This Exercise Is Futile Quotes & Sayings

It is not merely cruelty that leads men to love war, it is excitement. — Henry Ward Beecher

The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions. — Paul Goodman

Bear in mind that brains and learning, like muscle and physical skill, are articles of commerce. They are bought and sold. You can hire them by the year or by the hour. The only thing in the world not for sale is character. — Antonin Scalia

And it's true. It's so true. All those years of loving Zik because he never asked about Eve ... I never realized, I never understood. It was his job as my best friend not to ask.
But it was my job as his best friend to tell him without being asked. — Barry Lyga

If you see the humanity in the world, grains of sand that bring everything to a halt - it's corruption, clashes of egos, human factors more than resources. So, how to avoid that? There's a lack of human maturity. So it's not a vain or futile exercise to perfect yourself to some extent before you serve others, otherwise it's like cutting the wheat when it's still green. And nobody is fed by that. So we need a minimum of readiness to efficiently and wisely be at the service of others. So compassion needs also to be sort of enlightened by wisdom. Otherwise, it's blind. — Matthieu Ricard

Language. The process of sharing with words seemed such a futile exercise sometimes. — Guy Gavriel Kay

Jim: Green and red. (pulls on green lever which closes a door)
Artie: Very impressive. (stops Jim from pulling the red lever). Uh ... did it ever occur to you that red might mean danger?
Jim: For instance?
Artie: For instance, red for fire. Fire of explosion.
Jim: What would they want to explode?
Artie: Those who fool around with their levers.
Wild Wild West Season 4
Night of the Big Blackmail — Wild Wild West TV TV

Being impatient with a donkey is a futile exercise. — Vannetta Chapman

Why charm anyone? What a futile exercise it seemed now! People blew away like dandelion thistles, carried off by death or indifference or sheer, inexplicable whim. Why bother to grasp at them? One would only be disappointed eventually. — Meredith Duran

Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable — Derek R. Audette

Psychologists and economists love to talk about the notion of two selves: present self and future self. It's a nice way to explain the tendency to have one preference about the future, but a very different preference when the future becomes the present. — Daniel Goldstein