#futile

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. ↗

— Albert Camus

#ceaselessly #condemned #dreadful #fall #futile

When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm. ↗

— Stanley Crouch

#becomes #conclude #futile #norm #people

It would be futile to attempt to fit women into a masculine pattern of attitudes, skills and abilities and disastrous to force them to suppress their specifically female characteristics and abilities by keeping up the pretense that there are no differences between the sexes. ↗

— Arianna Huffington

#attitudes #between #characteristics #differences #disastrous

My hope is that the Chinese government will come to realise that it is futile to repress free speech, and that contrary to what they believe a regime's strength rests not its suppression of a plurality of opinions and ideas, but in its capacity and willingness to encourage them. ↗

— Ma Jian

#capacity #chinese #chinese government #come #contrary

The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile. ↗

— Alan Watts

#efforts #egos #feel #futile #his

Across the river he could see the burnt and crushed buildings of Fredericksburg, the debris piled along the streets, the scattered ruins of people's lives, lives that were changed forever. His men had done that. Not all of it, of course. The whole corps had seemed to go insane, had turned the town into some kind of violent party, a furious storm that blew out of control, and he could not stop it. The commanders had ordered the provost guards at the bridges to let no goods leave the town, nothing could be carried across the bridges, and so what the men could not keep, what they could not steal, they had just destroyed. And now, he thought, the people will return, trying to rescue some fragile piece of home, and they will find this...and they will learn something new about war, more than the quiet nightmare of leaving your home behind. They will learn that something happens to men, men who have felt no satisfaction, who have absorbed and digested defeat after bloody stupid defeat, men who up to now have done mostly what they were told to do. And when those men begin to understand that it is not anything in them, no great weakness or inferiority, but that it is the leaders, the generals and politicians who tell them what to do, that the fault is there, after a while they will stop listening. Then the beast, the collective anger, battered and bloodied, will strike out, will respond to the unending sights of horror, the deaths of friends and brothers, and it will not be fair or reasonable or just, since there is no intelligence in the beast. They will strike out at whatever presents itself, and here it was the harmless and innocent lives of the people of Fredericksburg. ↗

— Jeff Shaara

#war #anger

Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore... prove ultimately futile. ↗

— Pope John Paul II

#futile #generally #problems #prove #resolve

Every year the State will be the dog that chases its own tail... engaging in a futile attempt to close a perpetual budget gap. ↗

— Richard J. Codey

#budget #chases #close #dog #engaging

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic. ↗

— Anthony Minghella

#any #causes #civil #civil war #extract

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing. ↗

— Hilaire Belloc

#empty #fatiguing #futile #i #suppose