Trivial Quotations

There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans and the more worthy of scholarship. The smallest things in life often mean the most to people.

The stunning thing about the world as it is, is that we have a tremendously large problem in it: namely, one-third of all human deaths, 80-million every year from poverty-related causes, trivial diseases and so on, and stunningly, nobody is really paying attention to it.

The director of 'Independence Day,' 'Godzilla' and 'The Patriot' has certain attributes, all of which are given full vent in 'The Day After Tomorrow.' He's crude, stupid, slick, cornball, predictable, laughable, relentless, trivial and, the sum of all these, ridiculous. He's never made a movie you could believe and he still hasn't.

We live in an era of mind-blowing scientific discovery, virtually none of which ever makes the front page, even as every trivial twist and turn in the rococo political drama has a secure place as the lead story.

If string theory is a mistake, it's not a trivial mistake. It's a deep mistake and therefore kind of worthy.

I think the problem with the word 'happiness' is that it sounds fluffy. It sounds like something trivial that we shouldn't be concerned with.

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Our souls may lose their peace and even disturb other people's, if we are always criticizing trivial actions - which often are not real defects at all, but we construe them wrongly through our ignorance of their motives.

I never represented glam. That's the thing, you'll never see me in the front row of a fashion show. I'm uninterested in it. I find it trivial and banal and boring.

The hunting of monsters is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for those who feel bound by such trivial doctrines as law or national borders.

When you have cancer, you can define the trivial from the important very quickly.

In most organizations, change comes in only two flavors: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organization and you'll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change.

I know that campaigns can seem small, and even silly. Trivial things become big distractions. Serious issues become sound bites. And the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. If you're sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me - so am I.

A lot of what is publicized now is really pretty trivial stuff - you know, what I eat for breakfast, where I have my pedicures, questions that I just cannot for the life of me understand why someone would want to know that.

By now, you've heard endless warnings about the risk of short, trivial passwords. There's a good chance you ignore them.

We're not going to stand up and say that these 14 things make us human, ... But it's not trivial to be able to say, 'Here is an inventory of the most important differences, and now go at it and figure out which of these differences contain the signatures of what is distinctively human.'

Whether it's trivial or important, every choice has a moral aspect to it to a certain degree.

We know from Census Bureau surveys that something beyond a hundred thousand uses of guns for self-defense occur every year. We know from smaller surveys of a commercial nature that the number may be as high as two-and-a-half or three million. We don't know what the right number is, but whatever the right number is, it's not a trivial number.

This problem exists whether you use WEP or not, but it is trivial to exploit if not using WEP,

Light, trivial comedy does not appeal - it is not something I go to see.

Old age is the fourth stage. By the time one reaches this stage of his journey, he must have discovered that the joys available in this world are trivial and fleeting. He must be equipped with the higher knowledge of spiritual joy, available through delving into the inner spring of Bliss. Through his experiences, his heart must have softened and be filled with compassion. He has to be engrossed in promoting the progress of all beings without distinction. And he must be eager to share with others the knowledge he has accumulated and the benefit of his experiences.

Music is not simply an orchestration of something, but it's also not something as trivial as honesty.

Obama's people will all often complain about how trivial and silly the media is, but there's no president who's probably benefited from this sort of trivialness or superficial nature as President Obama.

I feel often that we don't have the right language to talk about emotions in disasters. Everyone is on edge, of course, but it also pulls people away from a lot of trivial anxieties and past and future concerns and gratuitous preoccupations that we have, and refocuses us in a very intense way.

I don't think it's appropriate -- except when they're very, very young -- for parents to let their kids win. If you're looking at Trivial Pursuit, maybe that means giving the parents harder questions than the children. You're still playing the game, and everyone is participating at their best level.

He knew something about everything. He was a walking encyclopedia. You couldn't play him in Trivial Pursuit. You could only try to contain him. He had not only read about everything, he had been there.

People are not impressed by watching interviewees cry. People recognize chat shows with personalities as the trivial things that they are. They're not designed to be deep. Quite frankly, people in show business don't stand up to in-depth scrutiny.

Play Trivial Pursuit with me, and you'll be astonished. I can remember every outfit I wore to every party going back to 1983.

Oracle still has not released an official patch, so it is still leaving its customers at risk. It is a trivial thing to fix. If the company is still working on it, I do not understand why.

Literally the most trivial thing gets charged to the taxpayer, (and) things that the average person would never think of trying to buy, like a $70 steak,

The assumption with Trivial Pursuit is never that one person would know all the answers, because it would be a very short game. The assumption is that one person should know half the answers.

We disclosed this to Oracle on Oct. 25 last year. Around the same time, they were alerted to another high-risk flaw that is not as serious as this one. They fixed that one in the January CPU but neglected to fix this. It's not a case of not having enough time, because the fix is trivial and the risks are severe.

We play Trivial Pursuit in the female version, rather than poker. There are six of us who are high school buddies.

To understand reality is not the same as to know about outward events. It is to perceive the essential nature of things. The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell uponThe trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

We've noticed that over time, it's the classic play patterns that really deliver on the promise that kids want. We saw that last year with Trivial Pursuit, which was the best-selling toy even in its 20th edition.

You can not foresee the results of even the most trivial act.

Twenty years from now if there is some obscure Trivial Pursuit question, I am confident I will be the answer.

The public may admire a corporation for its impressive size. Who in the United States doesn't? But when a business, however gigantic, gets smug enough to believe that it is sufficient only to match competition on trivial points instead of leading competition in valid matters, that business is becoming vulnerable to public disfavor.

Even if it's trivial things like people don't buy another pizza, this, on the margin, has an effect on the economy.

There's now an avalanche of poker books coming out. We have a reputation for putting out the very best books and we have no competitors in that respect. We're not putting out trivial books. These are like textbooks.

I used to be something of an obsessive when it came to research. When I first began writing the Thorne novels, I would drive to a set of traffic lights in the early hours of the morning to make sure you could turn left. I thought it was important to get even the most trivial details right.

The Rube Goldberg demonstrations are always well-attended on campus because it's fun to see how complicated our engineering students can make even the most trivial of actions. Sometimes their inventions work great. It is a fun exercise in semi-futility that produces a lot of camaraderie among the students who build these machines.

Pursuing petty physical beauty leads man astray; it is as calamitous as the pursuit of trivial joy.

Once you say it's okay to screen for gender, there's nothing that you can say that it's not okay to screen for whether it's eye color, hair color, trivial issues.

As a girl my temper often got out of bounds. But one day when I became angry at a friend over some trivial matter, my mother said to me, "Elizabeth, anyone who angers you conquers you.

This is not a trivial matter. From my perspective, this case demonstrates a blatant disregard for the privilege of owning a liquor license and for city ordinances designed to regulate the sale of alcohol.

This is not a trivial exercise. There were network deployment issues and various planning to do with this kind of migration. But we're now in a beta-testing phase with our select mobile users.

This illustrates the principle that unchecked authority goes astray. In this case, it's a relatively trivial infraction. But to me the point is that we need more aggressive and penetrating oversight than we have.

There's far too much time spent on trivial things, personal agendas and internal conflicts.

A television chat show is light entertainment, so it is trivial by its very nature. It is hardly the place to get people to reveal their innermost thoughts. Then it becomes sensationalism, and you lower yourself to the level of the popular newspapers.

It's kind of amazing how little of a difference it makes that we're not actually sexually attracted to each other. The longer we're in this, the more trivial it seems.

It's trivial for anybody to understand how it works, ... To modify the virus is relatively easy, and to change what the e-mail says is trivial.

For an individual consumer, the money and effort spent purchasing these products is not trivial ? as many as 12 percent of purchased products are never used and eventually discarded. By understanding why we buy products we never use, we can change our purchase and usage habits to reduce product abandonment, thereby saving money and reducing waste,

It made me realize that I'd changed what I thought was a trivial aspect of who I was but it profoundly made a difference in the way the world perceived me. That was when I thought it would be interesting to find out what goes on in that moment when someone looks at you and draws all sorts of conclusions.

Considering the risk I am about to take, I will require a minimum payment of 13 million U.S. dollars. There are many people from movie stars to athletes in the U.S. who receive tens of millions of dollars a year for their trivial contributions,

That is a judicious way of handling these charges, rather than having them played out on television, where everything gets confused and the trivial gets mixed in with other stuff that is legitimate.

It's certainly possible to write fiction that isn't trivial and isn't what people would call political, but it is very hard to figure out how, because our ordinary lives have such a strong tincture now of the whole world.

It's a mistake to equate the relative trivial size of the settlement to any indication of what click fraud actually is.

It wasn't about that other trivial stuff. This was a story about the Texas Western players, what they had to overcome. I was there, and there were a whole lot of things I didn't know when I saw the movie. The first time I ever saw them play was at the Final Four. There was no ESPN or anything like that in those days. You know that they're going to put some theatrical stuff in there. But I think it should be mandatory for kids today to watch it.

Nothing trivial should remove my president. We need to try this case, ladies and gentlemen, because you need to know who your president is,

I had a fantastic time. We hadn't played as Pink Floyd in 10 years and hadn't played with Roger in 25. The main thing was obviously the cause, but I was also pleased to get some of that personal, trivial antipathy that's been part of our lives for so long and pack that away. For several days, Roger and I went out together. I'm very pleased that we're now at a point where we can talk.

I certainly hope that we do not waste our resources, our staff time or anything dealing with such a trivial issue.

I am very pleased to announce that we were able to raise over $190,000 for Northwest Medical Teams tonight for people in the New Orleans area. A football game seems rather trivial when you consider what those folks are going through.

I don't want to suggest that the AOL division is trivial -- it's not. But it has to be put into context. We look at AOL as a small part of the pie.

The trivial round, the common task, / Would furnish all we ought to ask; / Room to deny ourselves, a road / To bring us, daily, nearer God.

These are not trivial matters. These are not partisan matters. These are matters of justice, the justice that each of you has taken a solemn oath to serve in this trial,

The Elephantine papyri - written as some of the books of the Bible are being written - is true social and legal documentation, and to historians overwhelmingly powerful and moving, even when ostensibly about trivial things.

The company does seem to be doing better already than it did any time it did during 2004, ... The lack of publicly available financials continues to be a hindrance, and that's not a trivial issue.

All that stuff is trivial to me. People lost their lives; people without home insurance lost their homes. My stuff can be replaced, because I've been blessed. Lives can't be replaced. Friends of mine are still looking for their siblings and their mothers and fathers. I don't care about my stuff.

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find ''tomorrow'' on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, ''If I had my life to live over again. ''Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

We recognize that there are no trivial occurences in life

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else - these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other cheap and trivial

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?