Most Usable Quotes & Sayings

When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next ... Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants] and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction. — Richard Heinberg

As you probably know, I'm often accused of intellectual exhibitionism and all forms of elitism. Although I can understand this point of view, it's a rather wasted argument because, if we regard areas of information as being elite and therefore somehow not usable, it means our centre-ground of activity becomes very, very impoverished. — Peter Greenaway

In those days [batch processing] programmers never even documented their programs, because it was assumed that nobody else would ever use them. Now, however, time-sharing had made exchanging software trivial: you just stored one copy in the public repository and therby effectively gave it to the world. Immediately people began to document their programs and to think of them as being usable by others. They started to build on each other's work. — Robert Fano

We will continue to work with agencies across the government to unleash the power of open data and to make government data more accessible and usable for entrepreneurs, companies, researchers, and citizens everywhere - innovators who can leverage these resources to benefit Americans in a rapidly growing array of exciting and powerful ways. — Todd Park

C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourages you to use simple and direct constructs. — Linus Torvalds

There are a number of advantages to moving yourself, with saving money being number one. I have done professional loading and unloading for countless shippers. Most were looking at savings of approximately fifty percent when all expenses were considered. These were people who were moving mostly 8,000 pound or less of furniture (household goods)-- the weight of the contents of the average small three-bedroom home and the maximum usable (as opposed to advertised) capacity of the largest rental trucks.



Moving yourself has other advantages too. Weather and road conditions permitting, the move will go on your schedule. You won't have to worry about coordinating with your movers for delivery because you are the movers. There is also the security of knowing exactly where your stuff is with no worries about delays, mixed-up shipments or theft. — Jerry G. West

Thirty spokes share one hub in non-being lies the use of the cart knead clay to make vessels in non-being lies the use of the vessel cut out doors and windows to make a house
therefore form being comes what is usable and from non-being comes what is essential. — Lao-Tzu

Above all else, products spread when they're useful and they're usable — Kevin Systrom

To be granted some kind of usable talent and to be able to use it to the fullest extent of which you are capable - this, to me, is a kind of joy that is almost unequaled. — Lawrence Welk

It is not enough that we build products that function, that are understandable and usable, we also need to build products that bring joy and excitement, pleasure and fun, and, yes, beauty to people's lives. — Donald A. Norman

Schools train people to be ignorant, with style. They give you the equipment that you need to be a functional ignoramus. American schools* do not equip you to deal with things like logic; they don't give you the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any medium or format; and they prepare you to be a usable victim for military-industrial complex that needs manpower. — Frank Zappa

But the justifications of the family farm are not merely agricultural; they are political and cultural as well. The question of the survival of the family farm and the farm family is one version of the question of who will own the country, which is, ultimately, the question of who will own the people. Shall the usable property of our country be democratically divided, or not? Shall the power of property be a democratic power, or not? If many people do not own the usable property, then they must submit to the few who do own it. They cannot eat or be sheltered or clothed except in submission. They will find themselves entirely dependent on money; they will find costs always higher, and money always harder to get. To renounce the principle of democratic property, which is the only basis of democratic liberty, in exchange for specious notions of efficiency or the economics of the so-called free market is a tragic folly. There — Wendell Berry

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either. — Randall Jarrell

It is a hopeless endeavor to make the form and content of earlier architectural epochs usable for our time; in this, even the strongest artistic talent must fail. We see repeatedly how the outstanding builders fail to achieve an effect because their work does not serve the will of the age. — Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

God is looking for people to use, and if you can get usable, he will wear you out. The most dangerous prayer you can pray is this: 'Use me.' — Rick Warren

Whatever it is that you're successful at, that has to be the No. 1 goal. In my case, it's accessibility. So all of my products have to be usable, accessible, affordable. — Rachael Ray

The IronClad is faster than most thumb drives but far slower than a standard hard drive. Boot up, application launch and other Windows operations feel sluggish, though still usable. — Barton Gellman

Whyte's work remains a living and usable handbook for improving our cities, our countryside, and our lives. — Nathan Glazer

She'd jury-rigged a computer using pieces scavenged from several crashed fighters over the years, including a cracked but still-usable display from an old BTL-A4 Y-wing. There were no radio communications to speak of - no way to transmit or receive and, frankly, nobody she wanted to talk to anyway. On the wreckage of a Zephra-series hauler, though, she'd once found a stash of data chips, and after painstakingly going through each and every one of them, she'd discovered three with their programs intact; one of them, to her delight, had been a flight simulator. — Greg Rucka

We all have so much access to the information on the Internet and in books, but we don't necessarily get that information in a usable way so that we can turn information into action. — Daphne Oz

The state of New York had just one important advantage - an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and were such an obstruction to trade and communications that many people believed that the pioneers living beyond the mountains would eventually, of practical necessity, form a separate nation. — Bill Bryson

My mother clutches at the collar of my shirt. I rub her back and feel her tears on my neck. It's been decades since our bodies have been this close. It's an odd sensation, like a torn ligament knitting itself back, lumpy and imperfect, usable as long as we know not to push it too hard. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

We must note the curious fact that people are not content with what is simple to understand, but go straight for the more complex problems which they will perhaps never grasp. What is simple to grasp is quite usable and useful, and can keep us occupied for a whole lifetime if it satisfies and stimulates us. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There was the matter of the withered-looking and bradyauxetic arms, which just as in a hair-raising case of Volkmann's contracture 115 curled out in front of his thorax in magiscule S's and were usable for rudimentary knifeless eating and slapping at doorknobs until they sort of turned just enough and doors could be kicked open and — David Foster Wallace

CONCERNED AS HE is that the usable be put to use, that there be no waste, still there is nothing utilitarian or mechanistic about Mr. Lapp's farm - or his mind. His aim, it seems, is not that the place should be put to the fullest use, but that it should have the most abundant life. — Wendell Berry

There were always men looking for jobs in America. There were always all these usable bodies. And I wanted to be a writer. Almost everybody was a writer. Not everybody thought they could be a dentist or an automobile mechanic but everybody knew they could be a writer. Of those fifty guys in the room, probably fifteen of them
thought they were writers. Almost everybody used words and could write them down, i.e., almost everybody could be a writer. But most men, fortunately, aren't writers, or even cab drivers, and some men - many men - unfortunately aren't anything. — Charles Bukowski

The reality is your bosses or clients never ask for fastest spreadsheets. They ask for most usable, accurate and simple ones. — Purnachandra Rao Duggirala

Once we have inexpensive energy, we can readily and inexpensively convert the vast amount of dirty and salinated water we have on the planet to usable water. — Ray Kurzweil

As scientific research demonstrates, llama wool's very coarseness and its range of fibers from fine to thick mean that it can be woven into clothing that's superior to down, fleece, sheep wool, and alpaca wool in criteria ranging from warmth to water resistance to usable life. — David Roberts

This freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth. — Robert Hayden

The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself. — Lewis Thomas

The world is complex, and so too must be the activities that we perform. But that doesn't mean that we must live in continual frustration. No. The whole point of human-centered design is to tame complexity, to turn what would appear to be a complicated tool into one that fits the task, that is understandable, usable, enjoyable. — Donald A. Norman

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions. — Bill Gates

It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying ... — John Ashbery

I can go into a playground of kids that don't know anything about Christianity, lead them to the Lord in a matter of, just no time at all, and just moments later they can be seeing visions and hearing the voice of God, because they're so open. They are so usable in Christianity. — Becky Fischer

Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era - it's a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good. — Clement Mok

Set the basketball on the kitchen table. Open a cupboard, get out a bottle of sesame seeds, and place a single seed beside the basketball. If you were to reduce the Earth to the size of a basketball, all the fresh surface water on the planet - all those rivers and lakes and ponds and streams - would fit inside that one tiny sesame seed. Add a second sesame seed; now you have all the usable underground water as well. Is fresh water a scarce resource? — William Ashworth

Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. — Twyla Tharp

Schools train you to be ignorant with style [ ... ] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [ ... ] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up. — Frank Zappa

The next big thing is the one that makes the last big thing usable. — Blake Ross

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words. — Roy Peter Clark

Knowledge can be enormously costly, and is often scattered in widely uneven fragments, too small to be individually usable in decision making. The communication and coordination of these scattered fragments of knowledge is one of the basic problems- perhaps the basic problem- of any society. — Thomas Sowell

The international community must do a better job of controlling the risks of nuclear proliferation. Sensitive parts of the nuclear fuel cycle - the production of new fuel, the processing of weapon-usable material, the disposal of spent fuel and radioactive waste - would be less vulnerable to proliferation if brought under multinational control. — Mohamed ElBaradei

Christians actually need to be confronted by their real need-an understanding of God's holiness and their own sinfulness-so they can be usable to Him for His Glory. When we have a right relationship to God, every aspect of our lives will settle into its divinely ordained place ... We are still to need other needs but it begins with a high view of God. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Revelation is everything, not for its own sake, because most self-revelation is just garbage
oop!
yes, but we have to purge the garbage, toss it out, throw it into a bunker and burn it, because it is fuel. It's fossil fuel. And what do we do with fossil fuel? Why, we dump it into a bunker and burn it, of course. No, we don't do that. But you get my meaning. It's endlessly renewable, usable without diminishing one's capacity to create more. — Dave Eggers

'The Last Five Years,' we sang almost everything live. When we're in a convertible on the West Side Highway, there was no point - it's not going to be usable sound. But any time we were indoors, we were singing live. — Anna Kendrick