Utility Quotes

“Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”
― John Steinbeck

“The beautiful is as useful as the useful." He added after a moment’s silence, "Perhaps more so.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.”
― John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

“Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“[T]he scale of a man's evil is not entirely to be measured by its practical consequences. Men commit evil within the scope available to them.”
― Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses

“It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.”
― William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life

“She watched the tunnels as they flowed past: bare walls of concrete, a net of pipes and wires, a web of rails that went off into black holes where green and red lights hung as distant drops of color. There was nothing else to dilute it, so that one could admire naked purpose and the ingenuity that had achieved it.”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Where utility ends and decoration begins is perfection.”
― Jack Gardner, Words Are Not Things

“A metaphysical understanding of what the world is, how it works, and how it all fits together, in general and abstract terms, could be the most real and important thing there is. In that case, we don't do metaphysics so that we can stay healthy and wealthy: we want to stay healthy and wealthy so that we can do metaphysics.”
― Stephen Mumford, Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction

“It is a strange notion that the acknowledgment of a first principle is inconsistent with the admission of secondary ones. To inform a traveler respecting the place of his ultimate destination, is not to forbid the use of land-marks and direction-posts on the way. The proposition that happiness is the end and aim of morality, does not mean that no road ought to be laid down to that goal, or that persons going thither should not be advised to take one direction rather than another. Men really ought to leave off talking a kind of nonsense on this subject, which they would neither talk nor listen to on other matters of practical concernment. Nobody argues that the art of navigation is not founded on astronomy, because sailors cannot wait to calculate the Nautical Almanack. Being rational creatures, they go to sea with it ready calculated; and all rational creatures go out upon the sea of life with their minds made up on the common questions of right and wrong, as well as on many of the far more difficult questions of wise and foolish. And this, as long as foresight is a human quality, it is to be presumed they will continue to do. Whatever we adopt as the fundamental principle of morality, we require subordinate principles to apply it by: the impossibility of doing without them, being common to all systems, can afford no argument against any one in particular: but gravely to argue as if no such secondary principles could be had, and as if mankind had remained till now, and always must remain, without drawing any general conclusions from the experience of human life, is as high a pitch, I think, as absurdity has ever reached in philosophical controversy.”
― John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

“And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people—in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“The 'Smart' radio frequency (RF) utility meter program is a known biologically harmful system that has been implemented by evil people.”
― Steven Magee

“The USA is corrupt in many areas with law enforcement and utility companies being two of those.”
― Steven Magee

“The general public has failed to realize that the USA government has built a High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) in most cities with the mass deployment of smart radio frequency transmitting utility meters.”
― Steven Magee

“With the development of utility electricity for the masses in the 1900's, very few people realize that a new era of sickness and disease was unleashed that are collectively called radiation sickness.”
― Steven Magee

“Very few people that have installed solar photovoltaics (PV) on their home have realized that by spending an additional five thousand dollars that they can completely disconnect from the electrical utility.”
― Steven Magee

“The corporate government is heavily influenced by the utility company cartel.”
― Steven Magee

“An electrical utility company that blatantly lies to law enforcement about an electrical fraud researcher would be considered suicidal by many people.”
― Steven Magee

“I find it very concerning that a utility company that has an established history of harassing me has my family under surveillance with a Smart/AMR/AMI meter.”
― Steven Magee

“Resist the corruption.”
― Steven Magee

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. -William Morris”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“Craft makes our homes more human. -Ilsa Crawford”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“Material goods rarely alter our levels of happiness, unlike emotional experience. Having can never replace being. -Ilsa Crawford”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“I research what electrical utility companies do not want researched.”
― Steven Magee

“Earth that is electrified by the electrical utility system is a known human health hazard.”
― Steven Magee

“Having worked for a utility company, I was aware of how corrupt they are with their own workers. What really surprised me is how corrupt utilities are with their own customers!”
― Steven Magee

“You know that when the local utility company is trying to assassinate you, that your research into their frauds and corruption is progressing in the right direction.”
― Steven Magee

“Utility company smart meters have become a sordid tale of fraud, corruption and willful biological damage of the masses.”
― Steven Magee