Utilitarian Quotes

Only the middle distance and what may be called the remoter foreground are strictly human. When we look very near or very far, man either vanishes altogether or loses his primacy. The astronomer looks even further afield than the Sung painter and sees even less of human life. At the other end of the scale the physicist, the chemist, the physiologist pursue the close-up – the cellular close-up, the molecular, the atomic and subatomic. Of that which, at twenty feet, even at arm's length, looked and sounded like a human being no trace remains.
Something analogous happens to the myopic artist and the happy lover. In the nuptial embrace personality is melted down; the individual (it is the recurrent theme of Lawrence's poems and novels) ceases to be himself and becomes a part of the vast impersonal universe.
And so it is with the artist who chooses to use his eyes at the near point. In his work humanity loses its importance, even disappears completely. Instead of men and women playing their fantastic tricks before high heaven, we are asked to consider the lilies, to meditate on the unearthly beauty of 'mere things,' when isolated from their utilitarian context and rendered as they are, in and for themselves. Alternatively (or, at an earlier stage of artistic development, exclusively), the nonhuman world of the near-point is rendered in patterns. These patterns are abstracted for the most part from leaves and flowers – the rose, the lotus, the acanthus, palm, papyrus – an ~ Aldous Huxley

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria. ~ David Lodge

I really like the idea of being utilitarian. My dream is to edit down my wardrobe and be very Japanese, where you have one rolling rack and it's like your four T-shirts, your five dresses, your two pairs of jeans. ~ Erin Wasson

That chair -shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow - these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. ~ Aldous Huxley

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright ... ~ Tom Wolfe

I do not see why the axiom of Prudence should not be questioned, when it conflicts with present inclination, on a ground similar to that on which Egoists refuse to admit the axiom of Rational Benevolence. If the Utilitarian has to answer the question, 'Why should I sacrifice my own happiness for the greater happiness of another?' it must surely be admissible to ask the Egoist 'Why should I sacrifice a present pleasure for a greater one in the future? Why should I concern myself about my own future feelings any more than about the feelings of other persons?' ~ Henry Sidgwick

If only people realized Corbusier is pure nineteenth century, Manchester school utilitarian, and that's why they like him. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Described in this way, utilitarianism has little in common with the prosaic, visionless notion of the 'merely utilitarian,' in the sense of a narrowly or mundanely functional or efficient option. No such limited horizon confined the thought and character of the great English-language utilitarian philosophers, whose influence ran its course from the period just before the French Revolution through the Victorian era. Happiness, for them, was more of a cosmic calling, the path to world progress, and whatever was deemed 'utilitarian' had to be useful for that larger and inspiring end, the global minimization of pointless suffering and the global maximization of positive well-being or happiness. It invokes, ultimately, the point of view of universal benevolence. And it is more accurately charged with being too demanding ethically than with being too accommodating of narrow practicality, material interests, self-interestedness, and the like. ~ Bart Schultz

Helen was beautiful in the way a supercomputer was beautiful: sleek with elegant but utilitarian styling, full of top-notch technological know-how, far too expensive for most people to possess. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Worship ought not to be construed in a utilitarian way. Its purpose is not to gain numbers nor for our church to be seen as successful. Rather, the entire reason for our worship is that God deserves it. (Worship) immerses us in the regal splendor of the King of the cosmos ... provides opportunities for us to enjoy God's presence in corporate ways that takes us out of time and into the eternal purposes of God's kingdom. As a result, we shall be changed - but not because of anything we do. God, on whom we are centered and to whom we submit, will transform us by his Revelation of himself. ~ Marva Dawn

I was born in a village in the northeast, and it wasn't until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it.
Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime.
I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn't until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me. ~ Osamu Dazai

By mobilizing relational ministry from how, by stopping only at Langmead's first aspect of incarnational mission (Jesus as a pattern for mission), the who of personal encounter, of participation in the continued presence of Jesus, is squeezed out into a utilitarian pattern (Jesus did it this way so we should too) that can be duplicated but lacks the indwelling power and direction of God. ~ Andrew Root

In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic ~ Slavoj Zizek

The fault of the utilitarian doctrine is that it mistakes impersonality for impartiality. ~ John Rawls

The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for poetry, and why it boils the study of literature down to the scrambling up of some marketable "skill" [ ... ] you don't read good books to learn about what literary artists do ... you learn about literary art so that you can read more good books and learn more from them. It is as if Thomas Gradgrind had gotten hold of the humanities and turned them into factory robotics. ~ Anthony Esolen

Another ethical ideal, the utilitarian principle, maintains that the ultimate criterion of an ethical decision is the balance of positive consequences over negative consequences produced by an action. ~ Philip A. Becnel IV

I have a utilitarian approach to dressing; as long as I quite like it and it covers me up, I don't care what it is. ~ Jo Brand

It was also her nature that caused her letters to avoid emotional pitfalls and confine themselves to relating the events of her daily life in the utilitarian style of a ship's log. In reality they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

CONCERNED AS HE is that the usable be put to use, that there be no waste, still there is nothing utilitarian or mechanistic about Mr. Lapp's farm - or his mind. His aim, it seems, is not that the place should be put to the fullest use, but that it should have the most abundant life. ~ Wendell Berry

is perhaps true to say, not that civil liberty is the child of religious liberty, but that liberty, whether civil or religious, was the work often reluctantly, sometimes unconsciously, undertaken by communities of men who had an end higher than political, who refused to submit religion to politic arguments, who fought for ends never entirely utilitarian. ~ John Neville Figgis

No words need be wasted over the fact that all these narcotics are harmful. The question whether even a small quantity of alcohol is harmful or whether the harm results only from the abuse of alcoholic beverages is not at issue here. It is an established fact that alcoholism, cocainism, and morphinism are deadly enemies of life, of health, and of the capacity for work and enjoyment; and a utilitarian must therefore consider them as vices. But this is far from demonstrating that the authorities must interpose to suppress these vices by commercial prohibitions, nor is it by any means evident that such intervention on the part of the government is really capable of suppressing them or that, even if this end could be attained, it might not therewith open up a Pandora's box of other dangers, no less mischievous than alcoholism and morphinism.
Whoever is convinced that indulgence or excessive indulgence in these poisons is pernicious is not hindered from living abstemiously or temperately. This question cannot be treated exclusively in reference to alcoholism, morphinism, cocainism, etc., which all reasonable men acknowledge to be evils. For if the majority of citizens is, in principle, conceded the right to impose its way of life upon a minority, it is impossible to stop at prohibitions against indulgence in alcohol, morphine, cocaine, and similar poisons. Why should not what is valid for these poisons be valid also for nicotine, caffeine, and the like? Why should not the sta ~ Ludwig Von Mises

Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

During that year by the railroad embankment, at the time of my father's complete disaster, distance meant for us not only some faraway lyrical splendor but also the exceedingly utilitarian idea of running away, the deliverance from fear and hunger. ~ Danilo Kis

It is easier to invent than to discover. Humanity does not have the patience to wait for the truth. Humans want utility – quickly! Religion and law were not created because they are true, but because they are utilitarian: they serve our needs.

Or, do they? ~ Vizi Andrei

Mestre. Say the word without hissing the conurbated villain, and pitying its citizens. As quickly as they can, two million tourists pass through, or by, Mestre each year, and each one will be struck by the same thought as they wonder at the aesthetic opposition that it represents. Mestre is an ugly town but ugly only in the same way that Michael Jackson might be desccribed as eccentric or a Tabasco Vindaloo flambéed in rocket fuel might be described as warm. Mestre is almost excremental in its hideousness: a fetid, fly-blown, festering, industrial urbanization, scarred with varicose motorways, flyovers, rusting railway sidings and the rubbish of a billion holidaymakers gradually burning, spewing thick black clouds into the Mediterranean sky. A town with apparently no centre, a utilitarian ever-expandable wasteland adapted to house the displaced poor, the shorebound, outpriced, domicile-deprived exiles from its neighbouring city. For, just beyond the condom- and polystyrene-washed, black-stained, mud shores of Marghera, Mestre's very own oil refinery, less than a mile away across the waters of the lagoon in full sight of its own dispossessed citizens, is the Jewel of Adriatic. Close enough for all to feel the magnetism, there stands the most beautiful icon of Renaissance glory and, like so much that can attract tourism, a place too lovely to be left in the hands of its natives, the Serenissima itself, Venice. ~ Marius Brill

To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality ~ John Stuart Mill

Unless the fundamental categories of economics such as 'property' were to be redefined in a radically personal way the liberal rationalist curse which had established economics as a scientific discipline cut off from human interests would proliferate. Economic models ... have failed to incorporate any meaningful index of individual benefit other than the original utilitarian one, ... the index of increasing income or an increasing flow of commodities. ~ John Carroll

utilitarian office ~ Douglas Corleone

Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life. ~ Aristotle.

Forests, beyond offering us their plainly utilitarian wealth, have to perform vast physiological functions in the great economy of nature, by contributing predominantly in the empire of vegetation to the liberation of oxygen. ~ Ferdinand Von Mueller

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...

Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! ~ Nick Hornby

The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revulsions. It is the finite divorced from the Eternal. It is multiplicity in isolation from its non-dual Ground. It is time apprehended as one damned thing after another. It is a system of verbal categories taking the place of the fathomlessly beautiful and mysterious particulars which constitute reality. It is a notion labelled 'God'. It is the Universe equated with the words of our utilitarian vocabulary. ~ Aldous Huxley

Failing to recognize the worth of beauty independent from utilitarian function is symptomatic of an abject poverty of the soul. It's like saying that if we turned St. Peter's Basilica into a parking garage, we would improve it by making it practical. There's a word for this, and it is vandalism. We must not vandalize the faith in the name of pragmatism! ~ Brian Zahnd

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory. ~ Claude Debussy

Men become utilitarian out of fear of the alternative the chaos of tangled or tepid desires, of rootlessness and boredom. ~ John Carroll

Now, granted, Howard doesn't fit the conventional psychological profile of a rebounder - that of the no-nonsense, utilitarian "dirty work" specialist. Rather, this is a guy who sings Beyoncé at the free throw line, who quotes not Scarface but Finding Nemo, whose idea of humor is ordering 10 pizzas to be delivered to another player's hotel room, or knocking on teammates' doors and sprinting off down the hall, giggling. He goofs around during practice, during press conferences and during team shootarounds, for which Magic coach Stan Van Gundy has had to institute a no-flatulence rule because, as teammate Rashard Lewis says, "Dwight really likes to cut the cheese. ~ Chris Ballard

I'd be the first person to say I can't write dialogue. My dialogue is very utilitarian and is designed to move things forward. I'm not Shakespeare. It's not designed to be poetic. ~ George Lucas

Darwinism met with such overwhelming success because it provided, on the basis of inheritance, the ideological weapons for race and well as class rule and could be used for, as well as against, race discrimination. Politically speaking, Darwinism as such was neutral, and it has led, indeed, to all kinds of pacifism and cosmopolitanism as well as to the sharpest forms of imperialistic ideologies. In the seventies and eighties of the last century, Darwinism was still almost exclusively in the hands of the utilitarian anti-colonial party in England. And the first philosopher of evolution, Herbert Spencer, who treated sociology as part of biology, believed natural selection to benefit the evolution of mankind and to result in everlasting peace. For political discussion, Darwinism offered two important concepts: the struggle for existence with optimistic assertion of the necessary and automatic "survival of the fittest," and the indefinite possibilities which seemed to lie in the evolution of man out of animal life and which started the new "science" of eugenics. ~ Hannah Arendt

The ultimate expression of this Christian attitude toward the power of money is what we will call profanation. To profane money, like all other powers, is to take away its sacred character.... Giving to God is the act of profanation par excellence.... We need to regain an appreciation of gifts that are not utilitarian. We should meditate on the story in the Gospel of John where Mary wastes precious ointment on Jesus. The one who protests against this free gift is Judas. He would have preferred it to be used for good works, for the poor. He wanted such an enormous sum of money to be spent usefully. Giving to God introduces the useless into the world of efficiency, and this is an essential witness to faith in today's world. ~ Jacques Ellul

Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A ~ Kevin Kelly

Mr. J.S. Mill speaks, in his celebrated work, "Utilitarianism," of the social feelings as a "powerful natural sentiment," and as "the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality," but on the previous page he says, "if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason less natural." It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man? ~ Charles Darwin

If I live to be old enough, I may sit down under some bush, the last left in the utilitarian world, and feel thankful that intellect in its march has spared one vestige of the ancient forest for me to die by. ~ Thomas Cole

How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion. ~ Anthony Esolen

The resurrection cannot be tamed or tethered by any utilitarian test. It is a vast watershed in history, or it is nothing. It cannot be tested for truth; it is the test of lesser truths. No light can be thrown on it; its own light blinds the investigator. It does not compel belief; it resists it. But once accepted as fact, it tells more about the universe, about history, and about man's state and fate that all the mountains of other facts in the human accumulation. ~ LIFE Magazine

To be human is the only way out of being human. An alternative exit - either by unbinding sentience from sapience or by circumventing sapience in favour of a direct engagement with the technological artefact - cannot go beyond the human. Rather it leads to a culture of cognitive pettiness and self-deception that is daily fodder for the most parochial and utilitarian political systems that exist on the planet. In delivering sentience from its so-called sapient yoke, one does not become posthuman, or even animal, but falls back on an ideologically charged 'biological chauvinism' that sapience ought to overcome, for it is the very idea of humanist conservatism that misrepresents what is accidental and locally contingent as what is necessary and universal. In discarding the human in the hope of an immediate contact with superintelligence or a self-realization of the technological artefact, one either surreptitiously subjects the future to the predetermined goals of conservative humanism, or subscribes to a future that is simply the teleological actualization of final causes and thus a resurrection of the well-worn Aristotelian fusion of reasons and causes. Human sapience is the only project of exit. ~ Reza Negarestani

We are all caught up, entangled, in the lumbering day-to-day operations of a [social] machinery, working in many respects in the service of ends which we as Christians reject. This situation, the present [schizophrenic] situation of thousands of thinking Christians is the end product of a process that began the day Christians first decided to stop thinking Christianly in the interests of national harmony; the day when Christians first felt that the only way out of endless public discussion was to limit the operation of acute Christian awareness to the spheres of personal morality and spirituality.
From that point, the spheres of political, cultural, social, and commercial life became dominated by pragmatic and utilitarian thinking. ~ Harry Blamires

When he adopted Western methods, it was in a purely utilitarian spirit. He gave no thought to the principles on which our civilisation is based. It was the finished product he was after and not the process. ~ Homer B. Hulbert

When words are well chosen, well arranged, they generate gratifying experiences for the listener. It is not for utilitarian reasons alone that breadth of vocabulary and verbal fluency are among the most important qualifications for success as a business executive. Talking well enriches every interaction, and it is a skill that can be learned by everyone. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

On the level of
history, as in individual life, murder is thus a desperate exception or it is nothing. The disturbance that it
brings to the order of things offers no hope of a future; it is an exception and therefore it can be neither
utilitarian nor systematic as the purely historical attitude would have it. It is the limit that can be reached
but once, after which one must die. The rebel has only one way of reconciling himself with his act of
murder if he allows himself to be led into performing it: to accept his own death and sacrifice. He kills
and dies so that it shall be clear that murder is impossible. He demonstrates that, in reality, he prefers the
"We are" to the "We shall be." The calm happiness of Kaliayev in his prison, the serenity of Saint-Just
when he walks toward the scaffold, are explained in their turn. Beyond that farthest frontier, con-tradition
and nihilism begin. ~ Albert Camus

Aesthetic and utilitarian considerations aside," I said, "Those mittens don't particularly make sense. Why would you want to hitchhike to the North Pole? Isn't the whole gimmick of Christmas that there's home delivery? You get up there, all you're going to find is a bunch of exhausted, grumpy elves. Assuming, of course, that you accept the mythical presence of a workshop up there, when we all know there isn't even a pole at the North Pole, and if global warming continues, there won't be any ice, either."
"Why don't you just fuck off?" the woman replied. Then she took her mittens and got out of there. ~ Rachel Cohn

It is not easy to get rid of weeds; but it is easy, by a process of neglect, to ruin your food crops and let them revert to their primitive state of wildness. [ ... ] In political civilization, the state is an abstraction and the relationship of men utilitarian. Because it has no roots in sentiments, it is so dangerously easy to handle. Half a century has been enough for you to master this machine; and there are men among you, whose fondness for it exceeds their love for the living ideals which were born with the birth of your nation and nursed in your centuries. It is like a child who in the excitement of his play imagines he likes his playthings better than his mother. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Creation and destruction are one, to the eyes who can see beauty.
And the greatest praise to India is this: not only are her people beautiful; not only are her daily life and cult beautiful; but, in the midst of the utilitarian, humanitarian, dogmatic world of the present day, she keeps on proclaiming the outstanding value of Beauty for the sake of Beauty, through her very conception of Godhead, of religion and of life. ~ Savitri Devi

However senior or accomplished, they were not allowed into the college's senior common room but instead had to take their meals in a more utilitarian chamber ~ Bill Bryson

The ability to expend energy, especially in the form of other people's labour, in non-utilitarian ways, is the most basic and universally understood symbol of power. ~ Bruce G. Trigger

Books were not quite an escape for me. And they were never my friends. They were so much more than that - utilitarian and unbreakable. They were my armor, my wall against the world. ~ Annika Martin

No word meaning "art" occurs in Aivilik, nor does "artist": there are only people. Nor is any distinction made between utilitarian and decorative objects. The Aivilik say simply, "A man should do all things properly." ~ Edmund Snow Carpenter

These shirts are perfectly serviceable."
I rolled my eyes. "Serviceable? Anyan, I get it that you're utilitarian. If we were in the old country you'd write odes to factories. You'd sing the praises of the communal farm while you gnawed on a perfectly 'serviceable' radish. But this is the new millennium. In America. Buy a button-up. ~ Nicole Peeler

I do all the cooking in our family. I'm a utilitarian cook, rather than an adventurous one - I only have about 15 recipes in my repertoire that I rotate - but I love being able to go down to the river and catch a 30 lb. salmon, then grill it on the barbecue. ~ Patrick Duffy

Of love and my parents, there is little to be written; their relationship to their children was utilitarian. We were fed and housed and dressed and outfitted with more cash than our associates and that was all. We were also vaguely taught certain vague absolutes: that we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone... ~ Lorraine Hansberry

The elimination of horrible disease, the increase of the quality of lives (for humans and for animals) achieved through research using animals is so incalculably great that the argument of these critics, systematically pursued, establishes not their conclusion but its reverse: to refrain from using animals in biomedical research is, on utilitarian grounds, morally wrong. ~ Carl Cohen

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize. ~ Aristotle.

A cheap, utilitarian clock hung on the wall; its secondhand clicked inconsistently - slow, fast, fast, slow - as if it were spitting out Morse code. ~ Anonymous

I absolutely consider fashion a form of art. Of course, there is some fashion that is not art at all - it's utilitarian, made for the purpose of covering up. And there are a lot of people out there who put a lot of effort into looking awful. But there are also people putting the same amount of energy into making bad art. ~ Iris Apfel

To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even in grade school the distinction eluded me. I remember how full of hope I was sitting in first-period home room listening to the teacher divide up our activities into purposeful sections. I got a grip on her process, at last, by picturing it in the following way: A cow stands in clover. When she is milked, that is her work; when she is merely eating, that is her play. But the problem lay, then as now, in the realization that, in any case, she is standing in clover. Not a handsome or elegant analogy, but it approximates for me the habit of reading - standing in a world of clover, the eating of which is occasionally utilitarian, usually nourishing, because that's what one does ~ Toni Morrison

I'm always hearing music in terms of what I can take out of it, and I think I've always listened like that. I have a hard time just listening for pleasure. I'm much less about instinct, and more of a utilitarian listener. ~ Sufjan Stevens

It is a remarkable fact that the people who do things by hand still find time to add to their work some elaboration of mere beauty which makes it a joy to look on, while our machine-made tools, which could do so at much less cost, are too utilitarian to afford any ornament. It used to give me daily pleasure in Teheran to see the sacks in which refuse is carried off the streets woven with a blue and red decorative pattern: but can one imagine a borough council in Leeds or Birmingham expressing a delicate fancy of this kind? Beauty, according to these, is what one buys for the museum: pots and pans, taps and door-handles, though one has to look at them twenty times a day, have no call to be beautiful. So we impoverish our souls and keep our lovely things for rare occasions, even as our lovely thoughts - wasting the most of life in pondering domestic molehills or the Stock Exchange, among objects as ugly as the less attractive forms of sin. ~ Freya Stark

It is the age of numbers, isn't it? So we are numbers and the Elbees are words. We are mathemathics and they are poetry. We are winning and they are losing; and so of course they're afraid of us, it's like a struggle inside human nature itself, between what's mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that loves and dreams. We all fear that the cold machine-like thing in human nature will destroy our magic and song. ~ Salman Rushdie

To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do what will have the best consequences for all of those affected. ~ Peter Singer

He wrote arguments for and against life; he began to think the slowest and most painful form of suicide was living, running the whole decathlon of suffering, no breather or bottled water. Fear of dying was irrational. Death was utilitarian. Decrease in net resource consumption and planetary suffering. Increase in net comedy. There was no afterlife but there was a right-before-death, and medical research said it was loopy and nice, all white lights and gentle voices. With booze it wasn't even scary. Some people with terrible lives didn't kill themselves, but that didn't mean they shouldn't. Most people weren't alive and didn't mind. You couldn't regret it. ~ Tony Tulathimutte

It will be the mother of all telescopes, and you can bet it will do for astronomy what genome sequencing is doing for biology. The clumsy, if utilitarian, name of this mirrored monster is Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST. You can't use it yet, but a peak in the Chilean Andes has been decapitated to provide a level spot for placement. ~ Seth Shostak

The depressing majority of comics seem to be about violence of one sort or another, [...] And I just don't enjoy violence. I can see that narratively it is often a powerful spike in a story, but I certainly don't want to dwell on it. I don't want it in my real life, I don't find violence entertaining in and of itself, or exciting, or funny.

But sex is happily part of most people's lives, and crosses the mind most days, I would say, even if it's just watching your partner get out of bed in the morning. [...] Most pornography is pretty awful. I mean, it does the job at the most utilitarian level, but it rarely excites other areas of the mind, or the eye. It's repetitive, bland and often a bit silly. I was interested in trying to do something that has an aesthetic beauty to it if possible, and something that tickles the intellect as well as the more basic areas of the mind. Maybe that's not possible, and as soon as you start to think too much, it stops working as pornography. I don't think so, but I guess it's in the eye and mind of the viewer. ~ Dave McKean

I think that in a lot of readers' minds the essay is a lot more utilitarian than it is art. ~ John D'Agata

Childhood is not merely basic training for utilitarian adulthood. It should have some claims upon our mercy, not for its future value to the economic interests of competitive societies but for its present value as a perishable piece of life itself. ~ Jonathan Kozol

Childhood ought to have at least a few entitlements that aren't entangled with utilitarian considerations. One of them should be the right to a degree of unencumbered satisfaction in the sheer delight and goodness of existence in itself. ~ Jonathan Kozol

There is danger in speaking so generally about "liberalism," a danger that has often plagued feminist debates. "Liberalism" is not a single position but a family of positions; Kantian liberalism is profoundly different from classical Utilitarian liberalism, and both of these from the Utilitarianism currently dominant in neoclassical economics. ~ Martha C. Nussbaum

His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism. ~ Andrew Pettegree

By placing all our focus on receiving God's blessings and gifts, we behave just like the arrogant young man in the story [Parable of the Prodigal Son] - we value what God can do for us but not God himself. We seek a relationship with God as a utilitarian means to an end. And although we may praise him with our words, our hearts are set on what we hope to get from him. We become jerks cloaked in religiosity. ~ Skye Jethani

But what is [the] quality of originality? It is very hard to define or specify. Indeed, to define originality would in itself be a contradiction, since whatever action can be defined in this way must evidently henceforth be unoriginal. Perhaps, then, it will be best to hint at it obliquely and by indirection, rather than to try to assert positively what it is.

One prerequisite for originality is clearly that a person shall not be inclined to impose his preconceptions on the fact as he sees it. Rather, he must be able to learn something new, even if this means that the ideas and notions that are comfortable or dear to him may be overturned.

But the ability to learn in this way is a principle common to the whole of humanity. Thus it is well known that a child learns to walk, to talk, and to know his way around the world just by trying something out and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind of lost paradise. As the child grows older, however, learning takes on a narrower meaning. In school, he learns by repetition to accumulate knowledge, so as to please the teacher and pass examinations. At work, he learns in a similar way, so as to make a living, or for some other utilitarian purpose, and not mainly for t ~ David Bohm

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Somebody who eats twice as much factory-farmed products as he or she needs to is clearly doing twice as much damage to the planet. From a utilitarian point of view, that's twice as bad. ~ Peter Singer

The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody. The criterion of "truth," they say, is not agreement with reality, but agreement with the spirit of a race or nation or class - that is, racial, national or utilitarian. Pushing to their limits the biological, pragmatist, activist theories of truth, the official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes deny the inherent value of thought. For them thought is not a light but a weapon: its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is, but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us towards what is not. Such being the case, myth is better than science and rhetoric that works on the passions preferable to proof that appeals to the intellect. ~ Alexandre Koyré

Can faith in God be free of ulterior motives and interests? Can there be such a thing at all? Is there something like pure religion that does not act from fear of punishment and that is not intent on reward? Or is religion always a deal, a transaction where people expect to reap well-being, fortunes here and beyond, health, wealth, and affirmation and enter into certain commitments as a result?
... the intent of Satan is to unmask religion. Piety, faith, and trust in God are all utilitarian aspects that the enlightened Satan sees through. They stand and fall with the expectation of reward, of a corresponding favor returned. Joh's friends are of the same opinion: suffering is to he understood only as just punishment. ~ Dorothee Solle

The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it's been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built. As a result, your average shopper has only to spend ten minutes inside to be reduced to a state of quiet desperation. Primark has the right idea, being right by the entrance so that fleeing punters would grab the closest approximation to whatever it was they wanted before running screaming into the night. I'm ~ Ben Aaronovitch

No utilitarian philosophy explains a snow crystal, no doctrine of use or disuse. Water has merely leapt out of vapor and thin nothingness in the night sky to array itself in form. There is no logical reason for the existence of a snow-flake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains - if anything contains - the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves. ~ Loren Eiseley

The manager comes to see all relationships with others by a strict utilitarian calculus and, insofar as he dares, breaks friendships and alliances accordingly. ~ Robert Jackall

The nineteenth century, utilitarian throughout, set up a utilitarian interpretation of the phenomenon of life which has come down to us and may still be considered as the commonplace of everyday thinking ... An innate blindness seems to have closed the eyes of this epoch to all but those facts which show life as a phenomenon of utility ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it. ~ David Orr

There are six canons of conservative thought:

1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist," says Keith Feiling: "he knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.

2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."

3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.

4) P ~ Russell Kirk

From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour. Aviators have personified national ideals, from French elan to Soviet party discipline. They've inspired lust and admiration. They've turned sunglasses and short, utilitarian leather jackets into fashion statements. ~ Virginia Postrel

The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. ~ Wyndham Lewis

My friend Chip Ward speaks of "the tyranny of the quantifiable," of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency over enjoyment and quality; the utilitarian over the mysteries and meanings that are of greater use to our survival and to more than our survival, to lives that have some purpose and value that survive beyond us to make a civilization worth having. ~ Rebecca Solnit

In our hurry of utilitarian progress, we have either forgotten the Indian altogether, or looked upon him only in a business point of view, as we do almost everything else; as a thriftless, treacherous, drunken fellow, who knows just enough to be troublesome, and who must be cajoled or forced into leaving his hunting-grounds for the occupation of very orderly and virtuous white people, who sell him gunpowder and whiskey, but send him now and then a missionary to teach him that it is wrong to get drunk and murder his neighbor. ~ Mary H. Eastman

They will speak of things that are spiritual and beautiful and of things that are practical and utilitarian; they will mix up angels and engines, sunsets and spark plugs, fraternity and frequencies in one all-encompassing comradeship of interests that makes for the best and most lasting kind of friendship any man can have. ~ Percy Knauth

At the same time, he expressed accurately and powerfully the state of mind of the countless underground fighters dying in the battle against Nazism. Why did they throw their lives into the scale? Why did they accept tor­ture and death? They had no point of support like the Fuhrer for the Germans or the New Faith for the Communists. It is doubtful whether most of them believed in Christ. It could only have been loyalty, loyalty to something called fatherland or honor, but something stronger than any name. In one of his stories, a young boy, tortured by the police and knowing that he will be shot, gives the name of his friend because he is afraid to die alone. They meet before the firing squad, and the betrayed forgives his betrayer. This forgiveness cannot be justified by any utilitarian ethic; there is no reason to forgive traitors. Had this story been written by a Soviet author, the betrayed would have turned away with disdain from the man who had succumbed to base weakness. ~ Czesław Miłosz

A street turned off at right angles, descending, and became a dirt road. On either hand the land dropped more sharply; a broad flat dotted with small cabins whose weathered roofs were on a level with the crown of the road. They were set in small grassless plots littered with broken things, bricks, planks, crockery, things of a once utilitarian value. What growth there was consisted of rank weeds and the trees were mulberries and locusts and sycamores
trees that partook also of the foul desiccation which surrounded the houses; trees whose very burgeoning seemed to be the sad and stubborn remnant of September, as if even spring had passed them by, leaving them to feed upon the rich and unmistakable smell of negroes in which they grew. ~ William Faulkner

It is fortunate that molecular synthesis also serves the utilitarian function of producing quantities of rare or novel substances which satisfy human needs, especially with regard to health, and the scientific function of stimulating research and education throughout the whole discipline of chemistry. ~ Elias James Corey

Democracy is essentially a means, a utilitarian device for safeguarding internal peace and individual freedom. As such it is by no means infallible or certain. Nor must we forget that there has often been much more cultural and spiritual freedom under an autocratic rule than under some democracies and it is at least conceivable that under the government of a very homogeneous and doctrinaire majority democratic government might be as oppressive as the worst dictatorship. ~ Friedrich Hayek

I'm a Utilitarian, so I don't see the rule against lying as absolute; it's always subject to some overriding utility which may prevent its exercise. ~ Peter Singer

The Copse at Hurstbourne is one of those fancy-sounding titles for a brand-new tract of condominiums on the outskirts of town. 'Copse' as in 'a thicket of small trees.' 'Hurst' as in 'hillock, knoll, or mound.' And 'bourne' as in 'brook or stream.' All of these geological and botanical wonders did seem to conjoin within the twenty parcels of the development, but it was hard to understand why it couldn't have just been called Shady Acres, which is what it was. Apparently people aren't willing to pay a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a home that doesn't sound like it's part of an Anglo-Saxon land grant. These often quite utilitarian dwellings are never named after Jews or Mexicans. Try marketing Rancho Feinstein if you want to lose money in a hurry. Or Paco Sanchez Park. Middle-class Americans aspire to tone, which is equated, absurdly, with the British gentry. ~ Sue Grafton