Useless quote for 19 June:
"I look at everything that happens to me as something I might be able to write down, to express the feeling I had in that moment through poetry. In that sense, writing brings me peace."
~ Parnia Abbasi (2002 - 14 June 2025)
Link to source:
https://www.pamenarpress.com/post/parnia-abbasi-2002-2025
Useless quote for 18 Jun:
"Any age can be viewed as 'the wrong age' for a woman, allowing her capacity to be questioned and her fitness for leadership challenged."
~ Amy Diehl, Leanne M. Dzubinski, and Amber L. Stephenson, in "Women in Leadership Face Ageism at Every Age" Harvard Business Review online, 16 June 2023
Link to source (paywalled):
https://hbr.org/2023/06/women-in-leadership-face-ageism-at-every-age
#UselessQuote #Ageism #HBR #AmyDiehl #LeanneMDzubinski #AmberLStephenson
Useless quote for 17 June:
"You should not serve things; things should serve you."
~ The instructions of Shuruppag, lines 242-244 (3rd millennium BCE)
Link to source (Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature):
https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr561.htm
Useless quote for 16 June:
"And his official work, and his ordering of his daily life and of his family, and these social and official interests, — all that might be not the right thing. He tried to defend it all to himself. And suddenly he felt all the weakness of what he was defending."
~ Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886; trans. Constance Garnett, 1902)
Useless quote for 15 June:
"Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate."
~ Martin Luther King Jr., in "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or community?" (1967)
#UselessQuote #Violence #MartinLutherKingJr #MartinLutherKing
Useless quote for 14 June:
"I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer …"
Étienne de La Boétie, "Discourse on Voluntary Servitude" (1548)
Useless quote for 13 June:
"It is not the extent of their information that appalls; it is the absence of any reflection upon it, any sense of relation between it and them and the world."
~ Jacques Barzun, "The Culture We Deserve" (Wesleyan University Press, 1989)
Useless quote for 12 June:
"DUTY, n. That which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire."
~ Ambrose Bierce, in "The Cynic's Dictionary" (1906), later in "The Devil's Dictionary" (1911).
#UselessQuote #Duty #AmbroseBierce #CynicsDictionary #DevilsDictionary
Useless quote for 11 July:
"The rulers wanted to fool us,
since they saw we were connected with the good."
~ The Gospel of Philip (trans. Dr. Barnstone, 2003)
Link to source:
http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/GPhilip-Barnstone.html
Useless quote for 9 June:
"Who we see on stage, and whose stories we tell, speaks to who we value in society."
~ Karen Zacarías, in a 14 September 2015 article, "Interview: A Date with DESTINY: Talking with Playwright Karen Zacarías" (Broadway World, Washington DC)
Link to source:
https://www.broadwayworld.com/washington-dc/article/BWW-Interview-A-Date-with-DESTINY-Talking-with-Playwright-Karen-Zacaras-20150914
Useless quote for June 8:
"Others are basically saying that cooperating with a foreign dictator is no big deal if it protects us against real threats, like universal health care."
~ Paul Krugman, in his Op-Ed piece "The New Climate of Treason", The New York Times, 14 July 2017
Link to source:
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/the-new-climate-of-treason/
Useless quote for 7 June:
"There can be no gradualist, ecomodernist answer to the dire ecological problems we face, because when looking at the human effect on the planet there is nothing gradual about it; it is a Great Acceleration and a rift in the Earth system."
~ John Bellamy Foster, in a 2 July 2017 interview with "Left Voice"
Link to source:
https://www.leftvoice.org/A-Resistance-Movement-for-the-Planet-Full-Interview/
Useless quote for 6 June:
"Racist, erratic and unpredictable, brutal, inept, bellicose, irrational, ridiculous, and militaristic."
U.S. Ambassador Thomas Patrick Melady, in a January 2, 1973, telegram from the U.S. Embassy in Uganda to the U.S. Department of State
Link to source (PDF of telegram):
https://web.archive.org/web/20060610225610/http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/67103.pdf
Useless quote for 5 June:
"[Hiraeth] is an unattainable longing for a place, a person, a figure, even a national history that may never have actually existed."
~ Pamela Petro, in "Dreaming in Welsh", The Paris Review Sep 18, 2012
NB: "hireath" is pronounced “here-eyeth” (with a rolled “r”).
Link to source:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/09/18/dreaming-in-welsh/
Useless quote for 4 June:
"My hair!"
~ Donald J. Trump's response to the question 'If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?' in Vanity Fair's "Proust Questionnaire", 1 Sep 2004
Link to source:
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2004/09/donald-trump-proust-questionnaire
Useless quote for 3 Jun:
"American birders use a nice shorthand expression for such an epiphany: 'the spark bird' – the encounter that switched on the nature-loving light."
Mark Cocker, in "Review: A Curious Boy: The Making of a Scientist by Richard Fortey", The Guardian 18 March 2021
Link to source:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/18/a-curious-boy-by-richard-fortey-review-the-making-of-a-scientist
Useless quote for 2 Jun 2025:
"Authoritarianism corrupts society."
~ Shadi Hamid, in "Why the Russian People Go Along With Putin’s War", The Atlantic, 23 April 2022
Link to source (paywalled):
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/russians-support-putin-invasion-popularity/629653/
Useless quote for 1 June:
"… mercatoresque et venales in vicen facti quaerimus non quale sit quidque, sed quanti …"
(We become alternately merchants and merchandise, and we ask, not what a thing truly is, but what it costs.
Trans. Richard M. Gummere, 1925)
~ Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger), in Letter CXV to Lucius ("On the superficial blessings"), c. 65 AD
Link to source (1971 Loeb Edition, Vol. III):
https://archive.org/details/adluciliumepistu03sene/page/318/mode/2up?view=theater
Reminder:
These are called 'useless quotes' because they remain useless until we think about them.
Useless quote for 31 May:
"What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, consciously, that is fully understanding their real interests, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing …"
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in "Notes from the Underground" (1864)
