The criminal law needs to be improved to meet new forms of crime, but to denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud, is ridiculous and unworthy of the age in which we live.
William Graham Sumner

The destroyer Cork, like the useful hero for whom it is named, will be game to the last.
Josephus Daniels

The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love.
Niccolo Machiavelli

The government's position was that we have frigates that have got a useful life until 2006. There is no necessity for us to make final decisions until 2002.
Jenny Shipley

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
Graham Greene

The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs.
Alfred P. Sloan

The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.
Aristotle

The hallway of every man's life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live.
Sean O'Casey

The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors' works have survived even in part.
Richard Stallman

The Indian Corn, or Maiz, proves the most useful Grain in the World; and had it not been for the Fruitfulness of this Species, it would have proved very difficult to have settled some of the Plantations in America.
John Lawson

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.
Emma Bonino

The little words in the Republic of Letters, like the little folks in a nation, are the most useful and significant.
Samuel Richardson

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
Antisthenes

The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency.
W. Somerset Maugham

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.
Christian Nestell Bovee

The President regards the Japanese as a brave people; but courage, though useful in time of war, is subordinate to knowledge of arts; hence, courage without such knowledge is not to be highly esteemed.
Townsend Harris

The problem of distinguishing prime numbers from composite numbers and of resolving the latter into their prime factors is known to be one of the most important and useful in arithmetic.
Carl Friedrich Gauss

The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
Karl Marx

The purpose of science is not to analyze or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it.
Edward de Bono

The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley