Variant: There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)
Variant: There is nothing inherently expensive about rockets. It's just that those who have built and operated them in the past have done so with horrendously poor efficiency.
“Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.”
On Machiavelli (1827)
“In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless.”
Part I : Ambiguity and Freedom
The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
Context: The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man, Sartre tells us, is “a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there might be being.” That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish the useless from the useful. The word “useful” has not yet received a meaning on the level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the human world established by man’s projects and the ends he sets up. In the original helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful. It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have. And indeed Sartre tells us that man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being. The term in order that clearly indicates an intentionality. It is not in vain that man nullifies being. Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type of attachment to being which is not the relationship “wanting to be” but rather “wanting to disclose being.” Now, here there is not failure, but rather success.
Lecture IX
Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851)
The cowboy in autumn https://world.wng.org/2016/04/the_cowboy_in_autumn (May 14, 2016)
“Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”
Thought and Word, viii
The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1912), Part VII - On the Making of Music, Pictures, and Books
“Well, nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.”
Address to fleet officers (August 11, 1917), quoted in Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson As I Know Him (1921), p. 297 https://books.google.com/books?id=f3xw1nfcn14C&vq=%22Nothing%20was%20ever%22&pg=PA297#v=onepage&q&f=false
1910s
