Quotes About Relevance

Let the past serve the present, let foreign things serve China," said that famous servant of the people Mao Zedong.

To be functionally inappropriate is to be dysfunctional.

Superman and Batman got their start, we think, during the twenty-fourth century. Except for a brief period during the Dark Age, they've never gone away.

Whoever reads the account of the cries that came to us afloat on the sea from those sinking in the ice-cold water must remember that they were addressed to him just as much as to those who heard them, and that the duty of seeing that reforms are carried out devolves on every one who knows that such cries were heard in utter helplessness the night the Titanic sank.

That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.

For this too I learned, that a storyteller's tale may end, but history goes on always. These events, so distant in legend, play a part in shaping the very events we witness about us, each and every day.

It's important to realize that what's most important is paying attention to the things that are not important.

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant. Or--as they are, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: obsolete. For, if trouble don't last always, as the Preacher tells us, neither does Power, and it is on the fact or the hope or the myth of Power that that identity which calls itself White has always seemed to depend.

You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discovered it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky.

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.

It is said that [Shakespeare's] time was easier than ours, but I doubt it—no time can be easy if one is living through it.

History does not refer merely to the past, history is literally present in all that we do

The fact that something is a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" is irrelevant, unless it fits within the three circles. A great company will have many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities

businesses. We will not make unrelated acquisitions. We will not do unrelated joint ventures. If it doesn't fit, we don't do it. Period.

never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn't matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple— indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.

Administrative man recognizes that the world he perceives is a drastically simplified model of the buzzing, blooming confusion that constitutes the real world. He is content with the gross simplification because he believes that the real world is mostly empty—that most of the facts of the real world have no great relevance to any particular situation he is facing and that most significant chains of causes and consequences are short and simple. —Herbert Simon

A thing which is of no moment itself may be made of importance in the way of competition.

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

that's how it works most of the time; we say the things that matter to people when it's already too late.

Uncle Fester brought me back with the young group. He was very 'in' with the teens.

The reason I'm uncomfortable with celebrity and don't care about it is that none of that matters. I think that's why people attack me and think I'm arrogant. I've never felt the need to justify myself. If I make good music, that music will do the job for me, even when I'm dead and gone.

I think the reality is that, for me, real fur is extraordinarily old fashioned. I think you look old. Even if you're 20, and you've got a real fur coat, you just look like an old, unaware, unconscious being on the planet. It's not relevant, it's not sexy, it's not fashionable, and it's not cool.

I think of our readers as young, conscious people. We can't underestimate how far-reaching our content is, especially these days.

Hip-hop is like underground. I don't know if hip-hop exists anymore. I don't know if it does.