Quotes & Sayings About Irrelevant

For the longest time in Denmark I didn't want to say what I was politically. I thought it was irrelevant. — Bjorn Lomborg

For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, properly. Its scenes don't vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there's a switchback, what's been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do something about it, though it's plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done. — Alice Munro

It may not be irrelevant to note that even very modest forms of life, like earthworms, dung beetles and fiddler crabs, have no trouble identifying the real problems they must deal with if they are to survive. — Edward Goldsmith

One must avoid snobbery and misanthropy. But one must also be unafraid to criticise those who reach for the lowest common denominator, and who sometimes succeed in finding it. This criticism would be effortless if there were no "people" waiting for just such an appeal. Any fool can lampoon a king or a bishop or a billionaire. A trifle more grit is required to face down a mob, or even a studio audience that has decided it knows what it wants and is entitled to get it. And the fact that kings and bishops and billionaires often have more say than most in forming appetites and emotions of the crowd is not irrelevant, either. — Christopher Hitchens

We read classics to flood the xenosphere with irrelevant words and thoughts, a firewall of knowledge that even makes its way to the subconscious of the customer. — Tade Thompson

A man counted only because he had a prison number. One literally became a number: dead or alive - that was unimportant; the life of a "number" was completely irrelevant. — Viktor E. Frankl

But, if we want our churches to thrive and our devotional lives to flourish, we absolutely must let God be God. We cannot settle for warm, fuzzy, "feel good movie of the year" versions of God. We cannot settle for a God who exists only to meet our needs and make us happy. We cannot settle for a God who is boring and irrelevant. We cannot settle for a God of our own imagination. We must know the ferocious, untamable God. We must let God out of the boxes we have created. We must come face to face with God as he really is, with all his sharp edges and blazing glory and heart-rending beauty. We must encounter the God who makes mountains melt like wax and the angels cover their eyes and the rivers leap for joy. If we are going to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we must truly know God. We must know him as he truly is, not as we imagine him to be. We must come to grips with the God who has revealed himself in scripture. — Stephen Altrogge

For a large majority of youth raised in church, the church has become irrelevant to their goals and pursuits in life — Sunday Adelaja

I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her vulnerable self ... to enter into a deeper solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success and bring the light of Jesus there. — Henri J.M. Nouwen

What you call poetry and passion are nothing but lies - with beautiful facades. Out of your hundred poets, ninety-nine are not really poets but only people in a state of turmoil, emotion, passion, heat, lust, sexuality, sensuality. Only one out of your hundred poets is a real poet. And the real poet may never compose any poetry, because his whole being is poetry. The way he walks, the way he sits, the way he eats, the way he sleeps - it is all poetry. He exists as poetry. He may create poetry, he may not create poetry, that is irrelevant. But what you call poetry is nothing but the expression of your fever, of your heated state of consciousness. It is a state of insanity. Passion is insane, blind, unconscious - because it gives you the feeling as if it is love. Love — Osho

Yes, etiquette is hypocritical. Yes, it does inhibit children - if you're lucky. But the idea that it's elitist and irrelevant is like saying language is elitist and irrelevant. — Judith Martin

Nothing, I learned, brings you into the present quite like holding hands. The past seemed irrelevant; the future, unnecessary. — Catherine Lowell

The United Nations has become a largely irrelevant, if not positively destructive institution, and the just-released U.N. report on the atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, proves the point. — Linda Chavez

What to one person is common courtesy is to another tender words of life - and by the same token, what one person intends to show as great affection may be to his beloved an irrelevant show of frivolousness compared to the kindness of simply doing the laundry sometimes. — Anna Broadway

I'm not interested in changing either my suit or my car or whatever with every change in fashion. That's irrelevant. I don't judge myself or my friends by their fashions. Of course, I don't approve of people who are sloppy and unnecessarily shabby or dishevelled ... But I'm not impressed by a US$5,000 or US$10,000 Armani suit. — Lee Kuan Yew

And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse. — Aldous Huxley

As believers in democracy we have not only the right but the duty to question existing mechanisms of, say, suffrage and to inquire whether some functional organization would not serve to formulate and manifest public opinion better than the existing methods. It is not irrelevant to the point that a score of passages could be cited in which Jefferson refers to the American Government as an experiment. — John Dewey

What others say about you is irrelevant. You define who you are. — Michele Vail

One winter night, at his home, while he was stirring up the logs in his fireplace, he muttered, "Computers are irrelevant." Building — Tracy Kidder

Nail polish or false eyelashes isn't politics. If you have good politics, what you wear is irrelevant. I don't take dictation from the pig-o-cratic style setters who say I should dress like a middle-aged lady. My politics don't depend on whether my tits are in or out of a bra. — Florynce Kennedy

The ability to try to understand existence, the ability to try to recognize the wonder and responsibility of one's own existence, the ability to know even fractionally the almost annihilating beauty, ambiguity, darkness, and horror which swarm every instant of every consciousness, the ability to try to accept it, or the ability to try to defend one's self, or the ability to dare to try to assist others; all such as these, of which most human beings are cheated of their potentials, are, in most of those who even begin to discern or wish for them, the gifts or thefts of economic privilege, and are available to members of these leanest classes only by the rare and irrelevant miracle of born and surviving 'talent. — James Agee

Intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

If you want to run for Prime Minister, you can. If you don't, that's wonderful, too. Shave your armpits, don't shave them, wear flats one day, heels the next. These things are so irrelevant and surface to what it is all really about, and I wish people wouldn't get caught up in that. We want to empower women to do exactly what they want, to be true to themselves, to have the opportunities to develop. — Emma Watson

Over the years, I've learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one. — Jessica Livingston

One thing that unites us all, one thing is universal among the human species; the anatomy. Big, small, fat, thin, colour or creed are irrelevant. Under the skin, under the flesh, we are one and the same. We desire the same things; love, money, power. All the things we can not have, not without cost. — Rob Shepherd

I'd like them to see that those things that set us apart or make us different can be wonderful contributions to the world around us. I'd like them to see that size and color are irrelevant to the dreams we envision for ourselves. And I'd also love for them to see that life is a journey, and every step of the way, we can learn something and become stronger and wiser. — Gloria Estefan

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and economics. So far from being irrelevant, our metaphysical beliefs are the finally determining factor in all our actions. — Aldous Huxley

A fact simply is. Whether you choose to believe it is irrelevant. — Cathryn Louis

Real philosophy is dense, impenetrable, so esoteric as to be unknown and so obscure as to be irrelevant... Maybe what I do is trivial, the philosophical equivalent of a Big Mac and fries — Jacob M. Held

Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin "social deviance," which is a statistical concept, and they call evil "psychopathology," which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts. — Neil Postman

Every vision must solve a problem or meet a need otherwise it's irrelevant. — Moagi Keretetse

If you're not ready the moment things happen, then you're irrelevant, you might as well not go. — James F. Amos

To picture Roosevelt as a man at this time in his life - he felt he was old. He was 53 years old, feeling lonely and irrelevant. And all of a sudden, he takes on this campaign, and it becomes a crusade for popular government. And he ultimately goes on fire in the campaign, but he discovers he's up against all the old machine tactics that he used to use himself, and he has to let the public get involved. And he energizes the public through the most extreme kind of rhetoric, which truly brings him into the streets and onto his side. — Geoffrey Cowan

The sad truth is that truth is almost irrelevant in a court of law. — Joy Fielding

Though I had been nearly two years on Winter I was still far from being able to see the people of the planet through their own eyes. I tried to, but my efforts took the form of self-consciously seeing a Gethenian first as a man, then as a woman, forcing him into those categories so irrelevant to his nature and so essential to my own. — Ursula K. Le Guin

When I was twelve or thirteen, if you liked something that was outside of your friend group genre, you had to rationalize and explain it in some way. It's totally irrelevant, I think, now. I don't think anybody cares. Not young people, at least. Maybe journalists. — Autre Ne Veut

Truth is irrelevant; what matters is what people believe. — Henry Mosquera

Value innovation is the cornerstone of blue ocean strategy. We call it value innovation because instead of focusing on beating the competition, you focus on making the competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for buyers and your company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space. Value innovation places equal emphasis on value. — W.Chan Kim

Prejudice ... is a subjective emotion which expresses itself upon others only because of an inner necessity for release. The object is irrelevant and opportune. The person who feels prejudice is the victim of himself and his own unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Life is not what he wants it to be and it has not been what he wishes it had been. — Pearl S. Buck

Either you're going to tell stories that spread, or you will become irrelevant. — Seth

We abjure labels. We fight for money and an indefinable pride. The politics, the ethics, the moralities, are irrelevant. — Glen Cook

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details. — Jonathan Lethem

Why they vote for me is irrelevant, but if they do, they're in safe hands. — Pim Fortuyn

It is in fact necessary to reduce CO2 emissions. There is no reason why we shouldn't spend our vacations on (the North Sea island of) Sylt instead of in the Seychelles, or drive more economical cars - for the sake of preserving increasingly scarce resources if nothing else. But that won't enable us to stop climate change. As long as China, India and the United States continue the way they have been, what we Germans do is more or less irrelevant. — Hans Von Storch

When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier. — Don Kardong

What is it about mothers and the phone which, immediately you say you have to go, makes them think of nineteen completely irrelevant things they have to tell you that minute? — Helen Fielding

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. — Neil Postman

The idea that I am a bad person or exhibiting poor character traits by my disdain for someone can be irrelevant and false. If I meet someone I immediately dislike, for what ever reason, but I am polite and courteous, helpful and pleasant then I have been polite, courteous, helpful and pleasant. This is not at all the same as then finding someone else to gossip with and verbalize my disdain for that person. It is certainly not the same as being outright rude to that person. What I have thought is of no consequence here. My actions show who I am, not my thoughts. The same can be said of the basic premise of being spiritual itself. If I seek to be spiritual and yet find no time in my life for reflection on what this should and does mean to me am I being spiritual at all? The actions we relate to as being spiritual are the natural outcome of such reflection in our lives. When we are true to our own sense of integrity we naturally find compassion for others. — David Carlyle

Will I someday pass into history having passed by God and therefore forfeited the opportunity to change my world and reap the blessing of being able to do so because I saw myself as inadequate to achieve either? And how long will it take me to realize that if I doggedly refuse to pass by God, my inadequacy is instantly irrelevant and I have in actuality begun to achieve these very things. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior. — Ed Catmull

Conversation was irrelevant. Only pie mattered. — Richelle Mead

the fact that she completely obscured his view of the road was quite irrelevant since Asian drivers never look where they're going. — Dervla Murphy

Told often enough that they are the source of sin, women may well begin feeling guilty as they accept the necessity for penance. Taught effectively enough that they are irrelevant to the important processes of society, women begin to feel they are living invisibly. — Sandra M. Gilbert Susan Gubar

What is truth? Pilate was not alone in dismissing this question as unanswerable and irrelevant for his purposes. Today too, in political argument and in discussion of the foundations of law, it is generally experienced as disturbing. Yet if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the stronger. "Redemption" in the fullest sense can only consist in the truth becoming recognizable. And it becomes recognizable when God becomes recognizable. He becomes recognizable in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God entered the world and set up the criterion of truth in the midst of history. Truth is outwardly powerless in the world, just as Christ is powerless by the world's standards: he has no legions; he is crucified. Yet in his very powerlessness, he is powerful: only thus, again and again, does truth become power. — Pope Benedict XVI

Emotion without action is irrelevant. — Jody Williams

The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning ...
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong. — Laurens Van Der Post

Somewhere beyond the battening, urged sweep of three-bedroom houses rushing by their thousands across all the dark beige hills, somehow implicit in an arrogance or bite to the smog the more inland somnolence of San Narciso did lack, lurked the sea, the unimaginable Pacific, the one to which all surfers, beach pads, sewage disposal schemes, tourist incursions, sunned homosexuality, chartered fishing are irrelevant, the hole left by the moon's tearing-free and monument to her exile; you could not hear or even smell this but it was there, something tidal began to reach feelers in past eyes and eardrums, perhaps to arouse fractions of brain current your most gossamer microelectrode is yet too gross for finding. — Thomas Pynchon

There was an emotion in the air that encompassed all of us, made us feel we'd shed our old skins and the past was irrelevant. — Robert F. Worth

When you have a show that's called Jessica Jones, if Jessica Jones isn't in a scene the rest of it become almost irrelevant until you earn other character storylines. You've got to flesh out those characters enough that you can travel. — Melissa Rosenberg

Karl Marx is irrelevant to many millions of them because, in America, religion is the poetry of the people and not their opiate. — Harold Bloom

The inner experience of meditation can be had without any kind of forced discipline. The outer trappings - how one sits, breathes, dresses, and so forth - are irrelevant. — Deepak Chopra

When you're the only person who could have created a work of art, the competition and standard metrics by which things are measured become irrelevant because nothing can replace you. The factors that distinguish you are so personal than nobody can replicate them. — Srinivas Rao

No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from achieving those positions for which their talents fit them and which their values lead them to seek. Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person - only his abilities. — Milton Friedman

The role of the leader is to foster mutual respect and build a complementary team where each strength is made productive and each weakness irrelevant. — Stephen Covey

I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies. — J. Jack Halberstam

The mere fact that a belief is unpopular at present (or at some other time) is interesting from a sociological point of view but evidentially irrelevant. — Alvin Plantinga

The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there's a clatter of wings. We both look up. There's a pigeon, a woodpigeon, sailing down to roost in a lime tree above us. Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It's as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes her neck. This. This flightpath. This thing, she thinks. This is fascinating. Some part of the hawk's young brain has just worked something out, and it has everything to do with death. — Helen Macdonald

First, I worry about climate change. It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible. — William J. Clinton

Always make a note of what you are doing and where it leads. By and by, you will become aware of that which is ego and that which is nature; which is real and which is false. It will take time and alertness, observation. And don't deceive yourself - because only ego leads to misery, nothing else. Don't throw the responsibility on the other; the other is irrelevant. Your ego leads to misery, nobody else leads you into misery. Ego is the gate of hell, and the natural, the authentic, the real that comes from your center, is the door to heaven. You will have to find it and work it out. — Rajneesh

The bottom line is that if politicians weren't in the business of granting favors and exacting tribute, every single issue surrounding campaign finance reform would be irrelevant. After all, why would anyone spend money for influence, access, favors and tribute if the only thing that politicians do is to live up to their oaths to uphold and defend the Constitution? — Walter E. Williams

This was not because he was cowardly and abject, quite the contrary; but for some time past he had been in an overstrained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria. He had become so completely absorbed in himself, and isolated from his fellows that he dreaded meeting, not only his landlady, but anyone at all. He was crushed by poverty, but the anxieties of his position had of late ceased to weigh upon him. He had given up attending to matters of practical importance; he had lost all desire to do so. Nothing that any landlady could do had a real terror for him. But to be stopped on the stairs, to be forced to listen to her trivial, irrelevant gossip, to pestering demands for payment, threats and complaints, and to rack his brains for excuses, to prevaricate, to lie - no, rather than that, he would creep down the stairs like a cat and slip out unseen. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There were shadows in the corners and whispers on the stairs and time was irrelevant as honesty. — V.C. Andrews

One cannot be strong without love. For love is not an irrelevant emotion; it is the blood of life. — Paul Tillich

Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as "irrelevant"? When — May Sarton

Evangelical Christians, who once were a ridiculed irrelevant sectarian movement, have, over just three decades, become a powerful voting bloc that can no longer be ignored. — Tony Campolo

Horza recalled that the Culture's attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn't totally irrelevant - along with the person's background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them - but you didn't take their views seriously. — Iain Banks

Some people are known, they have the platform and presence, but still remain irrelevant. They know you and what you do, but they don't need you or your offering. I see too many people with a platform but without substance, again this is not sustainable. Lack of substance can only relegate your talent or skill towards the league of the mediocre, if at all you become much by superficial branding then you will become the best of the worst. You don't have what it takes but you depend on your ability to sell substandard offerings to the market. It will not last for long, but quickly become irrelevant. — Archibald Marwizi

I don't spend much time thinking about whether God exists. I don't consider that a relevant question. It's unanswerable and irrelevant to my life, so I put it in the category of things I can't worry about. — Wendy Kaminer

Critical thinking is to a liberal education as faith is to religion ... the converse was true also - faith is to a liberal education as critical thinking is to religion, irrelevant and even damaging. — Jane Smiley

Then take it as it is. It's a gift. How or why is irrelevant, but if we don't enjoy it, we are ungrateful, he said and brought his face very close to mine. His eyes seemed to sparkle in the moonlight, mesmerizing me. — Rubianne Wood

There will always be some who dilute the gospel to attract a crowd, but not everyone who wants to be contemporary does that. You can tell those who do because they leave out critical parts of the message, such as the uniqueness of Christ, that he's the only way, the fact that we are saved by grace through faith, or the reality of heaven and hell. Those who compromise on nonnegotiables think they're being relevant, but they become irrelevant because they have nothing to offer. Their message becomes increasingly weak and void of the power to transform people's lives. — Leon Fontaine

What is the minimum daily requirement for carbohydrates? ZERO. The food pyramid is based on a totally irrelevant nutrient. — Ron Rosedale

The question of relevance comes before that of truth, because to ask whether a statement is true or false presupposes that it is relevant (so that to try to assert the truth or falsity of an irrelevant statement is a form of confusion) ... — David Bohm

If you know nothing about maintaining a [lawn] mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant ... the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable. — Charles Fishman

At first blush I am tempted to conclude that a satisfactory hobby must be in large degree useless, inefficient, laborious, or irrelevant. — Aldo Leopold

This basic problem of relevance-cum-subservience has been given an added twist in the modern world, where relevance has become not only hollow but fragile and short-lived. A wider range of choices, a deeper uncertainty of events, a more pressing need for new styles - all this makes for an accelerating turnover of issues, concerns and fads. Nothing tires like a trend or ages faster than a fashion. Today's bold headline is tomorrow's yellowing newsprint. Thus the relevance-hungry liberals achieve relevance, but their victory is Pyrrhic. It is precisely as they win that they lose. As they become relevant to one group or movement, they become irrelevant to another and find themselves rudely dismissed. Far from being in the avant-garde, Christian liberals trot smartly behind the times. Far from being genuinely new or radical, they catch up and announce their discoveries breathlessly, only to see the vanguard disappearing down the road on the trail of a different pursuit. — Os Guinness

Communications without intelligence is noise. Intelligence without communications is irrelevant. — Alfred M. Gray

A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the Whale. Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness. People who find those lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness. Science has nothing to do with it, friends. — Kurt Vonnegut

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. — Barry Eisler

Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant. — Oscar Wilde

No one else 'makes us angry.' We make ourselves angry when we surrender control of our attitude. What someone else may have done is irrelevant. We choose, not they. They merely put our attitude to a test. — Jim Rohn

Rather than get hung up on historical details, we need to keep coming back to the question, 'What does God want to tell us?' If we hang our faith on the absolute historical accuracy of Scripture in every detail, we risk making Scripture a sort of 'magic' book that turns up the right answers to all sorts of rather irrelevant questions, instead of being a book that gives us, in the wonderful words of the Coronation service, 'the lively oracles of God'. The Bible is not intended to be a mere chronicle of past events, but a living communication from God, telling us now what we need to know for our salvation. — Rowan Williams

Speed is irrelevant if you are going in the wrong direction. — Mahatma Gandhi

Many think of memory as rote learning, a linear stuffing of the brain with facts, where understanding is irrelevant. When you teach it properly, with imagination and association, understanding becomes a part of it. — Tony Buzan

I feel that our stories are cross culturally irrelevant, and I'm a member if a larger community of people who have no boundaries in terms of color or in terms of how I look at other people and their stories. — Giancarlo Esposito

[L]ike it or not, the right timing is an inescapable part of human endeavor and thus of politics. . . . But some activists suggest that "timing" is irrelevant in public policy and politics. In their view, it's just another "excuse" by "incrementalists," another example of their traitorous cowardice, another reason why they should be condemned and purged. . . . There is a fundamental ethical and practical difference between compromise and prudently fighting for the most good that can be gained in the face of overwhelming odds. . . . Realizing the constraints and limits of this world should guard us against unrealistic expectations of what politics can or should achieve. And yet, the examples of Wilberforce and Lincoln, among many others, demonstrate that moral purpose can be successfully pursued in politics with prudence. — Clarke D. Forsythe

The only reward the musician receives is music: The privilege of standing in the presence of music when it leans over and takes unto its confidence. As it is for the audience. In this moment everything else is irrelevant and without power. For those in music, this is the moment when life becomes unreal. — Robert Fripp

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. — Robinson Jeffers

Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole. — Lyndon B. Johnson

His emotional state is irrelevant." Raphael's face was brutal in its repudiation. "It's because of him that you didn't have what you needed to heal as a child. — Nalini Singh