Boondoggles Quotes & Sayings

No matter how many years you sit doing zazen, you will never become anything special. — Kodo Sawaki

Evil has no need to bother with eliminating Good. It's far simpler to let Good fight against itself. — Sergei Lukyanenko

Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses ... in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them. — Ralph Nader

The real distinction between a material and spiritual worldview, [William] James wrote does not rest in "hair splitting abstraction about matter's inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hope; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal order, and the letting loose of hope".
Given the choice, I throw my lot in with hope. — Barbara Bradley Hagerty

What we should be very concerned about is the excesses and the abuses. Where we see hunts where the fox is torn away out of the hole and thrown to the hounds, we have to be very concerned. Where we have hunts where foxes are bred for the sport of it, that is not pest control. That is pure bloody sport. — Huw Irranca-Davies

The cultivation of mindfulness is ultimately a matter of life and death, not in a scary way, but in the sense that we are always at risk, in every moment, for missing what is deepest and richest in our lives, the texture of the tapestry itself. We might say (every pun intended) that the richness lies right beneath our noses in any and every moment. — Larry Rosenberg

If only others knew that Lady Calpurnia Hartwell, proper, well-behaved spinster, entertained deep-seated and certainly unladylike thoughts about fictional heroes. — Sarah MacLean

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely ... and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.
But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful ... It will open up your life. — Cheryl Strayed

These guys [liberals] will never tire of spending our money and will never hold themselves accountable for their boondoggles. For them the failure of $5 trillion to eradicate poverty simply means that we haven't spent enough money. Ditto with education. The solution is always more money. No amount of empirical evidence will shake their socialist theology. — David Limbaugh

I'm not religious. I was as a child, and like lots of people, I suppose, rapidly became very disillusioned with the whole thing. I also feel that organised religion has caused far more problems than it has solved. — Natascha McElhone

Only create associations with positive affinities. Make this a rule of life and you will benefit more than from all the therapy in the world. — Robert Greene

It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren't surprising at all but follow a formula, like the dead body that's certain to lurch out of a wreck being explored by deep-sea divers in just about every book that involves wrecks and divers. — Will Schwalbe

And maybe if I can find a way to stop being scared, I'll actually figure out how to make friends. To be strong. To stop wallowing in my own problems. — Tahereh Mafi

America's belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one's philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you're a cabinet minister or a big time hockey player, you'll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it's up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs and arbitrary shakedowns. — Mark Steyn

Those who analogize the federal budget to a family's budget must know nothing about either. — Robert Reich

Elvis might have compromised his musical style a bit towards the end, but that doesn't mean that artists from the rock n' roll/folk-roots culture - of which he was not really a part - shouldn't get better as they get older, like the great jazz or blues artists. — Bonnie Raitt

Although it was created with the best of intentions, the federal government's Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program has become one of the worst and most costly boondoggles ever foisted on the American public. — Bob Beauprez