Top 175 Nonsense Quotes

I had been brought up in the law and had this sort of instinct that international law operates and was there to protect principles and not to be the plaything of power and might – which I now know, of course, to be an absolute nonsense. International law should be spelled l-o-r-e.

Look, I think the notion that there’s a dogma or doctrine of foreign policy that gives you a textbook recipe for how to react to all situations is really nonsense.

I’m different than another person who wants to lay back and do nothing for rest of the life and talk nonsense on ESPN… I will not do that. I want to achieve something else.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense.

I really don’t have time for nonsense.

Bicycles should not be insured or registered, and cycling proficiency should not be subject to a test. That’s just weak-kneed nonsense from people who believe the world can be cured with paperwork.

Cable news is more titillating to talk about who’s up and who’s down and all that nonsense as opposed to what’s actually done.

I don’t usually get star struck, but I met Sir Paul McCartney randomly on Sunset Boulevard a few years ago, and I lost it! I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t think, and I didn’t know how to speak. It was crazy. He was nice enough to talk to my family and me for 10 minutes, but I remember babbling away about nonsense.

My father‘s parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.

People who run environmental groups and things like that, who have to listen to all kinds of nonsense and keep their tempers, are very diplomatic and very inclusive.

People who go to Oxford and Cambridge are often unproductive. What am I saying? This is nonsense. No, sometimes they get so competitive that, unless they’re going to be Pulitzer prize-winning, they can’t get off their backside.

I’m more scared of parking by a parking meter than vampires because one of them is real and adversely affects my life and results in a $35 fine, and one is nonsense.

The way I see it is that all the ol’ guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn’t be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn’t be Chinese or Japanese.

Americans are raised to believe that anything is possible in America if you are pure of heart and willing to work hard, which is nonsense, and that anyone can become president, which is even more foolish, and that free markets always make the right decision, which is nuts.

The Left has pushed immorality to the point we have so-called ‘same-sex marriage’ and ‘transgender‘ nonsense trampling the rights of Christians.

If a doctor said you had stomach cancer, would you consult Rush Limbaugh for a second opinion? Of course, that sounds like nonsense, but many Americans have no qualms about listening to political commentators and untrained activists when it comes to even more complex scientific questions.

That which, perhaps, hears more nonsense than anything in the world, is a picture in a museum.

It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities.

The modern stuff, I can take it or leave it. I like its danceability, but the DJs talk a lot of nonsense.

It’s as if to be interesting, you had to be depressed and messy, but that’s complete nonsense.

I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.

Till now poets were privileged to insert a certain proportion of nonsense – very far in excess of one-half of one per cent – into their otherwise sober documents.

Maths is fundamentally a different process in education than it is in the real world. There is an insistence that we do maths by hand when most of it is done by computers. The idea that you have to do everything by hand before you can operate a computer is nonsense.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Nonsense and beauty have close connections.

One thing I detest most about the financial press is the lack of accountability. All sorts of nonsense is said without penalty.

I have a cup of tea in my hand at all times. I have about 10 a day. I don’t go for this hipster coffee nonsense. No flat whites for me!

It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.

If we allow responsible management of our forests and end the nonsense litigation from radical environmental groups, we can get our timber mills up and running, reduce the risk of wildfires, and ensure healthier forests and cleaner air.

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.

If you’re 90 and look good in a mini-skirt, go for it. What is ‘age appropriate‘? Such nonsense. My mother lived to 106, so what’s middle-age? Seventy is the new 50.

Most talk about ‘super-geniuses’ is nonsense. I have found that when ‘stars‘ drop out, successors are usually at hand to fill their places, and the successors are merely men who have learned by application and self-discipline to get full production from an average, normal brain.

There’s no such thing as The Method. The term ‘method-acting’ is so much nonsense. There are many methods, many techniques.

Just because ‘Mulk’ addresses some uncomfortable truths, trolls are having a field day. They say that the film has been funded by Dawood because that’s the easiest way to malign it. But I am not affected by such nonsense.

Everybody thinks I wear fake tan but I hate fake tan! Never been able to get on with it. I’m always linked to different fake tan brands and it’s nonsense because I’ve probably had three fake tans in my life.

If you think about it, 534 members of the U.S. Congress cannot all be religious. That’s just statistical nonsense. Many of them are quite well-educated.

You can’t allow other people to put a price on what you do, otherwise you don’t consider what you do to have any value at all, and that’s nonsense.

Rush Limbaugh, we expect nonsense from him. But the Vatican, that’s another story. When the Vatican is so threatened that it launches attacks on nuns, well, you know what they say in politics, a hit dog hollers.

When people work together, they have no time for nonsense.

The floor of Christendom and elsewhere is littered with wrecks made by old prophets. God won’t stand nonsense from any man. Every man has to choose between Christ and Barabbas, and every Christian between God and some old prophet.

Claiming that solid rockets are necessary for a heavy-lift launcher is obvious nonsense.

The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we’re a continent and the world falls away after us. And it’s just nonsense.

I don’t get into these petty things, Kentucky–Louisville. To me, it’s nonsense… There will be people at Kentucky that will have a nervous breakdown if they lose to us… They’ve got to put the fences up on bridges. There will be people consumed by Louisville.

As children know, there’s lots of fun in nonsense. We never stop benefiting from staying flexible, open and responsive, even in the midst of confusion.

There’s a feeling that strength is determined by the size of a union. That clearly is nonsense.

Everyone says you’ve got to do a foundation and legal structure to finance social change. What nonsense!

English wine is nonsense. They are over-priced and not very good.

I am not in any way a conspiracy theorist and have no time for such nonsense.

I don’t have any expensive habits. I’m not a car collector or any of that nonsense. But I’d love to be incredibly wealthy for no reason at all.

I run a taxpayer group – the most powerful guy in D.C., nonsense. OK? There are buildings with thousands of people in them, all lobbying for more spending and higher levels of spending and more government commitments. And there are a handful – a handful of groups that fight for less spending.

I wish I’d walked out of ‘The Tourist‘ with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. I said to the missus after two minutes, ‘He’s her husband.’ An hour and a half’s worth of nonsense later, the big twist at the end is… he’s her husband.

On the other hand, all kinds of adventurous schemes to add security checkpoints to subway and bus systems have been circulating since the London attacks. This is nonsense. No one can guaranty 100 percent security.

I think modern medicine has become like a prophet offering a life free of pain. It is nonsense. The only thing I know that truly heals people is unconditional love.

There’s so much nonsense tossed around about L.A. and how horrible it is and ‘don’t go out there’ and all that stuff. So I went out to L.A. and I was pleasantly surprised.

Imagine maintaining 70 brands in a digital world – it is a nonsense. It is better to focus on a fewer, more distinct brands.

I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.

The popular image that Hollywood is ruined by difficult prima donna actors is nonsense. They’re certainly very nice to directors. I can’t say the same about producers, who I found difficult, paranoid, and certifiably insane, mostly.

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

Your life changes after the limelight is on you. Sometimes, it is easy to get caught up in the nonsense.

Sometimes the world seems like a big hole. You spend all your life shouting down it and all you hear are echoes of some idiot yelling nonsense down a hole.

People used to believe only a professional could do tiling or install track lighting. That’s utter nonsense.

Normally during the week between Christmas and New Year I’m slumped in a chair in Birmingham, eating, farting and spouting total nonsense.

Since ‘The Office,’ everyone has this idea that comedy is only good if it reflects the way people really speak. But that’s nonsense – and it’s a problem unique to comedy.

A lot of what I do – I have to try and make sense of things before I can make nonsense of them.

Hope unbelieved is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed.

Buddhas don’t practice nonsense.

Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate them!

I only like non-fiction. After 30 pages of fiction, I think: what nonsense are they trying to write.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.

Any acceleration constitutes progress, Miss Glory. Nature had no understanding of the modern rate of work. From a technical standpoint the whole of childhood is pure nonsense. Simply wasted time. An untenable waste of time.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

We have all been told that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I have long thought this is nonsense.

I’d prefer no practices and just Saturday, Sunday. Just qualify Saturday morning, race Saturday afternoon, and race again Sunday. Less laps of nonsense and more laps of meaningful business.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

All my indispositions have their source in my mind. It is when I am restless and unhappy that I become susceptible of cold, damp, heats, and such nonsense.

My sisters and my mum taught me how to be a woman: the way they carry themselves, the way they talk to people, the way they know how to put their foot down. They’re not having any nonsense from no one. I can see traces of that in me.

People are very quick to go, ‘What is this nonsense?’ if they’ve not seen something before and it’s a bit different.

I lived a very isolated life. When you start at 20, you have a lot of nonsense to work out of your system.

The evolution of sense is, in a sense, the evolution of nonsense.

There’s a certain libertarian right-wing view that there should be no FDA, that people can decide for themselves whether medicines are safe and effective. That’s nonsense. Most people don’t have the expertise or the resources to mount a proper study to find out whether a treatment is safe or effective.

I’m an agnostic in the truest sense of the word. I think about these things – I grew up Roman Catholic, I’ve been interested in Hinduism, in Eastern religions, but I’m not dedicated to anything – I go through periods where I think maybe it’s all nonsense; maybe it’s ‘The Matrix…’ I’m open to various ideas.

Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey – it’s unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species.

Something is going to have to give because, if it doesn’t, not only will we get Jacob Rees-Mogg as our prime minister, we will get a devastating hard Brexit which will cause huge damage to our economy for generations to come. And I am not prepared to sit by any longer and put up with this nonsense.

It’s a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things.

Criticism is nonsense. TV shows and newspapers just want to fill the space.

I love boating – not flash, ‘noisy go fast‘ nonsense, but the general relaxation of it. My wife and I love to get in our little Wellcraft and go as far out to sea as we can, hopefully beyond land. That is the best thing you can ever do. It clears your psyche.

People are asking that question again if Max is being too tough on his equipment, but that’s complete nonsense. He can’t overdrive, he can’t break the material. We all know what it is: it’s just the equipment that isn’t good enough.

A lot of things the press say are nonsense.

Don’t talk to me about a man’s being able to talk sense; everyone can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?

I planted trees but the idea that you can offset carbon is nonsense – planting trees is more a way of acknowledging harm and apologising.

A fool can never be made to question his own wisdom. And George Groves is very foolish. He believes his own nonsense. He cannot stay with me for 12 rounds. He’s not tough enough.

On the Left, the best and brightest go into politics – Barack Obama is the epitome of the perfect leftist. On the Right, the best and brightest go make money. Very few conservatives want to endure all the nonsense you have to put up with to run for office.

It’s not as if I never used to get under pressure. That is nonsense. It’s just that my looks gave an appearance, and people didn’t think I was tense.

The trick to my writing, it turned out, was doing so exclusively in bed. The minute I even dared to discipline myself and write at the desk, I produced mounds of nonsense. Yet, sitting in bed, I wrote easily, effortlessly, fluidly. I became the master of perfect indiscipline.

I just don’t stand for any nonsense.

The way I think of it, economics and ecology occupy two intellectual silos, isolated from each other. Even when they do take each other into consideration, it’s not uncommon for ecologists to spout absolute nonsense about economics, and vice versa.

In the weeks after 9/11, out of the pain and the fear there arose also grace and gratitude, eruptions of intense kindness that occurred everywhere, a sharp resolve to just be better, bigger, to shed the nonsense, rise to the occasion.

Hersh’s account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts, and simple common sense.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense.

I won’t hold any illusions of changing the world or any such nonsense. But maybe, just maybe, I’m helping someone else change his or her life a little bit for the better, even if it just means giving someone a magical place in which to hide.

If I can, in any way, give people the courage to say, ‘Actually, no, the nonsense stops right here,’ then I want to be a part of doing that. Especially if that means that our folks will be more free.

I don’t believe in casual dating. I think that’s nonsense.

I did not want to reject religion as nonsense because life seemed to have no ultimate purpose without it, and most of the good people I knew were Christians.

To appreciate nonsense requires a serious interest in life.

In recent years there’s been a lot of philosophical theorising about how important magic is, and how it takes us back to a childlike state of astonishment. I think all this is just nonsense. Magic isn’t meaningful or important other than how you’re performing it in that moment.

Sometimes, I read that I’m this leftwing comic who just goes on about politics the whole time. Other times, I read that it’s just surreal nonsense about crisps. It’s both of those.

When in doubt, make no sense. No sense is good. And nonsense is good.

Ive found my way into a life surrounded by food people, which often leads to intensely passionate conversations about nonsense: deep-dives on devils food cake, monologues on jammy eggs, and proclamations of love addressed to Popeyes fried chicken sandwich.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.

Strangely enough, I don’t mention my sister too much in my columns because she nags me and says, ‘Don’t make me look foolish. Don’t write nonsense about me. Don’t make jokes about me.’

If any single human being is responsible for all this nonsense I’ve done with my life, it’s Ray Harryhausen… In ‘Kubo,’ you can see some of his influence throughout.

Here’s what we must do: Completely reform the vetting process for immigrants and foreign visitors. Change the screening process. Come up with a new visa-application review process. Stop this nonsense of marriage-visa fraud. And in the meantime, seal the borders.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

Now, I have a confession to make. I hate warm-ups with a passion. Worst part of the whole day. Nonsense, they are.

Since turning 40 I happily moisturise – I have what’s called a regime – but I’m always in two minds because I have no idea if I’m completely wasting my money. They feel nice when they are on but I can’t stop wondering, ‘Am I succumbing to the same nonsense I try to fight against in other areas?’

You can get too close as a team. You need time away from each other. You change in the same dressing room, you play on the same cricket field, you stay in the same hotel, you travel in the same planes and buses. C’mon – this business of everyone holding hands and being pally is nonsense.

I do like taking stuff seriously that a lot of people look at as nonsense. I enjoy the insanity of that. And I like the commitment that is needed for that.

The question of whether women should be made bishops once they had been ordained is absolutely pivotal. It seems to me absolute nonsense for women to be ordained to the priesthood but not to the episcopacy because the two are inextricably linked.

The game has changed. What’s going on now is nonsense. You have guys complaining about not being paid.

The first thing that we need to say is that God is grieving, too. Uh, a lot of people try to make it sound like ‘well everything that happens is God’s will.’ That’s nonsense. God allows everything, but God does not choose everything.

Whenever anyone challenges anything, the powers that be try to paint them as extremists or radicals or whatever. And I think that’s actually nonsense.

To assume that any couple goes without arguing is just nonsense.

I’ve realised that as long as the youth has the ability to use social media, and their voice is there, people can actually cut through the nonsense and see what’s really going on.

I think the must-have power qualities for a female or male power leader are really the ability to focus, to work hard, to be extremely goal oriented and to not let the noise and the nonsense interfere with your mission – what you really feel you want to do with your career and your life.

The pursuit of beauty is much more dangerous nonsense than the pursuit of truth or goodness, because it affords a stronger temptation to the ego.

I’m a quick wit, straight to the point, no nonsense.

It is nonsense to say that Germans are unable to change.

My father was an entomologist who believed in continental drift. In the early ’50s, that was regarded as nonsense. It was in the mid-’50s that it came back. Someone had thought of it 30 or 40 years earlier named Alfred Wegener, and he never got to see it come back.

I couldn’t tell you what the standing is in radio, I’m in the streaming world. I’m in the podcasting world. Radio just sounds archaic almost. It’s a never-ending battle. I’m so glad I’m retired so I don’t have to see the nonsense.

I have no interest in Shakespeare and all that British nonsense… I just wanted to get famous and all the rest is hogwash.

Some have argued that the United States was designed to block majority rule; to be a ‘republic, not a democracy.’ This is ahistorical nonsense.

I’ve become addicted to playing poker because you’re constantly faced with confusion, and winning is trying to make sense out of nonsense.

I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists’ language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.

What we can do is provide the tools, through our educational system, for people to be able to tell sense from nonsense. These tools include the scientific method, skeptical questioning, empirical evidence, verifying sources, etc.

They were saying computers deal with numbers. This was absolutely nonsense. Computers deal with arbitrary information of any kind.

I’m a hip-hop dancer, but when I’m in my room it turns into this lyrical nonsense, and I listen to Phil Wickham and India Arie, who has the most precious songs.

While I’d been in school, I had a nagging thought that it’d be so much easier to quit all this higher education nonsense and get a full-time job at wages low enough to still qualify for government assistance.

Gibberish rap is – I freestyle all the time, just hangin’ out with friends. And sometimes when I’m freestyling, I’ll lose my flow, you know, but I’ll still wanna – I don’t wanna just stop rapping because I lose my flow. So I’ll just put in nonsense words till I can bring in regular words again.

In South Africa, success never presented the problems that it presents in New York. In New York, if you happen to be the flavor of the month, a lot of nonsense comes with it into your life.

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that.

A lot of times, you’re interacting with people for whom you’re one of the very few veterans that they’ve met or had a lot of interactions with, and there’s a temptation for you to feel like you can pontificate about what the experience was or what it meant, and that leads to a lot of nonsense.

The idea that it’s only the young or people who’ve grown up with a technology who can appreciate it. Complete nonsense!

I don’t really believe in the mystery of cinematography – what happens in the camera is what the cinematographers create and all that nonsense – I want the director to see what I’m trying to do.

To assert, as some have, that illegal immigrants do not depress wages because they do the jobs Americans refuse is the kind of nonsense economists speak when they strain to be counterintuitive. It is similar to saying that cheap imports do not hold down prices.

In the end the recrudescence of racism on the right is conservatism‘s problem to solve, and it has to be solved independently of whatever liberals and leftists happen to be saying. But the task of solving it still gets a little harder with every nonsense charge or bad-faith accusation.

My family will occasionally take the mick out of the way I move and I always think Thats nonsense, I move like a gazelle: smoothly and swiftly and there is strength and glamour in the way I move. Then you see it on TV and they repeatedly show you bobbing off to do some task and you just look like a marionette.

Most theatre is still really bad. It has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives. Theatre about theatre is the most awful, terminal nonsense.

Hardcore wrestling like CZW is just nonsense. There’s no story there. You’ve got guys jumping off of houses onto barb wired tables, and that’s it. They don’t know how to work. CZW is trash.

Women all think that if a guy likes you he will come and talk to you. That’s nonsense – ‘actually the opposite is true. The more attractive he finds you, the less likely it is he’ll talk to you.

It is all nonsense, to be sure; and so much the greater nonsense inasmuch as the true interpretation of many dreams – not by any means of all dreams – moves, it may be said, in the opposite direction to the method of psycho-analysis.

I certainly wasn’t a fan of Thatcher‘s politics. People liked to label us as children of Thatcher. What nonsense. The real children of Thatcher came in the 1990s, and had no interest in politics. The Oasis, Britpop scene.

If the works of Jesus were so much more wonderful than man could perform as to deserve to be called miracles, was it not nonsense to caution his disciples so strongly against being deluded by the works of others?

There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.

If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.

As soon as I get the chance, I’ll be back spouting nonsense on the microphone.

I detest that saying ‘Everything happens for a reason’; it’s nonsense.

I don’t have much patience for people who are self-conscious about the act of eating, and it irritates me when someone denies themselves the pleasure of a bloody hunk of steak or a pungent French cheese because of some outdated nonsense about what’s appropriate or attractive.

To deny that human beings are filled with anti-social passions betrays a denial of reality and a lack of self-awareness. One has to be taught nonsense for a great many formative years to believe it.

Ending poverty calls for humility, honesty, freedom from ideology and refusal to accept cruel simplicities about anyone’s human potential. It requires listening to the wisdom and cutting the nonsense from both the Right and the Left.

I very classically would go into manic phases, which were as dangerous, if not more so, than the depressed phases, and I think I’d come up with the best ideas I ever had, and then the next day, I’d look at them and be like, ‘This is nonsense,’ because it was born out of a manic episode. What a waste of time.

I’m interested in how we can change the nature of what’s appealing in women so that all this nonsense about how we look, this obsession with Botox, dieting and cosmetic surgery, will just go away.

All this talk about inspiration and moment is nonsense.

There are a lot of laws from Europe about employing people which are absolute nonsense.

Common sense, in so far as it exists, is all for the bourgeoisie. Nonsense is the privilege of the aristocracy. The worries of the world are for the common people.

But I’ve got ideas. I keep my little notebook, I’ve always got that with me. Hopefully there’s more stuff than nonsense in there.

The great myth that many social scientists want to encourage is that there is an incompatibility between modern technology and traditional religion. This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it’s the reverse.

Usually the nonsense liberals spout is kind of cute, but in wartime their instinctive idiocy is life-threatening.

You want less of the annoying nonsense that interferes with your portfolios and more of the significant data that allow you to become a less distracted, more purposeful investor.

The Church should say, ‘I’m frightened that women will be ordained;’ that’s honest, say that. But don’t say, ‘It’s a grave sin,’ because that’s nonsense.

When I was in Switzerland, I still had the fantasy I could have saved my parents and family if I’d stayed in Germany. All nonsense. If they had not made the sacrifice to send their only child to Switzerland, I wouldn’t be alive.

Bureaucratic nonsense at airports drives me crazy.

I’m married to a nurse, and she is really, really ardent that – in screenplays or movies that I’ve worked on, that all the medical aspects be properly presented. I think that filmmakers ought to be respectful of all fields and not just be lazy and put nonsense in movies because most people won’t know the difference.

What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth?