Quotes About Utility

Utilitarianism holds that an action, or a law, is right only if it produces the best outcome – only if it brings about the "greatest good for the greatest number.

In architecture and interiors, as well as fashion, there is an interaction that is both functional and aesthetic.

Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon.

All connections based on selfishness, either on personal pleasure or on usefulness, are accidental. They are easily dissolved, because, when the pleasure or the utility ceases, the bond ceases.

Oh, that's a machete. That comes from the Bahamas. We spent a couple of Christmas holidays down there, and there were some youngsters that thought I did a favor for them, and they gave me that as we were leaving. Everybody has a machete. They use it to cut sugar corn, clean their fingernails, and everything else. They gave that to me as we were leaving. I had a terrible time getting it on the airplane, of course.

Modern man has a need for simplification that tends to find its expression one way or another. And this artificial monotony which he takes pains to create, this monotony which is slowly taking over the world, this monotony is the sign of our greatness. It bears the mark of a certain will-power, the will to utility; it is the expression of utility, a law that governs all our modern activity: the Law of Utility.

as soon as the electric power grid came online, they dumped their electric power generator, and they started buying power off the grid. it just makes more sense. and that's what is starting to happen with infrastructure computing. bezos wanted AWS to be a utility with discount rates, even if that meant losing money in the short term.

Mas, vendo bem, e se me é permitido um lugar-comum corriqueiro, não será que até as coisas inúteis têm cabimento neste mundo longe-de-ser-perfeito? Se desta vida imperfeita eliminássemos tudo o que é inútil, a imperfeição deixaria ela própria de fazer sentido.

The smallness of the soap

I like being mistaken for someone useful.

There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.

The fishes are also employed for the same purpose on any yard, which happens to be sprung or fractured. Thus their form, application, and utility are exactly like those of the splinters applied to a broken limb in surgery.

Daggers have such beautiful, functional shapes, and decorating them is an ancient tradition.

A currency designed for long-term storage and investment doesn't do so well at encouraging transactions and exchange in the moment.

On se débattait parce qu'on espérait s'en sortir, c'était utilitaire, c'était ignoble. Tandis que la tragédie, c'était gratuit. C'était sans espoir.

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

A man avails himself of the truth so long as it is serviceable; but he seizes on what is false with a passionate eloquence as soon as he can make a momentary use of it.

It was so useful to lie with the truth.

Truth is what works.

Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.

In his blackest hours, Stone doubted the utility of all thought, and all intelligence. There were times he envied the laboratory rats he worked with; their brains were so simple. Certainly, they did not have the intelligence to destroy themselves; that was a peculiar invention of man.

But it implied, as utility theory never had, that it was as easy to get people to take risks as it was to get them to avoid them. All you had to do was present them with a choice that involved a loss. In the more than two hundred years since Bernoulli started the discussion, intellectuals had regarded risk-seeking behavior as a curiosity. If risk seeking was woven into human nature, as Danny and Amos's theory implied that it was, why hadn't people noticed it before?

Expected utility theory wasn't exactly wrong. It simply did not understand itself, to the point where it could not defend itself against seeming contradictions. The theory's failure to explain people's decisions, Danny and Amos wrote, "merely demonstrates what should perhaps be obvious, that non-monetary consequences of decisions cannot be neglected, as they all too often are, in applications of utility theory.