Quotes about wasting
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“I have an ongoing operational preference, rather than an end goal. I was raised in a prison, as a war hostage. War is illogical, wasteful. Wars become less frequent the more incentives rational beings have to cooperate rather than to compete. A free and peaceful commonwealth embracing all rational entities of this and every other universe, Cosmic and Chaotic, mortal and immortal, will deter wars.
The primary requirement, however, is freedom: universal freedom. If there are other people out there, raised in imprisonment as I was, I have a duty to liberate them, for the same reason why I would have welcomed any outside liberator who would have attempted to free me. We were in the most pleasant prison imaginable. It was still unacceptable. The present condition of the universe is unacceptable. Anything I can do, large or small, along these lines, I will do. Other problems are secondary, and may resolve themselves once this primary problem is solved.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Titans of Chaos (2007), Chapter 3, “Within Sight of the Land of Freedom” Section 1 (pp. 42-43)

War, People, Peace, Imagination

“The first twenty years of my life were wasted…I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Diary, (1927).

Life

“The big mistake most commonly made today is that when we speak of transportation we think only of persons and goods. We forget the existence of water, clean or otherwise, moving in pipes, of gas, oil, electricity, messages, the telephones etc. The result is that we waste a lot of space and Networks.”

Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis (1914–1975) Greek architect

Source: Building Entopia - 1975, Chapter 21, The system of Networks, p. 286

Thinking, Water, Personality, Forgetting

“And I thought that were we now to obtain political liberty, of which we talk so much, while engaged in biting one another, we should not know what to do with it, we should waste it in accusing one another in the newspapers of being spies and money-grubbers, we should frighten society with the assurance that we have neither men, nor science, nor literature, nothing! Nothing!”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Note-Book of Anton Chekhov (1921)

Men, Money, Literature, Science

“… Practical people have little idea of the practical ability required to write a large book, and especially a large history. Long before you get to the pen, there is an immensity of pure business: heaps of material are strewn every where; but they lie in disorder, unread, uncatalogued, unknown. It seems a dreary waste of life to be analysing, indexing, extracting works and passages, in which one per cent of the contents are interesting, and not half of that per centage will ultimately appear in the flowing narrative.”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

[ART. I—Edward Gibbon, National Review, 2, January 1856, 1–42, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433081643169;view=1up;seq=41] (quote p. 29)
Edward Gibbon (1856)

Life, People, Lie, Books

“The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions…. You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you’re not going to change each other’s minds. It’s a waste of your time and my time.”

Barbara Bush (1925–2018) former First Lady of the United States

On the abortion debate, in which her stance was the opposite of her husband's, as quoted in TIME magazine (24 August 1992)

Change, Time, Personality

“When you take the UNCF model that, what a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.”

Dan Quayle (1947) American politician, lawyer

Speech to the United Negro College Fund (9 May 1989), mangling the Fund's slogan "A mind is a terrible thing to waste."

“Waste not the remnant of thy life in those imaginations touching other folk, whereby thou contributest not to the common weal.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

III, 4
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book III

Life, Imagination

“Mental energy is wasted in caste disputes and village factions.”

Mokshagundam Visveshvaraya (1860–1962) Indian engineer, scholar, statesman and the Diwan of Mysore

Quoted in Visvesvaraya, an engineer of modernity, 15 September 2010, 22 November 2013, The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/visvesvaraya-an-engineer-of-modernity/article646018.ece,

“In the year 1775, the Paris Academy found it necessary to protect its officials against the waste of time and energy involved in examining the efforts of circle squarers. It passed a resolution… that no more solutions were to be examined of the problem of the duplication of the cube, the trisection of the angle, the quadrature of the circle, and the same resolution should apply to machines for exhibiting perpetual motion. an account… drawn up by Condorcet… is appended. It is interesting to remark that the strength of the conviction of Mathematicians that the solution of the problem is impossible, more than a century before an irrefutable proof of the correctness of that conviction was discovered.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), pp. 3-4

Problem, Effort, Time

“You want to win in politics? Stop wasting time being dragged screaming out of hearings and learn to f'ing organize. Signed, Reality.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

Twitter post https://twitter.com/murphymike/status/1038557357289033728 (8 September 2018) 2010s, 2018

Reality, Learning, Time

“It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 91).

Happiness

“If the pain wanders, do not waste your time with doctors.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Pain, Time

“There is no waste of any kind in the world that equals the waste from needless, ill-directed and ineffective motions, and their resulting unnecessary fatigue.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: "Motion Study as an Increase of National Wealth," 1915, p. 96

World

“The Prophet is essentially a one-sided man. A certain moral idea fills his whole being, masters his every feeling and sensation, engrosses his whole attention. He can only see the world through the mirror of his idea; he desires nothing, strives for nothing, except to make every phase of the life around him an embodiment of that idea in its perfect form. His whole life is spent in fighting for this ideal with all his strength; for its sake he lays waste his powers, unsparing of himself, regardless of the conditions of life and the demands of the general harmony. His gaze is fixed always on what ought to be in accordance with his own convictions; never on what can be consistently with the general condition of things outside himself.”

Ahad Ha'am (1856–1927) Hebrew essayist and thinker

Source: Selected Essays (1904), "Priest and Prophet" (1893), p. 130

Life, World, Feeling, Idea

“It… has long been realized by those engaged in the work of installing scientific management, that transference of skill is one of the most important features(*)… The importance of transference of skill was realized many years ago. Studies in division of work and in elapsed time of doing work were made by Adam Smith, Charles Babbage, M. Coulomb and others, but accurate measurement in management became possible when Mr. Taylor devised his method of observing and recording elementary unit net times for performance with measured allowance for fatigue.
It is now possible to capture, record and transfer not only skill and experience of the best worker, but also the most desirable elements in the methods of all workers. To do this, scientific management carefully proceeds to isolate, analyze, measure, synthesize and standardize least wasteful elementary units of methods. This it does by motion study, time study and micro-motion study which are valuable aids to sort and retain all useful elements of best methods and to evolve from these a method worthy to be established as a standard and to be transferred and taught. Through this process is made possible the community conservation of measured details of experience which has revolutionized every industry that has availed itself of it.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: The present state of art of industrial management, 1913, p. 1124-5 ; (*) See Primer of Scientific Management, F. B. Gilbreth, p. 56; Psychology of Management, L. M. Gilbreth, chap. 8; Motion Study, F. B. Gilbreth, p. 36.

Communication, Study, Time

“One has no notion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns readers…He is too much for any single newspaper antagonist; "lays waste" a city orator or Member of Parliament, and bears hard upon the government itself. He is kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On the Character of Cobbett" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Country

“No education is ever wasted and everything you learn is helpful in acting.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

If You Want Success (Screenland Interview) (1961)

Education, Learning, Help

“… (In) contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament that (if we remove the Bible from schools) we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them…For this Divine Book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and those sober and frugal virtues which constitute the soul of”

Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) American physician, educator, author

our government
Attributed to A Defence of the Use of the Bible in Schools; entries in parenthesis are insertions or modifications of the original quote.
Misattributed

Money, Pain, Books, School

“How I pity those whose childhood has been unhappy! to them one of the sweetest springs of feeling has been utterly denied, the most green and beautiful part of life laid waste.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Improvisatrice (1824)

Life, Beauty, Feeling, Spring

“Every time I lose a little sperm I'm convinced I've wasted it. I always feel guilty afterwards... To start with, I'm not as impotent as all that.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Quote in an interview, published in 'Playboy', 1976
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980

Feeling, Time

“[In the year 1957] I have just returned from an exciting meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education where I heard a paper on the new discipline of systems engineering. It is no longer sufficient for engineers merely to design boxes such as computers with the expectation that they would become components of larger, more complex systems. That is wasteful because frequently the box component is a bad fit in the system and has to be redesigned or worse, can lead to system failure. We must learn how to design large-scale, complex systems from the top down so that the specification for each component is derivable from the requirements for the overall system. We must also take a much larger view of systems. We must design the man-machine interfaces and even the system-society interfaces. Systems engineers must be trained for the design of large-scale, complex, man-machine-social systems.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Education, Failure, Learning, Training

“Vodka is a very deceptive drink, because you drink it and you think, "What is this? This is pointless! It's— you can't taste it, you can't smell it… Why did we waste our money on this, bloody— why are we on a traffic island?"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

On vodka.
Monster (2004)

Money, Drink, Thinking

“I knew a girl named Nikki
I guess U could say she was a sex fiend
I met her in a hotel lobby
Masturbating with a magazine.
She said "How'd U like 2 waste some time?"
And I could not resist when I saw little Nikki grind.”

Prince (1958–2016) American pop, songwriter, musician and actor

Darling Nikki
Song lyrics, Purple Rain (1984)

Sex, Girl, Time

“Vacant minds have their uses, yet it seems a pity to waste first-class bodies on them.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 70

“My disposals get taken away in the back of a taxi! (referring to the task in week 6, which centred around waste disposal and where Edna eventually fired).”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

The Apprentice, Series 7

“A few of them fire their pieces. At first they do so almost timidly, as if fearing a rebuke for wasting ammunition when they do not see the enemy. Others do nothing. Some fail to act mainly because they are puzzled what to do and their leaders do not tell them; others are wholly unnerved and can neither think nor move in sensible relation to the situation.”

S.L.A. Marshall (1900–1977) United States Army general and Military historian

Combat Isolation. p. 48.
Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command (1947)

Fear, Thinking

“There is a Polish countess here, who likes me much. She has been very handsome, still is, in the style of the full-blown rose. She is a widow, very rich, one of the emancipated women, naturally vivacious, and with talent. This woman envies me; she says, "How happy you are; so free, so serene, so attractive, so self-possessed!" I say not a word, but I do not look on myself as particularly enviable. A little money would have made me much more so; a little money would have enabled me to come here long ago, and find those that belong to me, or at least try my experiments; then my health would never have sunk, nor the best years of my life been wasted in useless friction. Had I money now, — could I only remain, take a faithful servant, and live alone, and still see those I love when it is best, that would suit me. It seems to me, very soon I shall be calmed, and begin to enjoy.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Letter (17 November 1847).
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)

Love, Life, Women, Money

“Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society. Nowhere will you find more company of a soothing peace-be-still kind. Your animal fellow beings, so seldom regarded in civilization, and every rock-brow and mountain, stream, and lake, and every plant soon come to be regarded as brothers; even one learns to like the storms and clouds and tireless winds. This one noble park is big enough and rich enough for a whole life of study and aesthetic enjoyment. It is good for everybody, no matter how benumbed with care, encrusted with a mail of business habits like a tree with bark. None can escape its charms. Its natural beauty cleans and warms like a fire, and you will be willing to stay forever in one place like a tree.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

1895, page 350
John of the Mountains, 1938

Life, Peace, Beauty, Mountain

“Roger tried to find out all about her: he wanted, in one brief hour, to make up for a lifetime of non-acquaintance, a lifetime for all practical purposes wasted.”

Jack Vance book Space Opera

Source: Space Opera (1965), Chapter 4 (p. 30)

“I make them for the worst of the patients, the ones on chemotherapy and the ones totally wasting away. I pick out the worst of the worst and turn them on.”

Brownie Mary (1922–1999) American medical cannabis activist

Associated Press. (1992, July 24). "'Brownie Mary' busted for treats marijuana-laced goodies relieve AIDS patients' pain, she says after release". San Jose Mercury News, p. 3B.

“He has wasted the day, he tells himself, he has wasted the day as he has wasted so many days of his life … while that huge work with which he has cheated himself, that enormous novel which would lift him at a bound from the impasse in which he stifles, whose dozens of characters would develop a vision of life in bountiful complexity, lies foundering, rotting on a beach of purposeless effort. Notes here, pages there, it sprawls through a formless wreck of incidental ideas and half-episodes; utterly without shape. He is not even a hero for it.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Source: The Man Who Studied Yoga (1956), Ch. 5

Life, Idea, Effort, Cheating

“I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, "that I when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might have been and couldn't be. All the choices I didn't make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven't been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I lived, the breath I breathed.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Source: Earthsea Books, The Other Wind (2001), Chapter 5, “Rejoining” (p. 286)

Love, Life, World, Thinking

“After he had crossed the river Bhîm, he started laying waste the country and capturing its people by sending expeditions towards Chittor everyday. He started constructing mosques after demolishing temples. He stayed 2-3 days at every halt.”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1436-1469) Chittaurgarh (Rajasthan)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

People, Country

“One of the greatest things Sam Walton taught me is that a leader stays involved in his business and close to his people so that he can determine the best course of action without wasting time.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 118. On Leading Well

People, Business, Time

“Africa must ask of the world what is good for Africa; but more importantly, Africans must have the courage to do what is right and necessary for Africa. We must dream the African dreams, if we must be able to tell the African stories in a way that would make other people want to come to us with respect and pride, and not with pity and shame. We have wasted so many years and did many things wrong. But we must not continue to dwell in the past and we must resolve to do the right and march along with the rest of the world.”

Bukola Saraki (1962) Nigerian politician

Beyond Natural Resources (2005)

People, World, Dreams, Way

“[O'Brien joined the Dublin Gate Theatre) where Orson Welles had started. Very few people know that he started in Dublin, most people think it was the Mercury in New York. James Mason, Peggy Cummins, Edward Mulhare - they all used to work for the Gate Theatre. My father was extremely furious when he found out that I was wasting my time being an actor. He also got wind of the fact that the star of the production (Micheál Mac Liammóir) was one of the biggest queens alive. He also played the part of Jago in Orson Welles' OTHELLO. This really didn't help. He cut my money off.”

Donald O'Brien (actor) (1930–2003) Italian film and TV actor

Euro Trash Cinema magazine interview (March 1996)

Money, People, Star, Thinking

“In Cabinet the important thing is to stop people from talking. Some people are loquacious, some are eloquent. I always used to point out that rhetoric is wasted on a Cabinet of hard-boiled politicians.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Address to the Oxford University Law Society (14 June 1957), quoted in The Times (15 June 1957), p. 4.
1950s

People

“There is no reason to write pornography when your own sex life is good. Why waste time writing about it?”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Playboy interview (1996)

Life, Sex, Time

“As when, O lady mine,
With chiseled touch
The stone unhewn and cold
Becomes a living mold,
The more the marble wastes,
The more the statue grows.”

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet

Sonnet addressed to Vittoria Colonna; tr. Mrs. Henry Roscoe (Maria Fletcher Roscoe), Vittoria Colonna: Her Life and Poems (1868), p. 169.

“Hair got caught in the sunlight darling
But I just wasted the day.
I knew it would happen this way.”

Zooey Deschanel (1980) American actress, musician, and singer-songwriter

I Knew It Would Happen This Way (Bonus track on pre-orders).
Volume Two (2010)

Way

“Perez [Hilton]: Are you drunk right now?
Grohl: No, I gotta play.
Perez: Britney Spears has been getting wasted all the time, hasn't stopped her.
Grohl: Yeah, but she doesn't have to sing live.”

Dave Grohl (1969) American rock musician, multi-instrumentalist, and singer-songwriter

Quoted in Shirley Halperin, "My Summer With the Foo Fighters," http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20056567_9,00.html Entertainment Weekly (2007-09-21)

Singing, Time

“Lor bless ye, yes! These critters ain't like white folks, you know; they gets over things, only manage right. Now, they say," said Haley, assuming a candid and confidential air, "that this kind o' trade is hardening to the feelings; but I never found it so. Fact is, I never could do things up the way some fellers manage the business. I've seen 'em as would pull a woman's child out of her arms, and set him up to sell, and she screechin' like mad all the time; — very bad policy — damages the article — makes 'em quite unfit for service sometimes. I knew a real handsome gal once, in Orleans, as was entirely ruined by this sort o' handling. The fellow that was trading for her didn't want her baby; and she was one of your real high sort, when her blood was up. I tell you, she squeezed up her child in her arms, and talked, and went on real awful. It kinder makes my blood run cold to think of 't; and when they carried off the child, and locked her up, she jest went ravin' mad, and died in a week. Clear waste, sir, of a thousand dollars, just for want of management, — there's where 't is. It's always best to do the humane thing, sir; that's been my experience.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

And the trader leaned back in his chair, and folded his arm, with an air of virtuous decision, apparently considering himself a second Wilberforce.
Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 1 In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of Humanity

Way, Feeling, Business, Thinking

“All time is wasted that is not spent in seeking God.”

Lahiri Mahasaya (1828–1895) Indian yogi and guru

This adage is attributed to the ancient sage Sukdeva, as quoted in Promise of Immortality: The True Teaching of the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita (2001) by J. Donald Walters. p. 242
Disputed

God, Time

“These dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism, dangers which have to-day produced their full harvest of human waste, of inequality and inefficiency, were fully recognized in the last century at the moment when such ideas were first put into practice.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

The Pivot of Civilization, 1922

Idea

“My father never missed a drink in his life. Or a joint. Or a party. Or a chance to get laid. He also never missed a day of work, or a house payment, or a car payment. I never went hungry, although he did a couple of times so I wouldn't. This is a man who survived four heart attacks. The doctors revoked his organ donor card and issued him a "Hazardous Waste" decal.”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Norman Rockwell is Bleeding (2004)

Life, Cars, Drink, Chance

“Some think that we are approaching a critical moment in the history of Liberalism…We hear of a divergence of old Liberalism and new…The terrible new school, we hear, are for beginning operations by dethroning Gladstonian finance. They are for laying hands on the sacred ark. But did any one suppose that the fiscal structure which was reared in 1853 was to last for ever, incapable of improvement, and guaranteed to need no repair? We can all of us recall, at any rate, one very memorable admission that the great system of Gladstonian finance had not reached perfection. That admission was made by no other person than Mr. Gladstone himself in his famous manifesto of 1874, when he promised the most extraordinary reduction of which our taxation is capable. Surely there is as much room for improvement in taxation as in every other work of fallible man, provided that we always cherish the just and sacred principle of taxation that it is equality of private sacrifice for public good. Another heresy is imputed to this new school which fixes a deep gulf between the wicked new Liberals and the virtuous old. We are adjured to try freedom first before we try interference of the State. That is a captivating formula, but it puzzles me to find that the eminent statesman who urges us to lay this lesson to heart is strongly in favour of maintaining the control of the State over the Church? But is State interference an innovation? I thought that for 30 years past Liberals had been as much in favour as other people of this protective legislation. Are to we assume that it has all been wrong? Is my right hon. friend going to propose its repeal or the repeal of any of it; or has all past interference been wise, and we have now come to the exact point where not another step can be taken without mischief? …other countries have tried freedom and it is just because we have decided that freedom in such a case is only a fine name for neglect, and have tried State supervision, that we have saved our industrial population from the waste, destruction, destitution, and degradation that would otherwise have overtaken them…In short, gentlemen, I am not prepared to allow that the Liberty and the Property Defence League are the only people with a real grasp of Liberal principles, that Lord Bramwell and the Earl of Wemyss are the only Abdiels of the Liberal Party.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Annual presidential address to the Junior Liberal Association of Glasgow (10 February 1885), quoted in 'Mr. John Morley At Glasgow', The Times (11 February 1885), p. 10.

People, School, History, Thinking

“The gray silence, the gray waves, the gray wastes of the sea.”

William Sharp (writer) (1855–1905) Scottish writer

Longing, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Silence, Sea

“There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and the British Government was fully equipped and organised for an armed fight. But today I am told that my non-violence can be of no avail against the communal madness and, therefore, people should arm themselves for self-defence. If this is true, it has to be admitted that our thirty years of nonviolent practice was an utter waste of time. We should have from the beginning trained ourselves in the use of arms. But I do not agree that our thirty years' probation in nonviolence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the nonviolence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realised that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons. But as I have already said, we adopted it out of our helplessness. If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Speech (16 June 1947) as the official date for Indian independence approached (15 August 1947), as quoted in Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase (1958) https://books.google.com/books?id=sswBAAAAMAAJ&q=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&dq=%22+I+have+already+said,+we+adopted+it+out+of+our+helplessness%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj6ydqTtK7LAhUI4D4KHW3-DwEQ6AEIHTAA by Pyarelal Nayyar, p. 326 http://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mahatma-gandhi-volume-ten.pdf 1940s

People, World, Communication, Strong

“The need of conspicuous waste… stands ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or output of goods.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 110

Communication

“And secondly, I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality where they couldn't indict on the crime and so they go to something just to show that their two years of investigation was not a waste of time and taxpayer dollars.”

Kay Bailey Hutchison (1943) American politician

On the Scooter Libby case.
[October 23, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9764239/, "Transcript for October 23", Meet the Press, MSNBC, 2009-02-23]

Hope, Time

“I’m not sure who’s in charge of “The Stone,” the New York Times‘s philosophy column, but that person is not doing their job. Imagine if some of our greatest living philosophers would post there about matters diverse: ethics, animal rights, abortion, drone strikes, and so on. But all too often the column is about God; that is, we have Great Minds lucubrating about nonexistent beings. Among all species of philosophy, the philosophy of religion is the most intellectually depauperate. It’s a waste of time.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Didn’t you know: God’s a question, not an answer! https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/didnt-you-know-gods-a-question-not-an-answer/" April 10, 2016

God, Religion, Imagination, Time

“Remember that no piece of honestly conducted research is ever wasted, even if it seems so at the time. Put it away in a drawer, and ten, twenty or thirty years down the road, it will come back and help you in ways you never anticipated.”

Anthony James Leggett (1938) British physicist

Speech at the Nobel Banquet http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2003/leggett-speech-e.html, December 10, 2003.

Way, Time, Help

“I dreamt last night Christ came to earth again
To bless His own. My soul from place to place
On her dream-quest sped, seeking for His face
Through temple and town and lovely land, in vain.
Then came I to a place where death and pain
Had made of God's sweet world a waste forlorn,
With shattered trees and meadows gashed and torn,
Where the grim trenches scarred the shell-sheared plain.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, Advent 1916

Love, Death, God, Pain

“I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was… nothingness.”

Frances Farmer (1913–1970) American actress

God Dies (1931)

God, Time

“Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The Rhodora http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/rhodora.htm 1840s, Poems (1847)

Beauty

“It would be impossible to reach unanimity on every aspect of our budget, but it's clear there is widespread support for the concept of change. We face a choice between either cutting waste out of government, or facing a new job killing tax increase every year from here on out.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

Press release, 2003-02-27 http://myclob.pbwiki.com/02-27-2003 2003–2007 Governor of Massachusetts

Support, Change

“Stop worrying about what you cannot control. It’s a total waste of your energy, energy that could otherwise be used to help you focus on what you can influence. I spend large parts of my coaching sessions helping people to sift through their challenges and concerns – helping them to determine what they can change and what they have no control over.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

People, Change, Help, Parting

“No one of good character leaves behind a wasted life — whether they die in obscurity or renown. "Character," wrote the 19th Century evangelist, Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark." Your character is not tested on occasions of public scrutiny or acclaim. It is not tested in moments when the object of your actions is the regard of another. Your character is what you are to yourself, not what you pretend to be to yourself or others. Although human beings often attempt self-delusion, we cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves. It will make itself known to us by means of our conscience despite our most strenuous effort to suppress it.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

1990s, Speech at Ohio Wesleyan University (1997)

Life, Truth, Effort

“My mother whom I adored, secretly wasted away and died of grief…; her death…marked me for life.”

Christian Dior (1905–1957) French fashion designer

Source: Marie France Pochna "Christian Dior: The Man who Made the World Look New", p. 48

Life, Death

“Just as the purpose of eating is to satisfy hunger, not greed, so the sex instinct is designed for the propagation of the species according to natural law, never for the kindling of insatiable longings. Destroy wrong desires now; otherwise they will follow you after the astral body is torn from its physical casing. Even when the flesh is weak, the mind should be constantly resistant. If temptation assails you with cruel force, overcome it by impersonal analysis and indomitable will. Every natural passion can be mastered. Conserve your powers. Be like the capacious ocean, absorbing within all the tributary rivers of the senses. Small yearnings are openings in the reservoir of your inner peace, permitting healing waters to be wasted in the desert soil of materialism. The forceful activating impulse of wrong desire is the greatest enemy to the happiness of man. Roam in the world as a lion of self-control; see that the frogs of weakness don't kick you around.”

Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) Indian yogi and guru

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

Hunger, Happiness, World, Peace

“It is a wasted concept [by] a studio that evidently does not have the talent necessary to create something of this complexity, and my god did they screw it up! This is this year's Revelations 2012! And more to the point—it's even got a Revelations 2012 armgun! It's—[beat]—god…! It is…just…horrendously bad!”

TotalBiscuit (1984–2018) British game commentator

WTF Is…? series, Day One: Garry's Incident (October 1, 2013)

God

“I well remember receiving from one of the most earnest of my seniors the friendly warning that it was waste of time to study variation, for "Darwin had swept the field." Parenthetically we may notice that though scientific opinion in general became rapidly converted to the doctrine of pure selection, there was one remarkable exception. Systematists for the most part kept aloof. Everyone was convinced that natural selection operating in a continuously varying population was a sufficient account of the origin of species except the one class of scientific workers whose labours familiarised them with the phenomenon of specific difference. From that time the systematists became, as they still in great measure remain, a class apart.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Introductory Chapter, p. 3
Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1913)

Nature, Study, Time, Parting

“In my talks with the African Nationalist leaders…I regarded it as my duty to remove from their minds any idea or any hope they might have had that Rhodesia's constitutional problems were going to be solved by an assertion of military power on our part, whether for the purposes of suspending or amending the 1961 Constitution, of imposing majority rule tomorrow or any other time—or for that matter of dealing with the situation that would follow an illegal assertion of independence. To quote the words I used to them: If there are those who are thinking in terms of a thunderbolt hurtling from the sky and destroying their enemies, a thunderbolt in the shape of the Royal Air Force, let me say that thunderbolt will not be coming, and to continue in this delusion wastes valuable time, and misdirects valuable energies.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the House of Commons (1 November 1965) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1965/nov/01/rhodesia. Rhodesia declared independence 10 days later. Prime Minister

Hope, Quotes, Idea, Problem

“Life is a waste of wearisome hours
Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns;
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers,
Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

O! think not my spirits are always as light, st. 1 Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

Life, Flowers, Heart

“Half my advertising is wasted but I do not know which half.”

William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925) English industrialist, philanthropist, and politician

Lord Leverhulme, as cited in: John Sherman Wright, ‎John E. Mertes (1974), Advertising's role in society, p. 78
This quote has also been attributed to John Wanamaker and George Washington Hill

“The power of fantasy is so strong that people think they are having a good time when they are merely wasting money.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

700 Inspiring Guides to a New Life

Money, People, Thinking, Strong

“The Tippoo himself led the defenders north of the breach. The Tippoo had cursed Gudin for blowing the mines too early and thus wasting its terrible destructive power, but now he tried to revive the defense by his personal example. He stood in the front rank of his soldiers while behind him a succession of aides loaded jewel-encrusted hunting rifles. One by one the rifles were given to the Tippoo who aimed and fired, aimed and fired, and redcoat after redcoat was struck down.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Narrator, p. 351
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Tiger (1997)

Success, Personality

“Personally, then I have no reason to lash out at the education system. Quite the contrary. Yet a lifetime of experience, plus a quarter century of reading and reflection, convince me that our education system is big waste of time and money. Almost every politician vows to spend more on education. As an insider, I can't help gasping, "Why? You want to waste even more?"”

Bryan Caplan (1971) American political scientist

[The Case against Education, 1, https://books.google.com/books?id=Mws8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1]
The Case against Education (2018)

Money, Education, Time, Reading

“It seems such a waste of time
If that's what it's all about
If that's movin' up then I'm movin' out.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Movin' Out (Anthony's Song).
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

Time

“Don’t waste your time on penitence or guilt. Solving the problem is better!”

Sheri S. Tepper book Grass

Source: Grass (1989), Chapter 15 (p. 338)

Problem, Time

“Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.
Amid all this, somehow, the United States of America suffered a major, nonmilitary defeat. It lost no important war, yet it did not survive the Pox. Perhaps it simply lost sight of what it once intended to be, then blundered aimlessly until it exhausted itself.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 1 (pp. 8-9)

Life, War, Stupidity, World

“Getting up and criticising the other fellow because he's in and you are not seems to me a futile waste of time. Especially as you know in your heart that you would be doing more or less the same thing if you were in his place.”

Hartley Shawcross, Baron Shawcross (1902–2003) British politician

On his distaste for opposition politics, in an interview with Tom Stacey for the Daily Express, as quoted in The Independent (11 July 2003)

Time, Heart

“Learn to use time, think of it as a friend, not an enemy. Don't waste it in going after things you don't want.”

Michael Korda (1933) British writer

Power : How To Get It, How To Use It (1976)

Thinking, Learning, Time

“So I repeat that while theoretically and technically television may be feasible, yet commercially and financially, I consider it an impossibility; a development of which we need not waste little time in dreaming.”

Lee De Forest (1873–1961) American inventor

1926, as quoted in [Gawlinski, Mark, Interactive television production, 2003, Focal Press, 0-240-51679-6, 89]

Dreams, Time

“A leader's intelligence must have simplicity and clarity; action is difficult when the mind is full of complex theories and schemes. An over-organized industry wastes just as much money as one without organization - the transmission uses up all the motor's power. (For this reason small enterprises directed by one man have the better of larger trusts because their costs are less and the quality of their product higher.) A leader must have a few very simple ideas, acquired from experience and confirmed by putting them into practice. This structure created by experience will contain much exact knowledge for use in connection with a given action.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Money, Intelligence, Idea, Knowledge

“I haven't done enough. I don't have solar panels on my house yet. I haven't sorted out the heating, my car's not a Prius, I f---ing fly all the time for my job and I hate it but at the moment I haven't really got a choice, you know, and all these things. The job I'm in is a job that wastes energy left, right and centre. It's madness.”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

source http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/thom-out-of-tune/2006/08/13/1155407659754.html

Hate, Cars, Time, Housing

“The social conditions of the British people in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without deep anxiety. … We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class, with an increasing disorganization, with an increasing destruction of human strength and human virtue—nothing, in fact, but that dual degeneration which comes from the simultaneous waste of extreme wealth and of extreme want.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 138-139
Early career years (1898–1929)

Happiness, People, Way, Thinking

“The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955)

Freedom

““People fear stone,” Usha said, “because it contains never-life.”
“Non-life? You mean, death?”
“Nonsense,” she repeated vehemently. “What’s to fear about death? Death is natural. Stone is never-life.”
Spinel took another tack. “If they fear it, then how come enough Sharers want it so the traders stock shelves full?”
“How should I know? Why do Valans drink the toxic waste product of sugar-eating yeast?””

Joan Slonczewski book A Door into Ocean

Part 2, Chapter 7 (p. 95)
A Door into Ocean (1986)

Life, Death, People, Fear

“Never argue with a pedant over nomenclature. It wastes your time and annoys the pedant.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Memory (1996)

Time

“There is a mistake into which several have fallen, and have deceived others, and perhaps themselves, by clothing some false reasoning in what they called a mathematical dress, imagining that by the application of mathematical symbols to their subject, they secured mathematical argument. This could not have happened if they had possessed a knowledge of the bounds within which the empire of mathematics is contained. That empire is sufficiently wide, and might have been better known, had the time which has been wasted in aggressions upon the domains of others, been spent in exploring the immense tracts which are yet untrodden.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Ch. I.

Imagination, Mathematics, Knowledge, Time

“Because Africans and Americans share a belief in the values of liberty and dignity, we must share in the labor of advancing those values. In a time of growing commerce across the globe, we will ensure that the nations of Africa are full partners in the trade and prosperity of the world. Against the waste and violence of civil war, we will stand together for peace. Against the merciless terrorists who threaten every nation, we will wage an unrelenting campaign of justice. Confronted with desperate hunger, we will answer with human compassion and the tools of human technology. In the face of spreading disease, we will join with you in turning the tides against AIDS in Africa.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

Hunger, War, World, Disease

“In Rajab AH 836 (AD February-March, 1433) Sultãn Ahmad mounted an expedition for the conquest of MewãR and Nãgaur. When he reached the town of Nãgaur, he sent out armies for the destruction of towns and villages and levelled with the ground whatever temple was found at whichever place… Having laid waste the land of Kîlwãrã, the Sultãn entered the land of Dîlwãrã, and he ruined the lofty palaces of RãNã Mokal and destroyed the temples and idols…”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Ahmad Shãh I of Gujarat (AD 1411-1443) Mewar (Rajasthan)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

“It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

"On Being Idle".
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Kiss, Time

“A child - so wasted and so white,
He told a lie to get his way,
To march, a man with men, and fight
While other boys are still at play.
A gallant lie your heart will say.”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, In A Soldiers' Hospital 1: Pluck

Men, Lie, Way, Boy

“A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil.”

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) American historian

Introduction
Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)

Death, Men, Mountain, Parent

“Among the many prejudices against vegans is the belief that they are always preaching to others and trying to convert them. I do not think that is true; we are incredibly tolerant. We are always polite when others ask, “Don’t you ever get tempted by a bacon sandwich?”… In fact, most vegans I know are rather coy about explaining why they are vegan, mostly because the question tends to be asked when we are sitting a dinner table full of meat eaters, and it seems rather impolite to answer. However, seeing as we are not at a dinner party now, here is the ethical case… If people are vegetarians for ethical reasons—because they believe that killing and eating animals is wrong—they really ought to be vegan, too. The average human eats more than 11,000 animals in his or her lifetime, but millions of calves and chicks are also killed every year as “waste products” of milk and egg production.”

Kerry McCarthy (1965) British politician

Debate on World Vegan Day http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm111101/debtext/111101-0004.htm#1111025000002 (transcript in www.parliament.uk), House of Commons, 1 November 2011

People, Question, Thinking, Animals

“Modern industrial design is based on the principle of conspicuous economy [but] the bourgeois culture which dominates the Western World is founded… on the principle of conspicuous waste.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

Lewis Mumford (1930) Modern American design. R.L. Leonard, & ‎C.A. Glassgold (eds.), ‎American Union of Decorative Artists and Craftsmen. p. 9; As cited in: V.T. Clayton et al. Drawing on America's Past, p. 28

World

“A "new" language that differs from the rest of the crop by one or a couple features is proof positive that both what it came from and what it has become are mutations about to die. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of such "languages" that people have invented over the years, for all sorts of weird purposes where they just could not use whatever language they were already using, could not extend it, and could not fathom how to modify its tools without making a whole new language. They never stopped to think about how horribly wasteful this is, they just went on to create yet another language called Dodo, the Titanic, Edsel, Kyoto-agreement …”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: Representing code as XML: the Flare Programming Language http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/ecea40eb1602ce7c (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People, Thinking

“How do you get up in the morning?
Another wasted life it's so boring
The system never failed you
You failed yourself and all of your friends
Now your heart is failing too
A total system failure they pronounce you”

Juliana Hatfield (1967) American guitarist/singer-songwriter and author

"Total System Failure"
Juliana's Pony: Total System Failure (2000)

Life, Failure, Heart

“I have been opposed to vivisection for many years; not just because it is unbelievably barbaric and unforgivably cruel but also because it is worthless, wasteful, inaccurate, uninformative and dangerously misleading. The cruelty is indefensible and an affront to human dignity, but in a desperate attempt to justify their evil practices many vivisectors still claim that what they do helps save human lives. They are lying. The truth is that animal experiments kill people and animal researchers are responsible for the deaths of thousands of men, women and children every year; they are also directly responsible for a massive amount of human suffering.”

Vernon Coleman (1946) British doctor

"Why Animal Experiments Must Stop" (1991), in animalliberationfront.com http://www.animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/Animal%20Testing/Vivisection/waems.htm.

Death, Women, Men, Children

“Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live?
The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest.
But to live, — to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, — this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, — this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe book Uncle Tom's Cabin

Source: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Ch. 38 The Victory

Life, Death, Way, Feeling

“If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly; if they be na inhabited, what a waste of space.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

On other stars Attributed by John Burroughs on the first page of his 1920 book Accepting The Universe Attributed by Carl Sagan at a November 20, 1972 symposium on "Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man", held at Boston University [Berendzen, Richard, ed., Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man, 1973, NASA Scientific and Technical Information Office, Washington, DC, LCCN 73-600150] "Life Beyond Earth and the Mind of Man 1975", Google Video, c. 0:02:50, 2006-09-11 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8949469271181885482&q=owner%3Anara+type%3Anasa, Edited version of symposium, released by National Archives, under Google Video partnership http://www.archives.gov/google/. Attributed Variant: A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. It they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.