I’ve always been a sucker for any technology engineered primarily for the entertainment of the human race – even such technology as has been disguised as ‘useful’ or ‘improving’ when we all know the real virtue lies in its ability to distract and divert.
You can’t please everyone, but I’ve always felt you cannot ultimately lose if you give everything you try 110%. You’ll always learn something useful, even from a failure, that can be applied to the next challenge or project.
Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed.
I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I’ve written songs that are useful to people having dark hours.
There is, in our nature, a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which, unless hourly combated, will overcome and destroy the best faculties of our minds and paralyze our most useful powers.
Banks properly established and conducted are highly useful to the business of the country, and will doubtless continue to exist in the States so long as they conform to their laws and are found to be safe and beneficial.
Every child should try everything: sport, music, art, mathematics; they can do it all. Copying and competition are now seen as twin evils, but they are both useful tools.
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I’ve left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
Creative writing lessons can be very useful, just like music lessons can be useful. To say, as Hanif Kureishi did, that 99.9% of students are talentless is cruel and wrong. I believe that certain writers like to believe they arrived into the world with special, unteachable powers because it is good for the ego.
The advice would be the same for any kind of fiction. Keep writing, and keep sending things out, not to friends and relatives, but to people who have the power to buy. A lot of additional, useful tips could be added, but this is fundamental.
When part of what you’re trying to get at is the truth hidden under a taboo, or when you want to nail a hypocrisy, laughter is a very useful tool. I want to show the painful side of existence, but there is no question I also want to make people laugh.
I refuse to see losing as a negative. Obama lost in ’83 when he ran against Bobby Rush. Hillary lost in ’08. Even Lincoln lost the first election. It’s a useful learning experience.
I think overdesigning comes from a lack of editing. The strongest, most compelling, and most useful things in life are irreducible – love, truth, faith, honor.
I often get asked if I think I’m ever going to build something useful, and maybe someday I will.
New parents will feel that euphoric high where they feel like their mind is racing and they can’t sleep. But its important to take quiet moments when you can. Even if you can t get a full sleep, just resting and calming yourself can be so useful.
Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else’s eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven’t actually experienced.
I’m not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site’s user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.
Quantum computation is… a distinctively new way of harnessing nature… It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
When my marriage broke up, I went to three separate therapists, and each was worse than the last. I can only speak for myself. There are other people it’s been incredibly useful for, but not me.
Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
In an age when many of our citizens casually reveal information about themselves in social media wildly beyond anything imaginable only a decade ago, it would seem to be a useful exercise in civics to re-educate the public about the value and purpose of protecting against unwarranted government intrusion.
My relationships are helped because of all the success I’ve had, but I’m only as useful as the idea I have today or tomorrow. Otherwise, I’m just a trophy.
I liked helping my parents, feeling useful, feeling smart.
I think the United Nations is a useful format to discuss matters, but I think it’s a weak institution in being able to carry out matters and, in many respects even, it has been harmful on things like human rights.
You make a great investment in the consumer Internet, maybe you make a lot of money and create something useful, interesting, or fun. But in life sciences, you have a chance to be part of something that lets people live longer and healthier and not lose the people they care about. That is really profound.
There are few tribes more loathsome than the American Right, and their vicious use of the shortcomings in the NHS to attack Barack Obama’s attempts at health reform are a useful reminder.
Basic research is very useful, but it should be more geared toward application than it was before.
I don’t think my political opinions, to the extent I have them, are useful.
Capitalism requires individual responsibility and accountability. People are seen as atomized units in a capitalist system – they are either useful, or they are not. They are not seen racially or ethnically or religiously. They consume and they produce, and those are their only relevant characteristics.
A ‘reptilian revolution’ has the potential to reshape manufacturing. The ‘snakebots’ being developed at Carnegie Mellon University aren’t just useful for surgical or search-and-rescue purposes. They could also usher in a new, more customized era of mass production.
I was very insecure. I figured the only thing I can do is just work harder than everybody else and be useful. So I would anticipate when a client would need a cup of tea. I would anticipate when they wanted to rewind the tape. I would anticipate when they were going to do a vocal.
It is often useful, if an enemy happens to see you, to pretend that you have not seen him. Or it may sometimes be useful to pretend that you have other men with you. I did this once in the Boer War when, having crept up a donga to look at a Boer fort, I was seen by the enemy, and they came out to capture me.
I’m very lucky in the sense that I’ve got a voice that’s distinctive. Not good, but distinctive. That’s a very useful thing to have in this business. I’m glad on the one hand that I’ve got it, but I wish it was more powerful. I wish I had a greater range. I wish it was more accurate at times.
It was very useful to learn the history, the theory, and the art of building from a practical background.
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.
Having goals can be useful, but don’t lose sight of how great you are and how much you can help yourself and others right now.
I think it’s useful, as a famous person, to have as little separation between the perception of you and how you really are – because otherwise I’d be sitting here thinking I’m keeping secrets, and wondering when you’re going to find out.
Every generation brings something new to the workplace, and millennials are no exception. As a group, they tend to be highly educated, love to learn, and grew up with the Internet and digital tools in a way that can be highly useful when leveraged properly.
You have an awareness of your body and how to use it and I think that if you can embody a character physically it’s another really useful tool.
I have to read something positive every single day. I have to have faith that the day is unfolding in a way that is going to be useful to somebody else… For me, living every day in gratitude has been profound for me.
We actually have a real community of people doing useful things.
Among the social networks, LinkedIn can be one of the most useful when it comes to cultivating critical, lucrative business opportunities, since it has a high concentration of business decision makers.
Something I’ve learned being in this industry for so long is that if you want to work with somebody, call them up. Very few musicians have any illusions about genre boundaries. They are useful descriptive terms, but they don’t really bind musicians.
Self-pity is never useful. It tends to distort like a fun-house mirror.
I honestly believe that you have to be able to play the guitar hard if you want to be able to get the whole spectrum of tones out of it. Since I normally play so hard, when I start picking a bit softer my tone changes completely, and that’s really useful sometimes for creating a more laid-back feel.
The good news is that the credibility of the Net is already a subject of much research and discussion and there is a serious effort to go beyond surfing tools and lists of ‘best’ and ‘useful’ sites.
An architect’s most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site.
