Dispensable Quotes

Unfortunately, what is thrown away is not only food and dispensable objects, but often human beings themselves, who are discarded as 'unnecessary.' For example, it is frightful even to think there are children, victims of abortion, who will never see the light of day; children being used as soldiers, abused and killed in armed conflicts; and children being bought and sold in that terrible form of modern slavery which is human trafficking, which is a crime against humanity. ~ Pope Francis

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

Denying the necessary role of the creative mind as expressed in capital and technology, Marx ended up vindicating the zero-sum vision of anti-Semitic envy, in which bankers, capitalists, arbitrageurs, shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, and traders are deemed to be parasitical shysters and dispensable middlemen. ~ George Gilder

After a while, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything. One can be a father and assume no obligations, it follows that one can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all. Pretty soon you can add friend, acquaintance, co-worker, and just about anyone else to the long list of people who seem to be part of your life, though there is no code of conduct that they must adhere to. Pretty soon, it seems unreasonable to be bothered or outraged by much of anything because, well, what did you expect? In a world where the core social unit - the family - is so dispensable, how much can anything else mean? ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

I always liked Barbara Howar and admired her spunk. I know that she considered me - and Alice Roosevelt Longworth - an exception to her negative feelings about Washington widows and single women, whom she basically found dispensable. ~ Katharine Graham

Also see how many quarters of corn you will spend in a week in dispensable bread, how much in alms. ~ Robert Grosseteste

In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time. ~ Elisabeth Tova Bailey

I would like to believe in the myth that we grow wiser with age. In a sense my disbelief is wisdom. Those of a middle generation, if charitable or sentimental, subscribe to the wisdom myth, while the callous see us as dispensable objects, like broken furniture or dead flowers. For the young we scarcely exist unless we are unavoidable members of the same family, farting, slobbering, perpetually mislaying teeth and bifocals. ~ Patrick White

The welfare culture tells the man he is not a necessary part of the family; he feels dispensable, his wife knows he is dispensable, his children sense it. ~ George Gilder

I honor my importance and the importance of others. None of us is dispensable, none of us is replacable. In the chorus of life each of us brings a True Note, a perfect pitch that adds to the harmony of the whole. I act creatively and consciously to actively endorse and encourage the expansion of those whose lives I touch. Believing in the goodness of each, I add to the goodness of all. We bless each other even in passing. ~ Julia Cameron

The man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Nowadays ... deals are transactional rather than personal. Instead of placing your faith in a person, you get lawyers to write safeguards into the contract. This is an historic shift from a trust economy to a risk economy. But trust is not a dispensable luxury. It is the very basis of our social life. Many scholars believe that capitalism had religious roots because people could trust other people who, feeling that they were answerable to God, could be relied on to be honest in business. A world without trust is a lonely and dangerous place. ~ Jonathan Sacks

Alone Together
I want us to be together,
but I want to stay connected.
I want your attention,
but I want to manage mine,
opting in and opting out,
sponging up what's relevant,
discarding the expendable.
I can't get enough of you,
not too close, not too far,
at a manageable distance,
at a convenient time.
Let me tell you how much I loveyou,
let me count the ways,
by text, by email, by post, by Tweet.
If I've said too much
I can edit.
If I've show myself too vulnerable
I can delete.
If I'm at a loss for words
I can Google.
Come to think of it,
I'd much rather text than talk.
Come to think of it
you're dispensable too.
I just need the illusion of love,
without all its messy demands,
without its unpredictability,
without the risk.
I just need Facebook
because nothing beats being
alone
together. ~ Beryl Dov

We thus begin to see that the institutionalized practice of citations and references in the sphere of learning is not a trivial matter. While many a general reader-that is, the lay reader located outside the domain of science and scholarship-may regard the lowly footnote or the remote endnote or the bibliographic parenthesis as a dispensable nuisance, it can be argued that these are in truth central to the incentive system and an underlying sense of distributive justice that do much to energize the advancement of knowledge. ~ Robert K. Merton

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it - even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them. ~ Annie Proulx

Ethics is not a mystic fantasy
nor a social convention
nor a dispensable, subjective luxury ... Ethics is an objective necessity of man's survival
not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but the grace of reality and the nature of life. ~ Ayn Rand

People who read books," he went on, "tend to be dispensable. Extremely. ~ Ninni Holmqvist

The person of the therapist is the converting catalyst, not his order or credo, not his spatial location in the room, not his exquisitely chosen words or denominational silences. So long as the rules of a therapeutic system do not hinder limbic transmission - a critical caveat - they remain inconsequential, neocortical distractions. The dispensable trappings of dogma may determine what a therapist thinks he is doing, what he talks about when he talks about therapy, but the agent of change is who he is. (187) ~ Thomas Lewis

The world as it has very little use for your womanhood. You are considered a weaker sex and are treated as a sexual object. You are thoroughly dispensable except for bearing children. Your youth is the measure of your worth, and your age is the measure of your worthlessness. Do not look to the world for your sustenance or for your identity as a woman because you will not find them there. The world despises you. ~ Marianne Williamson

Sex is too important a matter to be left to the independent judgment of young women, because young women rarely possess good judgment. The overwhelming majority of women will be happier in the long run by marrying an ordinary man and having children than byseeking sexual thrills, ascending the corporate heights or grinding out turgid tracts on gender theory. A woman develops an emotional bond with her mate through the sexual act itself; this is why arranged marriages (contrary to Western prejudice) are often reasonably happy.Romantic courtship hasits harms, but is finally dispensable; marriage isnot dispensable. ~ F. Roger Devlin

His hair was getting longer, bordering on unkempt. As a prince, he'd always been groomed to near perfection. But then he became an emperor. The weeks since his coronation had been spent trying to stop a war, hunt down a wanted fugitive, avoid getting married, and endure his own kidnapping. As a result, haircuts became a dispensable luxury. She ~ Marissa Meyer

A party at which the guests are all of the beautiful persuasion tends to be dull indeed, as they have no conversation that does not pertain to themselves. A successful gathering requires a number of the ill-favored but clever. The beautiful are but ornaments - desirable, but dispensable. ~ Diana Gabaldon

War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with ... But it is not only a biological law but a moral obligation, and, as such, an dispensable factor in civilization. ~ Friedrich Von Bernhardi

The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect
this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence. ~ Twyla Tharp

My friends knew that I was reading the Bible. First, the dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was dispensable and, with it, any prohibition about sexuality and immorality. But I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament, and it seemed to me that you couldn't dispense with it in its entirety without violating a foundational rule about canonicity: no creating canons within canons. In fact, I had just gone over this in my graduate seminar in Queer Theory and it made me wonder if the chapel dean ought not sit in on my class. His position seemed like a hermeneutic of convenience, tailoring the text to fit my experience, and not a hermeneutic of integrity, where the text gets the chance to fulfill its internal mission. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Everyone is dispensable but some are more dispensable than others. ~ Miles Anthony Smith

Nor did I grasp the capacity of love's absence to destroy, that my lack of love for myself made my own life unbearable. You take someone whose life experiences have taught them they're worthless, string them out on drugs, and you have one miserable person. How could I have given what I didn't have? It's hard to value another life when you view your own as dispensable, hard to understand how you can have so great an effect on someone else when you don't think you matter. ~ Mia Fontaine

All too often we say of a man doing a good job that he is indispensable. A flattering canard, as so many disillusioned and retired and fired have discovered when the world seems to keep on turning without them. In business, a man can come nearest to indispensability by being dispensable in his current job. How can a man move up to new responsibilities if he is the only one able to handle his present tasks? It matters not how small or large the job you now have, if you have trained no one to do it as well, you're not available; you've made your promotion difficult if not impossible. ~ Malcolm Forbes

they would be astonished to discover the seriously German problem that we are dealing with, a vortex and a turning-point at the very centre of German hopes. But perhaps those same people will find it distasteful to see an aesthetic problem taken so seriously, if they can see art as nothing more than an entertaining irrelevance, an easily dispensable tinkle of bells next to the 'seriousness of life': as if no one was aware what this contrast with the 'seriousness of life' amounted to. Let these serious people know that I am convinced that art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life in the sense of that man, my noble champion on that path, to whom I dedicate this book. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Even though no one complained or maybe even realized it, I could feel that the people around me knew they were viewed as dispensable. ~ Sarah Smarsh

Sometimes I felt that growing up and being a girl was about learning to be afraid. Not paranoid, exactly, but always alert and aware, like checking out the exits in the movie theatre or the fire escape in a hotel. You came to know, in a way you hadn't as a kid, that the body you inhabited was vulnerable, imperfectly fortified. On TV, in the papers, in books and movies, it isn't ever men being raped or kidnapped or bludgeoned or dismembered or burned with acid. But in stories and crime shows and TV series and movies and in life too, it's going on all the time, all around you. So you learn, in your mind, that your body needs to be protected. It's both precious and totally dispensable, depending on whom you encounter. ~ Claire Messud

The divinity of Jesus is not a dispensable extra that has no significance for our salvation. On the contrary, our salvation depends on it. We can be saved only by God Himself. ~ Klaas Runia

Most people are dispensable in 'Game of Thrones,' not only in the story but in the series. ~ Isaac Hempstead-Wright