and whatever useless rules that society puts on us.
When you're not involved, other people's unhappiness seems to be about the funniest damn thing on earth because you think you can solve it, that you are God, that you are above this, and that their unhappiness is just such useless toil and agony. If it's you, it ceases to be a comedy.
All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
It is useless to live on burned ruins.
I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information.
I have been made redundant before and it is a terrible blow; redundant is a rotten word because it makes you think you are useless.
I really hate looking back. think it's useless. The only way is forward.
There is no sense in making a film that no-one will go and see, just to create a perfect, but useless, work of art.
Politicians in Washington are useless.
In the romantic sense, I'm pretty useless with guys. If I see somebody who I'm attracted to, generally I just think, 'Oh well, he's not interested in me.' The only time that I talk to guys is when they talk to me first.
Laws are the terms by which independent and isolated men united to form a society, once they tired of living in a perpetual state of war where the enjoyment of liberty was rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrificed a portion of this liberty so that they could enjoy the remainder in security and peace.
The government - they're completely useless.
The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
