Quotes About Relevance

With Twitter, it's a little harder to tell jokes that somebody hasn't heard already. You have all these people out there sharing their opinions and telling jokes in real time, and by the time you get on, somebody's already done some version of what you're trying to do.

If I could distil the relevance of Bruce Springsteen's music to Australia it would be this: don't let what has happened to the American economy happen here. Don't let Australia become a down-under version of New Jersey, where the people and the communities whose skills are no longer in demand get thrown on the scrap heap of life.

I think recreations are a good thing if done right because it can be very dangerous also. If you do something which goes wrong, then people probably won't like it because they are attached to that old version of the song... So, recreations can be a little tricky.

If the universe came into and out of existence and there were no brains to know it, did the universe really exist? Who would know?

What good is it to perform anyway? The audience sits there like logs, they cough and sneeze, they don't dress up anymore. Do you know what it's like playing Brahms for people wearing blue jeans and T-shirts?

Speculation about the past is inefficient. And therefore irrelevant to achieving your goal. So

expecting to find good twenty-first-century economic answers in a constitution that dates back to 1789 is unrealistic. The Founding Fathers were clever, to be sure, but the cleverest thing they realized is that Thomas Jefferson's famous aphorism that "the earth belongs to the living" means laws from a premodern age should not blindly bind us today.

What's the reason for studying history? To understand the present or avoid it?

Jerome then speaks of the unity of the sacred books. Whatever, he asserts, we read in the Old Testament we find also in the Gospel; and what we read in the Gospel is deduced from the Old Testament. There is no discord between them, no disagreement.

I wish I was back in the sixth grade. I was important there. I'm nothing here. I'm a turd.

We need to make sure that we are allowing students to be exposed to future technology and not reducing it to current—what a lot of people would like to say, relevant teaching.

People who leave their own time out of their work cannot be surprised if their time fails to find them interesting.

I wouldn't do the 'Magic Hour' again, but I would do TV again. The 'Magic Hour' is not me. Anything I would do, I would have to be me. That is how it would work.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

If a musician is making a mediocre, self-indulgent body of work, they have to know that, for the most part, people aren't going to be interested.

By being able to play different styles I can get more work. I also learn so much from each of those experiences. It keeps everything from getting stale.

Fifty years is the long time to think about a thinker's relevance or to think of the relevance of their work to a contemporary period.

I think any actor will tell you that they always assume they'll never work again, so every job becomes important.

People who don't like my work say that the connections seem too arbitrary. But that's how life is.

Efficiency, which is doing things right, is irrelevant until you work on the right things.

Theology must work itself out in the most practical relationships.

I work with deadlines. It is terrible to be an artist where you are just producing work and nobody gives a damn. Nobody wants to show it.

You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

The good news is that more than ever, value accrues to those that show up, those that make a difference, those that do work that matters.