It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful: they are found because it was possible to find them.
But for the children of the poorest people we’re stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We’re not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child.
I love that vein which uses sci-fi to address society’s problems. It is the same when you have useful nightmares – things morph, and you get to confront issues in your dreams.
A good scientist can understand the current state of a field, pick interesting questions where a success will actually lead to useful new knowledge, and push that field further through their work.
I’m touched by the idea that when we do things that are useful and helpful – collecting these shards of spirituality – that we may be helping to bring about a healing.
For novelists, sharply drawn moral conflicts are often useful, and even human and personal disasters can be seen as material.
When you’re a houseguest and you leave, it’s nice to straighten something up or send your hosts a useful gift. And when you leave the planet, it’s nice to have made a positive contribution.
What’s so useful about the British culture of politeness is the level of passive aggression is really fun to write.
I live by Edith Wharton’s rule to get rid of anything neither useful nor beautiful. So I put the TV out on the street.
I love test screenings. Some directors don’t, I know. But I love it. I think it’s because I come from the theatre and in the theatre, previews are where you really have to listen to the audience and really feel how they’re responding. I found our test screenings incredibly useful.
When I joined Bloomberg, I was especially eager to take advantage of the organization’s size. Because I work on a wide variety of stories, bouncing between industries and countries, it’s immensely useful to work together with so many journalists with such a wide range of expertise.
Averages are useful because many traits, behaviors, and outcomes are distributed in a bell-shaped curve, with most results clustered around the middle and a much smaller group of outliers at the high and low ends.
The footballers’ wives I know, they’re teachers, midwives. They want to do something useful. One is working at my son’s nursery, on her hands and knees, in Converse and jeans, teaching kids to count.
The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.
I am a writer, and the duty of a writer is not only to furnish pleasant pursuits for the mind and taste: he will be held accountable if things useful to the soul are not disseminated by his works and if nothing remains after him as a precept for mankind.
Anytime you learn something new, you’re just trying to file it away – might be useful one day.
I believe it has been said that one copy of The Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.
That being said, I often write into recipes techniques I learned in the restaurant kitchen. There are ways of organizing your prep and so on that are immensely useful. Those are woven into all the recipes I do.
Connecting with people who are able to maintain a sense of humility is really useful.
It’s useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.
The blogosphere might be very useful as propaganda or as therapy. But it’s not journalism.
Often, people think that individual data is the most valuable thing they can collect. But it’s not useful to know what I am doing or where I am, unless you’re particularly interested in me, which is weird. But it is very useful to know what a population of people are doing.
I think it’s important that we eliminate regulations that are not serving a useful purpose.
Basically, our goal is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful.
The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.
Grassroots organizing tends to be most available to big campaigns, but it’s actually most useful to small ones. You can’t win a presidential campaign without going on TV, but you can win a local election simply by organizing your community. NationBuilder levels the playing field.
I try to be useful.
Come Christmas Eve, we usually go to my mom and dad’s. Everybody brings one gift and then we play that game when we all steal it from each other. Some are really cool, others are useful and some are a bit out there.
Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other.
Before the 1970s, banks were banks. They did what banks were supposed to do in a state capitalist economy: they took unused funds from your bank account, for example, and transferred them to some potentially useful purpose like helping a family buy a home or send a kid to college.
The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.
My fundamental philosophy is that you owe it to society to transfer to them any knowledge you have that might be useful.
I’ve hidden behind my hair more than clothes. Sometimes having long hair with a fringe is very useful when you don’t want to look at people. I used to have very short hair, but long hair is my thing – a black nocturnal shield.
I hope I contribute something useful to the human family. That’s my intention. And I hope that it’s useful to people.
By creating useful job descriptions and making clear what qualifications should be expected, the Department aims to help improve schools’ ability to recruit the right people.
It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.
Probably the most useful thing I can do as secretary of state is to assist the president in adapting and renewing the transnational institutions that were created after World War II.
To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquire experience.
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
The theater is who I am – it’s where I feel the most inspired, the most at home, the most useful.
You’re about as useful as a one-legged man at an arse kicking contest.
I’m creating art that can be healing. Art that can make you feel like you’re not alone, like you’re not an outsider. Art that is useful.
You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for his own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.
I’m a classic Church of England member, but part of its strength is the fact that it doesn’t ask us to sign up to too much of a canon… but I’ve always found the teachings of Jesus and the Bible quite useful as a sort of handy guide.
I want to be able to say what’s on my mind and in my heart and what I think is helpful and useful without somebody getting angry, some special interest group deciding this is the time to silence a voice of dissent and attack affiliates, attack sponsors. I’m sort of done with that.
Perhaps if I knew I would be stranded on an island with but one book, I would choose the Bible. For no religious reason whatsoever, but because of the varieties of stories, which might be useful as the days pass.
QR codes have always been a kind of half-measure, a useful but inelegant transitional technology; the ultimate goal is augmented reality.
Very little useful science got done in the space station. NASA never did the experiments needed to develop the technologies required for a genuine interplanetary expedition: centrifugal gravity to avoid bodily harm and a truly closed biosphere.
Sometimes incompetence is useful. It helps you keep an open mind.
There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.
Fear is really powerful; it’s really useful to me.
Groupthink can become a serious issue – old ideas stay around after they’re useful, and new ideas too often don’t get a fair hearing.
Persuasiveness is really just about getting your ideas across without being forceful. It’s a skill that can be learned and is useful for anyone who works in a team environment.
I’m lucky to have depression less severely than a lot of people. I know some find it useful to talk about it and people are definitely doing that more. It’s becoming less stigmatised.
The end-to-end value chain analysis proposed by the World Economic Forum has proved to be useful methodology, not only to identify trade barriers but also to highlight the importance of coordination among public-sector institutions.
