
“Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
Source: 2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
Μηκέθ᾽ ὅλως περὶ τοῦ οἷόν τινα εἶναι τὸν ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα διαλέγεσθαι, ἀλλὰ εἶναι τοιοῦτον.
X, 16
Variant: Don't go on discussing what a good person should be. Just be one.
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X
“Time spent arguing with the faithful is, oddly enough, almost never wasted.”
Source: 2000s, 2001, Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)
“Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.”
Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)
On the abortion debate, in which her stance was the opposite of her husband's, as quoted in TIME magazine (24 August 1992)
Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 7, Income Redistribution Conceptual Issues, p. 147
“Maybe we should gather a few more facts before wasting our time speculating.”
Source: Ring (1994), Chapter 30 (p. 852)
“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”
volume I, chapter VI: "The Voyage", page 266 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=284&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image; letter to sister Susan Elizabeth Darwin (4 August 1836)
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)
Source: The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin
Source: The Cruise of the 'Nona (1925), pp. 48-9
Belloc writes that Cardinal Manning said this sentence to him "when I was but twenty years old" (p. 47), i.e. in 1890 or 1891.
Context: The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: all human conflict is ultimately theological. […]This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered) that all human conflict was ultimately theological: that is, that all wars and revolutions, and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine, was utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I would almost have said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight: with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that it reached to the very roots of political action; so extended that it covered the whole.It is, indeed, a truth which explains and co-ordinates all one reads of human action in the past, and all one sees of it in the present. […] All tragedy is the conflict of a true right and a false right, or of a greater right and a lesser right, or, at the worst, of two false rights. Still more do men pretend in this time of ours, wherein the habitual use of the human intelligence has sunk to its lowest, that doctrine is but a private individual affair, creating a mere opinion. Upon the contrary, it is doctrine that drives the State; and every State is stronger in the degree in which the doctrine of its citizens is united. Nor have I met any man in my life, arguing for what should be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar foundation for all mankind. Hence battle.