Misguided Efforts Quotes

A zealot is a person who, having forgotten his original purpose, redoubles his efforts.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don’t work.

I can never believe how much time and energy and money and talent and everything else is being poured into horrible ideas.

You can't throw a hook on the side of the road and expect to catch a fish in the grass.

Direction is more important than speed. You can go fast in the wrong direction.

In the life of a nation, few ideas are more dangerous than good solutions to the wrong problems.

It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.

It’s amazing how much research has gone into making some of the worst decisions.

But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor.

God save us from people who mean well.

We're often so busy cutting through the undergrowth we don't even realise we're in the wrong jungle.

Without gospel truths, man's efforts to reach his goals are like the northbound explorer who drove his dog sled feverishly northward on an ice pack that was flowing southward - only to find himself farther from his destination at the end of a hard day's journey than he had been at dawn!

I, like Don Quixote, have fought many a windmill.

When leaders carry out policies for decades that have no consequences for the stated goal and are very costly, you have to ask whether they are telling you the truth or whether the policies are for a different goal, because they are not reducing drug use.

Typically what happens is, somebody drags an idea from the past that worked in an old set of logics that they try to apply to the new one. And it doesn't work.

[Unbelievers] think they have made great efforts to get at the truth when they have spent a few hours in reading some book out of Holy Scripture, and have questioned some cleric about the truths of the faith. After that, they boast that they have searched in books and among men in vain.

We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing.

We confuse activity with progress, and that's always dangerous, especially in war.

When politicians rush to fix things, it's a sure sign that either the intended patient is dead or fully healed.

As for your high towers and monuments, there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.

You'll never find your gold on a sandy beach.

Liberals get credit for good intentions, and that's about it, because everything they do fails.

The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.

One of the classic mistakes is we think if we get closer to someone by just listening to all of their relationship woes, we're going to suddenly end up romantically involved.