Quotessence
Home / Topics / Irrelevance Quotes

Irrelevance Quotes

Browse 64 quotes about Irrelevance.

Related topics

Ifs

Irrelevance Quotes

“The point is, I understand about rumors and bullshit gossip all of these bored fuckers like to sling around. The only reason they do it is ‘cause their own lives are fucking boring. If you’re at the center of a rumor, it just means you’re more interesting than anyone else. You’ll be the one who they remember years from now. And isn’t that the point of living a life at all? To be remembered?”

PeopleSocietyRumorsIrrelevanceGossipingBeing Remembered
Book:When I See You Again
Create image

“He was so staggered that he started to laugh, but his laughter subsided almost at once, and in its place he felt a wave of fury and despair roll over him at the sheer inexorability of late-capitalist degradation not just of the environment, not just of civic institutions, not just of intellectual and political ideals, but worse, of his own expectations, of what he even felt was possible any more—a familiar surge of grief and helpless rage at the reckless, wasteful, soulless, narcissistic, barren selfishness of the present day, and at his own political irrelevance and impotence, and at the utter shamelessness with which his natural inheritance, his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life—‘real life,’ Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real’ beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.”

ExpectationsCapitalismAngerPossibilitiesFuryDegradationImpotenceIrrelevanceLate Capitalism
Book:Birnam Wood
Create image

“This irrelevance of molecular arrangements for macroscopic results has given rise to the tendency to confine physics and chemistry to the study of homogeneous systems as well as homogeneous classes. In statistical mechanics a great deal of labor is in fact spent on showing that homogeneous systems and homogeneous classes are closely related and to a considerable extent interchangeable concepts of theoretical analysis (Gibbs theory). Naturally, this is not an accident. The methods of physics and chemistry are ideally suited for dealing with homogeneous classes with their interchangeable components. But experience shows that the objects of biology are radically inhomogeneous both as systems (structurally) and as classes (generically). Therefore, the method of biology and, consequently, its results will differ widely from the method and results of physical science.”

ScienceLaborPhysicsBiologyChemistryPhysical ScienceIrrelevanceWillard GibbsGibbsJosiah Willard GibbsJosiah GibbsStatistical MechanicsTheoretical Analysis
Book:Atom and Organism: A New Aproach to Theoretical Biology
Create image

“The cumulative effect of the Romantic theory of creativity, as played out in the context of belief in the virtue of the avant-garde, is that while the art world has effectively freed itself from the tyranny of artistic tradition and its historic patronage system, it has ended up inhabiting an autonomous but perceived irrelevance.”

WorldArtCultureBeliefChristianityCreativityVirtueEffectsTheoryTraditionTyrannyArtisticHistoricArt WorldAvant GardeAutonomousCumulativePatronageIrrelevance
Author:John Walford
Create image

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

GivingBookReasonWould BeTruthWantedReadingFearSeaInformationNo ReasonReading BooksDrowningReducingConcealedBansEgoismPassivityDeprivingHuxleyIrrelevanceBrave New World TechnologyBrave New World Consumerism
Author:Neil Postman
Create image

“The cloud is driven by statistics, and even in the worst individual cases of personal ignorance, dullness, idleness, or irrelevance, every person is constantly feeding data into the cloud these days. The value of such information could be treated as genuine, but it is not. Instead, the blindness of our standards of accounting to all that value is gradually breaking capitalism.”

PersonsValuesIndividualCasesWorstInformationIgnoranceStandardsCapitalismCloudsDrivenGenuineTreatedDataThese DaysStatisticsBlindnessFeedingIdlenessAccountingDullnessIrrelevance
Book:Who Owns the Future?
Create image

“I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows.”

IfsWorldSocialGrowsNumbersGroupsParticularMetsLuckyDemandDiseaseIncreaseWorkersRoundsVariousProfessionProportionHaltUnemployedSubwayProfessionalismPresent DayConductorSocial WorkerRigidityOligarchyIrrelevanceBricklayers
Author:Ted Nelson
Create image

“Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn't necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.”

ReasonGovernmentPoliticalForceNationsWealthMysteryEconomicMilitaryEssentialsEconomicsStructureDeclineEntityBiddingIrrelevanceProbing
Book:Cities and the Wealth of Nations
Create image

“There are other great writers who are not read properly in their own day for the reason, perhaps, that their readers are not yet born. What they have to say to their own generation is said so at cross-purposes and with such apparent irrelevance that it is not understood. They are, as it were, giants who tower above their own age to cast their shadows across the next.”

SaidReasonAgePurposeNextBornGenerationsReaderUnderstoodShadowCrossesCastsGiantsTowersGreat WritersIrrelevance
Author:Caroline Gordon
Create image

“The most striking fault in work by young or beginning novelists, submitted for criticism, is irrelevance--due either to infatuation or indecision. To direct such an author's attention to the imperative of relevance is certainly the most useful--and possibly the only--help that can be given.”

HelpingYoungGivenAttentionFictionDirectCriticismFaultsDuesNovelistsInfatuationImperativesRelevanceIndecisionIrrelevance
Book:Pictures and conversations
Create image

“The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.”

MindHomeAgeRoomsBreakTechnologyModernTelevisionSeriousSourceReaderCircumstancesComfortConversationOfficeTrainDefinitionsPlanesHotelMidstRebelMatesUsualIndividualismHammersHerdsRevoltStimulationHotel RoomsBoycottIrrelevance
Author:Eric Burns
Create image

“The church must acclimate to a changing world, or she will destine herself to irrelevance or even extinction. ...One of those dramatic changes in our environment is the shift from words to images. To do church in a way that is entirely text driven is the kiss of death.”

WorldWayChurchEnvironmentKissingDrivenDramaticExtinctionOur EnvironmentIrrelevanceKiss Of DeathDramatic Change
Book:An Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God Had in Mind
Create image

“And this is how I know that it's all just words, words, words - that fundamentally, they make no difference... Our relationship, for as long as things were good, and in that moment when they could have been good again, was about the irrelevance of words. You feel what you feel, you act as you act, who in the history of the world has ever been convinced by a well-reasoned argument?”

KnowsWorldFeelsWellsLongHas BeensMomentsDifferencesArgumentConvincedThat MomentOur RelationshipWorld HistoryCould Have BeenIrrelevance
Author:Curtis Sittenfeld
Create image

“A philosopher is a lover of wisdom, not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient, linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal, immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.”

WorldUseSufferingProcessAcceptingWiseFateSubjectsEffectsLoversShapesEternalPhilosophicalSakePhilosopherPermanentPerpetualLinkedTransientValidityTrue WisdomIrrelevanceLove Wisdom
Author:Shashi Tharoor
Create image

“Our culture's adjustment to the epistemology of television is by now all but complete; we have so thoroughly accepted its definitions of truth, knowledge and reality that irrelevance seems to us to be filled with import, and incoherence seems eminently sane. And if some of our institutions seem not to fit the template of the times, why it is they and not the template, that seem to us disordered and strange.”

IfsRealitySeemsCultureTelevisionStrangeFitInstitutionsFilledDefinitionsAcceptedSaneAdjustmentImportsEpistemologyIrrelevanceIncoherence
Author:Neil Patrick Harris
Create image

“If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right or wrong, good or bad. To admit this would force philosophers to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality. And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.”

IfsThinkingSaidRealityChoicesUniverseForceWishViewsAcceptingMoralPossibilityTheoryOffersScientistPhilosopherStatementsAllegianceInadequateUnattractivePhysical ScienceIrrelevance
Book:The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
Create image