There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.

Tony Harrison

I even get tired performing standup, which is normally a low-impact exercise in futility but looks hard the way I do it. That's why I take a lot of breaks, often stopping in the middle of a joke to catch my breath, or blame the crowd for not laughing before the punchline.

Andy Kindler

Change is the only constant, and to turn one's back and pretend that it is not coming is an exercise in futility.

Anthony Carmona

Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility.

Brendan I. Koerner

Worry compounds the futility of being trapped on a dead-end street. Thinking opens new avenues.

Cullen Hightower

So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.

Danny Elfman

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Elliot Richardson

'Black Hawk Down' wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily.

Elvis Mitchell

Since all life is futility, then the decision to exist must be the most irrational of all.

Emil Cioran

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

Errol Morris

We are becoming able to see the pursuit of external power for what it is and the futility of trying to escape the pain of powerlessness by changing the world. When we look inward, not outward, we can dismantle the parts of our personalities that have controlled us for so long - such as anger, jealousy, vindictiveness, superiority, inferiority.

Gary Zukav

We are moving beyond the non-fiction novel to different kinds of narrative art, different forms of cognition. Loaded with moral and political point, narrative has been recalibrated to record, honour, and protest the latest historically specific instance of futility and mess.

Geoff Dyer

Dusting is a good example of the futility of trying to put things right. As soon as you dust, the fact of your next dusting has already been established.

George Carlin

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

H. G. Wells

God created a good world that was subjected to futility because of the sinful, treasonous choice of the first human beings.

John Piper

'Sam Stone' is a song about futility.

John Prine

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

War continues to divide people, to change them forever, and I write about it both because I want people to understand the absolute futility of war, the 'pity of war' as Wilfred Owen called it.

Michael Morpurgo

By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib.

Michel Onfray

Any story about revenge is ultimately a story about forgiveness, redemption, or the futility of revenge.

Nick Wechsler