Quotes About Relevance

Note: When reading dry political theory, such as the texts you will find on the following pages, it may be useful to apply the Exclamation Point Test from time to time, to determine if the material you are reading is actually relevant to your life. To apply this test, simply go through the text replacing all the punctuation marks at the ends of the sentences with exclamation points. If the results sound absurd when read aloud, then you know you're wasting your time.

For God's sake, all of you, say spiteful things about me, then I shall know I mean something to you. Don't say surgaries, or I'm done.

Why are we all only like mortal pieces of furniture? Why is nothing important?

Nobody kicks a dead dog

the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on earth put together.

Dr. Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is "the desire to be important." Remember that phrase: "the desire to be important." It is significant. You are going to hear a lot about it in this book.

the deepest urge in human nature is "the desire to be important.

Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth today?

Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation.

If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

If a book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it.

Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Things that matter in the morning somehow don't matter in the afternoon.

The computer will never be as important to society as the copier."73

WASTING TIME IS a big problem in the world we live in, that's for sure. But it doesn't mean that we necessarily have to know what the goal is for every step we take. Sometimes we do things that are not directly connected and yet are still significant.

But then it dawned on me that the opinion of someone who is always wrong has its own special utility to decision-makers.

A poor relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

A poor relation is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondence, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity. He is known by his knock.

There's no sense in doing a lot of barking if you don't really have anything to say.

Five hundred years from now, who'll know the difference?!

That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and "out-of-date" could say words my heart needed to hear and didn't know how to say.

That was the night I learned the value of an old hymn. How something so old and "out-of-date" could say words my heart needed to hear and didn't know how to say.

Homer is new this morning, and perhaps nothing is as old as today's newspaper.