Quotes and Sayings about Nonsense
"My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know."
- Josef Albers
(Related: Father, Nonsense, Parents, Theatre)
"It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future."
- Gregory Bateson
(Related: History, Change, Future, Man, Nonsense)
"Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter."
- Max Beerbohm
(Related: Nonsense)
"The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born."
- Warren G. Bennis
(Related: Leadership, People, Fact, Myth, Nonsense)
"Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money, 'cause they're convinced that there is a free lunch."
- Ron Bloom
(Related: Money, Nonsense, Will)
"Buddhas don't practice nonsense."
- Bodhidharma
(Related: Nonsense, Practice)
"I think we have a fascinating new and quite dominant input into politics - and it wont go away. From time to time, people articulate a view that we should ban opinion polls, but that's nonsense."
- Jim Bolger
(Related: Politics, Time, People, Nonsense, Opinion)
"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down."
- Ray Bradbury
(Related: Love, Time, Business, Friendship, Intellect, Nonsense)
"The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping."
- Benjamin Britten
(Related: Idea, Night, Nonsense, Old)
"I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense."
- Harold Brodkey
(Related: Life, Accomplishment, Intellect, Nonsense)
"To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life."
- Gelett Burgess
(Related: Life, Interest, Nonsense)
"All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: Home, Nonsense)
"Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time."
- Karel Capek
(Related: Nature, Time, Work, Progress, Childhood, Glory, Nonsense, Understanding, Waste)
"They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard."
- Alexander Cockburn
(Related: Peace, War, Truth, First, Nonsense)
"They are few in the midst of an overwhelming mass of brute force, and their submission is wisdom; but for a nation like England to submit to be robbed by any invader who chooses to visit her shores seemed to me to be nonsense."
- George Combe
(Related: Wisdom, EnglForce, Nation, Nonsense, Visit)
"Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening."
- Ann Coulter
(Related: Life, Cute, Liberals, Nonsense)
"It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code."
- Francis Crick
(Related: Nature, Nonsense)
"A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: Men, Nonsense, Now)
"No. 1, Halliburton. Certainly, if they've overcharged they should be whacked and whacked good, but the idea that the vice president somehow is involved in this, whether they got contracts because of him, that's nonsense."
- Al D'Amato
(Related: Idea, Nonsense, President, Vice)
"There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity."
- Robertson Davies
(Related: Society, Time, Doctrine, Nonsense, Stupidity, Will)
"Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where's the harm? September 11th changed all that."
- Richard Dawkins
(Related: Religion, Thought, People, Beliefs, Harm, Nonsense)
"I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it."
- Charles Dickens
(Related: Men, Trust, Idea, Honesty, Day, Dishonesty, Nonsense, Quantity, Will)
"Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense."
- Benjamin Disraeli
(Related: Books, Nonsense)
"Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole."
- Adam Duritz
(Related: Life, Nonsense, World)
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism - how passionately I hate them!"
- Albert Einstein
(Related: Patriotism, Hate, Heroism, Name, Nonsense, Violence)
"Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?"
- George Eliot
(Related: Being, Friends, Nonsense, Quarrel)
"I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians."
- Luke Ford
(Related: Life, Religion, People, Purpose, Nonsense, Want)
"Nonsense and beauty have close connections."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Beauty, Nonsense)
"Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Nonsense, Talk)
"The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego."
- Northrop Frye
(Related: Beauty, Truth, Ego, Goodness, Nonsense, Pursuit, Temptation)
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
- John Kenneth Galbraith
(Related: Thought, Nonsense)
"Polling is merely an instrument for gauging public opinion. When a president or any other leader pays attention to poll results, he is, in effect, paying attention to the views of the people. Any other interpretation is nonsense."
- George Gallup
(Related: Leader, People, Attention, Effect, Nonsense, Opinion, President, Public, Public opinion, Results)
"Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning."
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Genius, Grammar, Learning, Liquor, Nonsense)
"That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum."
- Edmond De Goncourt
(Related: Nonsense, World)
"Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense."
- Stephen Jay Gould
(Related: Evolution, Nonsense)
"Most actors really love it, that's what they want to do. They burn to do it. And so they'll read a script and think, that's an interesting part. And because they love acting, that blinds them to the fact that the rest of it is pretentious nonsense, which it very often is."
- Hugh Grant
(Related: Love, Acting, Actors, Fact, Nonsense, Rest, Want)
"Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it."
- Augustus Hare
(Related: Mother, Nonsense, Old, Talking)
"That was the first time ever in history that anybody got Special Guest Star. I started that whole nonsense."
- Jonathan Harris
(Related: History, Time, First, Guest, Nonsense)
"A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery; and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again, till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense, and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice."
- Anthony Hecht
(Related: First, Fun, Lies, Mystery, Nonsense, Saying, Trying)
"The Roosevelt enactment of Social Security was a moral revolution in our country: We were assured that we would never reach the very depths of poverty. And to be told, that we are now going to gamble it, on Wall Street, is nonsense!"
- Arthur Hertzberg
(Related: Revolution, Now, Poverty, Security)
"I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense... I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash."
- Anthony Hopkins
(Related: Famous, Interest, Nonsense, Shakespeare)
"Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, and no nonsense about angels and being good."
- William Hurlbut
(Related: Life, Angels, Being, Nonsense)
"I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense."
- C. L. R. James
(Related: Idea, Nonsense, United)
"The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong."
- Carl Jung
(Related: Mind, Nonsense, Right, Wrong)
"I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?"
- Jean Kerr
(Related: Beauty, Being, Deep, Nonsense, Skin, Want)
"People say you can't teach writing, but I think that's nonsense."
- Tracy Kidder
(Related: People, Nonsense, Writing)
"This is a formidable enemy. To dismiss it as a bunch of 'cowards' perpetuating 'senseless acts of violence' is complacent nonsense. People willing to kill thousands of innocents while they kill themselves are not cowards. They are deadly vicious warriors and need to be treated as such."
- Charles Krauthammer
(Related: People, Cowards, Enemy, Nonsense, Violence)
"Tis the privilege of friendship to talk nonsense, and have her nonsense respected."
- Charles Lamb
(Related: Friendship, Nonsense, Privilege, Talk)
"Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable."
- C. S. Lewis
(Related: God, Nonsense, Questions)
"A man can make himself put down what comes, even if it seems nauseating nonsense; tomorrow some of it may not seem wholly nonsense at all."
- F. L. Lucas
(Related: Man, May, Nonsense, Tomorrow)
"It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams - not by any means of all dreams - moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis."
- Arthur Machen
(Related: Dreams, Direction, May, Nonsense)
"In a society in which equality is a fact, not merely a word, words of racial or sexual assault and humiliation will be nonsense syllables."
- Catharine MacKinnon
(Related: Equality, Society, Fact, Nonsense, Will, Word, Words)
"I begin to grow heartily tired of the etiquette and nonsense so fashionable in this city."
- George Mason
(Related: Etiquette, Nonsense)
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
- John McCarthy
(Related: Arithmetic, Nonsense, Talk)
"The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese."
- John McGahern
(Related: Being, Irish, Nonsense)
"It is nonsense to say that Germans are unable to change."
- Angela Merkel
(Related: Change, Nonsense)
"People talk about innovations and evolutions and that kind of thing; I don't understand about that nonsense. It's like, all instruments are there to use all the time."
- Gerry Mulligan
(Related: Time, People, Nonsense, Talk)
"The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Evolution, Nonsense)
"Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people."
- George Jean Nathan
(Related: People, Aristocracy, Common sense, Nonsense, Privilege, World)
"They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind."
- Ted Nelson
(Related: Computers, Information, Nonsense, Numbers, Saying)
"Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it."
- Evita Peron
(Related: Money, Books, Nonsense, Poor)
"To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture."
- Pablo Picasso
(Related: Work, Soul, Grace)
"Don't talk to me about a man's being able to talk sense; everyone can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?"
- William Pitt
(Related: Being, Man, Nonsense, Talk)
"Movies are movies, and I don't think any of them are going to hurt the moral fiber of America and all that nonsense."
- Richard Pryor
(Related: Movies, America, Hurt, Nonsense)
"Miss Rice talks very tough. We have gotten used to this nonsense. Miss Rice is a bit emotional about this, and we predicted that she would have a more emotional approach to this."
- Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
(Related: Nonsense)
"Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense - very far in excess of one-half of one per cent - into their otherwise sober documents."
- John C. Ransom
(Related: Excess, Nonsense, Now, Poets)
"You were there all day long, 12 hours a day. So there was none of this, 'I'm going back to my trailer, my trailer's bigger than your trailer,' that kind of Hollywood nonsense."
- John C. Reilly
(Related: Day, Hollywood, Nonsense)
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
- Carl Sagan
(Related: Science, Religion, Thoughts, Deep, Nonsense)
"Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited."
- George Santayana
(Related: Common sense, Nonsense)
"There's a feeling that strength is determined by the size of a union. That clearly is nonsense."
- Arthur Scargill
(Related: Strength, Feeling, Nonsense)
"On the other hand, all kinds of adventurous schemes to add security checkpoints to subway and bus systems have been circulating since the London attacks. This is nonsense. No one can guaranty 100 percent security."
- Otto Schily
(Related: London, Nonsense, Security)
"It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities."
- Anton Seidl
(Related: Nonsense, Voice)
"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."
- Dr. Seuss
(Related: Life, End, Fantasy, Living, Nonsense, Wrong)
"There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage."
- George Bernard Shaw
(Related: Marriage, Thought, Nonsense)
"To say, that Capt. Ingraham violated the rights of Turkey, is nonsense."
- Gerrit Smith
(Related: Rights, Nonsense, Turkey)
"It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things."
- Anne Sullivan
(Related: Mistake, Children, Desire, Discrimination, Nonsense, Observation)
"I don't try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That's nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them."
- Mike Tyson
(Related: People, Fight, Nonsense)
"Hope unbelieved is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed."
- Jim Wallis
(Related: History, Hope, Being, Nonsense)
"By deafness one gains in one respect more than one loses; one misses more nonsense than sense."
- Horace Walpole
(Related: Nonsense, Respect)
"The game has changed. What's going on now is nonsense. You have guys complaining about not being paid."
- David Wells
(Related: Being, Complaining, Nonsense, Now)
"Always remember, money isn't everything - but also remember to make a lot of it before talking such fool nonsense."
- Earl Wilson
(Related: Money, Fool, Nonsense, Talking)
"I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words. Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics."
- Rick Wright
(Related: Nonsense, Words)
"If you're a preacher, you talk for a living, so even if you don't make sense, you learn to make nonsense eloquently."
- Andrew Young
(Related: Living, Nonsense, Talk)