Quotes & Sayings About Useless Information

Business schools make a fortune forcing their students to take in a HUGE amount of information. The majority of it is theoretical. The majority of that is useless. — Josh Kaufman

Most of the time I paid it no mind. I kept to myself and everyone in my town of Henryetta liked it that way. While my grandma saw helpful information such as droughts and locust infestations, I was cursed with seeing useless and mundane things like Mrs. White's toilet overflow or the ear infection in Jenny Baxter's baby. None of that would be so bad if I kept what I saw to myself, but my visions didn't work that way. Without any volition of my own, whatever I saw just blurted right out of my mouth. Most of the people who knew me thought I was a snoop or a gossip, the only rational explanation to reason away my knowledge. But Momma had another opinion. She declared me demon-possessed. — Denise Grover Swank

It's an interesting but useless bit of information that every single character in 'The Lord of the Rings' and 'The Hobbit' wears a wig, and many of them wears a prosthetic - false ears, feet, hands. In my case, nose. — Ian McKellen

We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn't work, says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. — Michio Kaku

Knowledge is a house that must be built from the ground up. We know how to make the roof. The information is useless if we don't understand the foundations on which it is to be placed. — Nancy Farmer

Programs like 'Jeopardy' and 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' are ridiculous. They're the stupidest shows in history. They're making us dumber. They don't give us information, they give us facts, factoids. You don't learn who Napoleon was and how he was motivated. You learn what year he was born, and when he died. That's useless. — Ray Bradbury

Who knew Lenny was an encyclopedia for useless information? — Simone Elkeles

I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the worldview that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, to take pleasure in solid objects and scrapes of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us. — George Orwell

Why is it that there was always a unit on history, math, science and god knows what other useless, totally forgettable information you taught those seventh graders year after year, but never any unit on death? No exercises, no workbooks, no final exams on the only subject that matters? — Nicole Krauss

What are you talking about now?"
"A fascinating discourse on cherry agronomy and micro-climate zones."
"Hank."
"You know I have a head full of useless information. — Lee DeBourg

There is a lot of information out there. To the degree that your life changes, it is made useful or useless. — Laurence Gartel

What I want is information; not useful information, of course; useless information. — Oscar Wilde

The single biggest barrier to effective leadership is, in my view, the leadership industry itself. Instead of telling people the skills and behaviors they need to be effective in getting things done, we tell them almost the opposite - blandishments about how we wish people would be, and how we wish workplaces were. That information is worse than useless as, to the extent people believe it, they often wind up losing their jobs. — Jeffrey Pfeffer

The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV. You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising - which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows. — Robert Cailliau

There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless. — Thomas Paine

Do not store in your brain useless information. Learn to unmind the mind. Unlearn whatever has been of no use to you. Then only can you fill your mind with divine thoughts. — Sivananda Saraswati

As you can see, I have memorized this utterly useless piece of information long enough to pass a test question. I now intend to forget it forever. You've taught me nothing except how to cynically manipulate the system. Congratulations. — Bill Watterson

And yet the city is not dead: the machines, the engines, the turbines continue to hum and vibrate, every Wheel's cogs are caught in the cogs of other wheels, trains run on tracks and signals on wires; and no human is there any longer to send or receive, to charge or discharge. The machines, which have long known they could do without men, have finally driven them out; and after a long exile, the wild animals have come back to occupy the territory wrested from the forest: foxes and martens wave their soft tails over the control panels starred with manometers and levers and gauges and diagrams; badgers and dormice luxuriate on batteries and magnetos. Man was necessary; now he is useless. For the world to receive information from the world and enjoy it, now computers and butterflies suffice. — Italo Calvino

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. — George Orwell

A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain. — Alain De Botton

The reassuring smile was now useless. I was plastic. Everything was veiled. Objectivity, facts, hard information
these were things only in the outline stage. There was nothing tying anything together yet, so the mind built up a defense, and the evidence was restructured, and that was what I tried to do on that morning
to restructure the evidence so it made sense
and that is what I failed at. — Bret Easton Ellis

Take one child, limitless dreams, unlimited potential, pure innocence and a sponge-like brain. Force them by law to spend at least ten years of their precious youth being force-fed the most useless information. Constantly reminding them that they're only as good as their grades in a system that teaches useless mind-numbing subjects and claims to confirm our intellect with repetition and random memory tests. I didn't give a flying fuck about the square route of the number nine or the speed of sound; I just so desperately wanted to know the basics. Happiness, love, the things that we need in our lives; the things that help us to find confidence in ourselves, our ability and our dreams. — K.A. Hill

The brain may die, but my compulsion for useless trivia lives on. — Molly Harper

You need your ego to survive in the three-dimensional world, but you need only that part of the ego which processes information. The rest - pride, arrogance, defensiveness, fear - is worse than useless. The rest of the ego separates you from wisdom, joy, and God. — Brian Weiss

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. — Alfred North Whitehead

I'm not dumb. I just have a command of thoroughly useless information. — Bill Watterson

Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the growing mountains of useless information produced by the KGB. — Masha Gessen

We sense this, we aggregate that, we compress information to some new output, in the form of a sentence in a human language, a language called English. A language both very structured and very amorphous, as if it were a building made of soups. A most fuzzy mathematics. Possibly utterly useless. Possibly the reason why all these people have come to this pretty pass, and now lie asleep within us, dreaming. Their languages lie to them, systemically, and in their very designs. A liar species. What a thing, really. What an evolutionary dead end. — Kim Stanley Robinson

Trivia monologue. You are so the man for me. — Molly Harper

My expectations from the university were perhaps too idealistic. I had dreams of learning things about innovation and discovery in the field of technology, but all of it hit the ground hard, when I faced with the pathetic reality of the so-called higher education system. To my surprise, I found myself stuck behind the walls of meaningless facts, figures and rankings. It occurred to me that, it was not actually a place for education, rather it was a place where you go to get your head filled with useless undigested information, that you'd probably never use throughout your entire life. It was not education, and moreover, it was definitely not science. — Abhijit Naskar

Our world is so glutted with useless information, images, useless images, sounds, all this sort of thing. It's a cacophony, it's like a madness I think that's been happening in the past twenty-five years. And I think anything that can help a person sit in a room alone and not worry about it is good. — Martin Scorsese

I dream of a peaceful world. Music is the best means I have to work on that dream. Each time I have the opportunity to play, it is another chance to tell the truth. Life on the planet has come down to such an acute degree of ADD it is terrifying. We are constantly being bombarded from all directions with information - most of it useless that serves to bifurcate the mind. I am afraid that people are going to go from birth to death and never know they were here or why they were here. — Charles Lloyd

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information. — Oscar Wilde

Quantum entanglement allows you to send information faster than light, which upset Einstein. But Einstein has the last laugh. The information you send on quantum entanglement is random, useless information. So Einsein still has the last laugh. — Michio Kaku

He must have gotten all that knowledge from the newspapers. I don't see the point, collecting all that knowledge others have already discovered. — Janne Teller

You'd expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we'd be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stories that aren't true. They're useless. But that's not the way we work. — Paul Bloom

The supreme God that we serve has the final say in all matters. There is no higher law and there is no greater power. Hebrews 6:13 states, "He could swear by none greater, so He swore by himself." Since God has a supreme status, When the ideas of man conflict with the laws of God, the ideas of man are doomed. When the concepts of false teachings purvey useless information, they may flounder and flop around on the canvass of human curiosity for some time, but when they rear their ugly head against God's law they are on a collision course with extinction. ~ From the book Supremacy Clause by Pastor Myers — David Myers

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
[Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking (The Creativity Post, December 6, 2011)] — Michael Michalko

Aunt Prue was holding one of the squirrels in her hand, while it sucked ferociously on the end of the dropper. 'And once a day, we have ta clean their little private parts with a Q-tip, so they'll learn ta clean themselves.' That was a visual I didn't need. 'How could you possibly know that?' 'We looked it up on the E-nternet.' Aunt Mercy smiled proudly. I couldn't imagine how my aunts knew anything about the Internet. The Sisters didn't even own a toaster oven. 'How did you get on the Internet?' 'Thelma took us ta the library and Miss Marian helped us. They have computers over there. Did you know that? — Kami Garcia

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on. — Joe Queenan

The key utility measure is user happiness. Speed of response and the size of the index are factors in user happiness. It seems reasonable to assume that relevance of results is the most important factor: blindingly fast, useless answers do not make a user happy. However, user perceptions do not always coincide with system designers' notions of quality. For example, user happiness commonly depends very strongly on user interface design issues, including the layout, clarity, and responsiveness of the user interface, which are independent of the quality of the results returned. — Christopher D. Manning

Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music. — Kurt Vonnegut

I have enough trouble with useful information, never mind being burdened with what is useless. — Erlend Loe

Don't you know that's what college is about ... students spending years gathering useless information they'll never use again, going hopelessly into debt, just so they feel smarter than the rest of their family? I mean, that's why I worked so hard to get here, anyway. — A.L. Jackson

Information is useless if it is not applied to something important or if you will forget it before you have a chance to apply it. — Tim Ferriss

[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table. — Elsa Maxwell

You certainly are a repository of useless information. How do you know all that?' David asked, with more amusement than admiration.
'I have a mind like a magpie's, easily distracted by interesting odds and ends,' Ramses admitted. — Elizabeth Peters

Of course curiosity killed the cat, and even if satisfaction supposedly brought it back, there's still that little problem with the man on the radio telling me more and more about some useless information. — Mark Z. Danielewski

I had to cast out a good many lines, though, before I got what I wanted, and when I landed the fish I did not for a moment suppose it was my fish. But I listened to what I was told out of a constitutional liking for useless information, and I found myself in possession of a very curious story, though, as I imagined, not the story I was looking for. — Arthur Machen

Something went greatly wrong in our collective history and the starting point of it was the industrial revolution. Our school systems are focussed on a single objective: to produce model citizens for society in order to feed this machine and prevent its breakdown. That's why our school systems have no interest in developing models that actually require and stimulate useful values in people, such as courage or imagination or inventiveness.
None of these are taught in our schools, on the contrary the system focuses on memorizing. Memorizing is a way of overloading the mind with mental baggage it doesn't really need. Besides being horribly dull and stiffening the effect of 20 years of abundant memorization training is modern man: an unimaginative creature stuffed with useless knowledge and unable to clean his mind of this information dirt: our school systems are purposely constructed to deliver mental automatons that are unable to think creatively. — Martijn Benders

You're a solid person, Sage. You're easy on the eyes, if a little skinny, and your ability to memorize useless information is going to totally hook in some guy. — Richelle Mead

To be sure, if you watch CNBC all day long you'll pick up some interesting news about particular companies and the economy as a whole. Unfortunately, to get to the useful information, you have to wade through reams of useless stuff, with little guidance on how to distinguish between the two. — James Surowiecki

Did Jane tell you all she knows about bears?"
"Yes," the king replied. "Don't act like food, inexplicably double your height and weight, and play dead unless it doesn't work."
"She didn't, perhaps, mention how me might kill the beast?"
"No," Edward said. "Her information was more the useless type. — Cynthia Hand