1y ago

What popular quote are you tired of hearing?

Bonus points if it's usually misused/misunderstood by the people who say it

255 comments

"We only use ten percent of our brains."
People genuinely believe this and never learned where it came from.
- That and the "Alpha Male" garbage. Even the author of the study on wolves has said repeatedly that his study was totally wrong. And yet some people continue to reference it and apply it to humans when even the original study wasn't about people.
  
  People love excuses for bad behavior, no need to verify them. Sigh.
  
  I think that one is finally starting to die off, aside from the last gasps of a man in prison. It takes a while for real science to filter through to common knowledge, and I'm constantly seeing the corrections about wolves and alpha status as flawed thinking.
- Limitless was fun though.
  
  Lucy was not, though.
  
  I mean, sure, it makes a fun movie. But when people take it seriously, it stops being fun.
  
  Ooh! Isn’t that the one where the guy becomes limitless?
- I think we only use 10 percent of our hearts.
  
  A profound twist on a worn out wrong fact.
  
  I like this comment
- Where did the myth come from?
  
  It came from early on in studying the brain. A scientist said that we only understand what 10 percent of the brain does, and everyone ran with a misunderstanding of that idea.
  Neil DeGrasse Tyson explains here. https://youtube.com/shorts/E4EjYfUBEvw?si=LO3GIURgZesHjo85
  
  I thought it was something about how much is active at any given time, but it doesn't look like it's that either.
  It might be straight pulled out of thin air.
- That's only true for Elon musk. He maybe even use less.
  
  He uses more than 10%, but not of brain.
- Ha ha yeah and we only use 10% of our muscles luckily :-D
  
  I once read a documentary of what happens when someone uses 100%. It's called My Hero Academia.
- I mean, it's true for the people that use that phrase.
  
  Often times, yes!

"Everything happens for a reason"
The cancer disagrees.
- I actually love this one, because it's technically correct but not in the way people who use it mean, so you can turn it around easily.
  Yes, you did get cancer for a reason. Because you insisted on maintaining your suntan every winter. Or perhaps merely because you pissed off the wrong banana.
  
  In my case, it was through no action of my own and merely bad luck. So the only "reason" would be bad luck or a shitty all-powerful deity.
- I mean, technically it did happen for a reason. Your body hates you.
  Also, my sympathies for your condition.
  
  To be fair I've been abusing with alcohol since my late teens. So I guess we're even now.
- Children starving to death
- Or worse: "it's all part of God's plan!" every time something bad happens. "So... God's a sadist, or what? Cuz his plan is shit."
  
  Or the related one: "I'd like to thank God for coming through this surgery."
  What about the doctors, nurses, and various other staff members?
  
  God did ruin Job’s life over a bet with Satan so maybe this is less of a plan and more of a downward spiral gambling addiction

"I could care less".
Oh really? How much less?
- At least it makes sense when people say "I couldn't care less."
  
  "I tried to, I really did. But I just could not care less. I'd hit the bottom of the barrel."
- I thought that was the joke: I could care less… but I can’t even be bothered to care any less because I care so little.
  
  It's just people saying it wrong, like "bone apple tea" instead of " bon appetit". It's supposed to be "I couldn't care less". But I mean come on, these are the same people who searched for "Michael Jackson Billy's Jeans" so often on YouTube that it became a recommended search term. Lol.
- It can be interpreted as sarcasm, as in "tell me more, I could care even less."

“They’re just one bad apple” in reference to (more often than not) shitty cops, but also for most malcontents in a position of public trust. This a misappropriation of the aphorism “one bad apple spoils the bunch” which is literally saying that if there’s one bad actor in a group, the entire group is comprised.
- I think autocorrect got your "compromised".
  
  You’re goddamn right.
  
  The entire group is comprised of compromised compadres.

"Customer is always right" isn't a trump card for customers to win disputes with the staff. When it comes to matters of preference, yes, the customer is always right. Ketchup on ice cream? Great. Down jacket and shorts? Sure thing! If it makes you happy and you're paying for it then you're always right.
In most other matters though, customers are usually wrong. The idea that random people off the street know more about the products and the way a business should be run than the actual people selling said products and running said business is absolutely ridiculous.
- I think the original quote was something along the lines of, "the customer is always right, in mattera of taste". Meaning to accommodate the customers wishes, even if it's ugly or a bad idea or whatever. Like if they want to paint their house pink with green trim, let them
  
  I think it's even broader than that.
  If customers want green socks, sell green socks.
  It would be have been better said as demand is always right (not supply).

"if you can't handle me at my worst you don't deserve me at my best".
You're basically excusing bad behavior. And never taking accountability. People are wrong. Mostly when they are so blindly following some perception of greatness rather than caring for those around you.
- Anyone who feels the need to say this is usually really, really bad at their worst, and just okay-ish at their best. They just need a reason why it's everyone else's fault nobody can put up with them.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
That is not the definition of insanity
- Yeah, isn't it like practicing? You're not very good at something so you practice over and over and over and hopefully when you're done you do it better... You know different than when you started.
  
  You know different than when you started.
  Try again
- this quote works very well on computers who run instructions pretty consistent.
  any larger/ life-level scope and it falls apart from niche cases.
  
  Any software engineer you care to ask will tell you about situations in which doing the same thing has led to vastly different results.
  
  *on deterministic computers.
  Technically, even then doing the same can lead to different results, if nondeterministic events play a role and the different aspects of the software or system may contain bugs. For example mutlithreaded applications where the scheduler can passively influence the outcome of an operation. In one run it fails, in another it doesn't. A nightmare to debug.
- OH! I forgot about that one. I have hated it since I was a kid.

"Survival of the fittest" when used to indicate the stongest should survive. Instead of the one best suited for (fitting) the situation.
- Both wrong. Survival of the barely adequate.
  
  We are all minimal viable products on this blessed day
  
  Welcome to Costco. I love you.

do or do not, there is no try
Fuck you. That was meant for a Jedi master not your fucking IT systems admin
- I think you're misunderstanding it. Do what you do, you're going to break something anyways just don't half-ass it. Just like there's a graveyard behind every doctor, there's a pile of mistakes behind every sysadmin.
  
  No, it's not about caring or not about the consequences.
  The ideea is to do something, anything with full commitment, do it as you know you're going to be successful. This way you give 100% and you have the best chances to succeed.
  If you just try something then from the start your mentally taking in consideration the possibility of failure and you're preparing for that scenario and searching for the signs of it, which means you're not 100% invested in the success of the task itself so the chances of success are smaller.

Whenever "woke" is brought up.
Please give me your definition of woke, because so far it's been different for everyone I've talked to.
- My baby was too woke last night and kept me up.
  
  Baby is woke AF, just Channel that energy to fight the right fights.
- Imo woke means aware
  
  That's what it should mean, but it usually implies political awareness specifically and has been hijacked by several minority groups and their allies to imply that they are wholly in support of whatever the latest minority issue is.
  You haven't heard of lgbtbbqx+? I have because I'm woke!
- I like this Little Joel video about how conservatives use "woke"

Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Especially when used by people claiming to have done just that.
- Especially when you consider that it was coined to refer to literally impossible action. It's not meant to be about self-reliance or whatever, it's something that cannot be done.
  
  THIS! A million times this!! It's literally implying the opposite of their intent in that you have to have someone else HELP YOU because you OBVIOUSLY can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps!
  One way to use this phrase correctly would be "No one can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, we all need some help along the way."!

"Agree to disagree." No, dipshit, you're just wrong.
I do not agree to disagree, because we're not arguing about opinions. Your belief is simply, objectively incorrect. Or mine is, which is something that I would be willing to accept. If I were wrong, you'd be able to convince me that I'm wrong. We can keep going until one of us accepts that we didn't have an accurate understanding of reality.
It's always the dipshits that fall back on "Well, we will have to agree to disagree," usually right after they've been presented with enough evidence to change the mind of a rational person. Fuck that, I do not agree to disagree.
- Agree to disagree is for things like "what ice cream flavor is best", not for things like "2+2=4".
  
  I have found that the issue is often that people tend to not realize they're arguing that 2+2=6, they think they're arguing what ice cream flavor is the best
- If I were wrong, you'd be able to convince me that I'm wrong. We can keep going until one of us accepts that we didn't have an accurate understanding of reality.
  I had an ex like you.
  
  Sara?
- You don't get tired of arguments? I see it as a 'fine, be stupid if you want' because I'm not spending more time on the point.
  
  You can walk away from an argument without agreeing to disagree.
- Let's agree to disagree
- No, dipshit, you're just wrong.
  Your belief is simply, objectively incorrect.
  If I were wrong, you'd be able to convince me that I'm wrong. We can keep going until one of us accepts that we didn't have an accurate understanding of reality.
  Boy if this doesn't describe most people arguing online lol.
  which is something that I would be willing to accept.
  I've found this is much harder than it seems. People either don't understand they're wrong (which might be the reason they're wrong to begin with) or unwilling to admit to being wrong even to themselves. So you'll have the first part of my quote lol
  
  Love your username

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. And as far as I can tell Einstein never said it but it's always attributed to Einstein
- If I just rolled a 6 I'm not going to expect the same result if I roll the die again.
  
  I would argue that you didn't roll the die the exact same way...
  Of course there could be other things other than your movements like wind that also affects the outcome.

"actually we're a republic" when someone defends democracy
- Well to a lot of people democratic rule isn't their primary goal, that's why they emphasize it.
- Well technically, we're a constitutional monarchy with the King of Canada as our nominal head of state. Gosh. Though I wouldn't mind opening that discussion.
  
  ...constitutional monarchy with the *rightful heir of Emperor Joshua Norton as our nominal head of state.
  Fixed that for you, prepared to go to war over it

"They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps!" Apparently, the quote originates from like a late 1800s textbook or something, and it was a logic problem: "Why cannot a man pull himself up by his own bootstraps?" It's not possible, 'cause physics.
- It could have been a reference to the story of Baron Munchausen from 1860 where the baron and his horse got stuck in a swamp and he lifted himself and his horse by pulling on his pigtail.
  Here's an image of it. https://blogs.loc.gov/international-collections/?attachment_id=3246
  
  Loopy-schwoopy troll physics!
- I only ever hear it in the context of people criticizing it. This is a perpetuation of something people used to say, by people who dislike it.

"not all heroes wear capes"
- Only the dead ones.
  NO CAPES!
  — Edna Mode

"Fuck around and find out"
- I don't see anything wrong with this one, since people keep proving it to be true time and time again, myself included.
  
  I didn't claim there's anything wrong with it. I'm just tired of hearing that repeated over and over again.

Occam's razor, because it seem it is often used wrong by using it for just shutting down possible explanations. Typically noone mentions, that this is about guessing probabilities without prior knowledge and not a way to completely ignore an explanation.
- Yes, it's a way to move forward with incomplete knowledge, when you need to make assumptions regardless of which theory you go with. There will always be an asterisk by theories or decisions made with this method, because one of more of the assumptions themselves could later turn out to be incorrect, thereby invalidating your decision. Occams razor is very misunderstood and used or quoted incorrectly all the time.
- People just use it as "this makes sense to me, therefore it's probably right"
  
  In fictional media I've mostly seen this the other way round. Like "I don't want to believe this expanation, so it should not be considered "

"If you know, you know"
- My thoughts when I see this are “well I don’t so you’re wasting my time”

"make it was simple as possible"
Super annoying, because the people who use this always forget the second half, which makes the saying useful.
"Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler" it is effectively a re-stating of Occam's razor.
- KISS -keep it simple, stupid

No one wants to work anymore.
- I sure as fuck don't

"Galileo too was ostracized for his beliefs, but he was right"
Yeah but he did science, not that new age bullshit you think are an expert in.
- They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
  —Carl Sagan
  
  Columbus thought the world was pear shaped. Meaning it was viable to get to India by going west. If the Americas didn't exist he would have died.
  It was well known at the time that the world was round. The ancient Greeks had a very good calculation if the circumference of the earth.

"think of how stupid the average person is, and then think half of them are dumber than that"
So heavily overused.
- This was actually the quote that inspired this thread. I love George Carlin but I hear this all the time online and I hate it
  
  The people saying it aren't usually in the half they think they are, either.
- "Half of them are smarter than that!" Doesn't have the same ring to it.
- Half of the people who unironically use this quote are in the exact half he's making fun of

I live in the US and follow rugby.
"Rugby is a hooligan's sport played by gentlemen, soccer is a gentleman's sport played by hooligans."
So cringe. Different sports are different. I can like both, I can even play both, and neither suffers a loss.
- I"m sorry but this is very true
  
  It's a stereotype, maybe even a generalization. It's not "very true". It can't be; there's about 130,000 men in the world who play soccer professionally or semi-professionally.
  Just because certain cultures incentivize hooligan behavior (looking at you, London), doesn't mean all everywhere do.
- They both result in awful cases of CTE unfortunately.
  
  You can get CTE from faking injuries?
- Rugby League is a hooligans game played played by hooligans.
- Ah, you must be one of these gentle hooligans

"I took the road less traveled." Which in the original poem means pretty much the opposite of what people are trying to say.

I guess you don't see it too much these days (outside of maybe yearbooks or collections of inspirational quotes), but Frost's "I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference."
If you read the rest of the poem the narrator explicitly states in several different ways that the roads are pretty much the same. So the narrator is saying that by later on saying the roads are different he'll be retroactively be justifying his choice or just not telling the truth about it.
- Even after rereading the poem I had to read the Wikipedia analysis section to be convinced you are right. It's a very subtle poem, which, honestly, just makes it better.
  
  I always thought the confusion came from just seeing the last two lines out of context, because the poem itself has descriptions like "Then took the other, just as fair", "Had worn them really about the same", and "both that morning equally lay". It seemed like Frost was really hammering home the equality, considering 15% (3/20) of the lines are talking about the similarities.

Not a quote, just a single word that's overused to death, and you can probably already guess the word...
"Woke"
Just shut the fuck up! Please please please just shut up!

- A "well regulated militia" had a different meaning back then. Also, there's a comma in the middle of the amendment that means the first phrase is only a clarification. The second clause stands on its own.
  
  It meant "properly equipped," not "heavily restricted."
  
  I just attended a lecture about this specific comma today. It was there as a rhetorical pause, not to separate clauses. A great example of how ambiguity in punctuation can cause thousands of deaths.
- The people that spout the second part are only slightly more annoying than the people that spout the first part. Both sides are idiots who think they have a "gotcha!". Rhetorical geniuses.
  The second amendment exists. The courts have upheld it to mean the right of individual ownership. There is zero wiggle room here. If anyone wants to debate how it is vs. how it should be, I welcome that conversation! But be warned, we'll be arguing opinions, not these two facts.
  The next comment is where some kid, fresh out of Remedial PolySci, tells us all that amendments can be changed. Who knew? Of course they can't explain the method by which that happens or propose a path forward in the foreseeable future. (Hint: The point is entirely moot.)
  
  Yeah the genie is already waaaay out of the bottle in the US. It would be logistically impossible to get rid of guns, nice as that would be. This is something both extremes refuse to accept, because they wouldn't have a cause or solution to rally around. No, Bubba, nobody's going to take your guns. No Stewart, we can't just ban guns and wash our hands of it. Other countries have indeed mostly eradicated firearms in normal society, but nowhere near on the scale that the US has.
- Ok, I'm not saying you need to agree with the principle, but the grammar clearly states that the citizens get guns because the government has a military (which is the well-regulated militia).
  Again, not starting a debate on if that's good or bad, just grammar.
  
  No, the "well-regulated militia" actually referred to a desire to have all able-bodied men of military age to commonly have most of the skills needed to fight in a war in case of a draft, such as marksmanship and survival skills, as well as already owning most of the necessary equipment.
  What's important to note is that the US had a very small standing military for most of its history. It relied on being able to conscript a large number of recruits whenever a war started, and sent them home whenever the war was over. This requires a lot of the citizenry to already know most of the skills they'd need to raise an army quickly.

That trickle-down economics quote. There's studies about it [not working] published but it's just studies.
The original quote is "If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows" from Galbraith.
I imagine people are not yet ready to learn this "promise" ain't holding water.
- The original quote is "If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows" from Galbraith.
  If my goal is to feed sparrows that's a very costly and inefficient method. I also end up with an overweight horse.
  
  ... and a lot of horse shit.
- So we all get to eat shit? Is that the point of the quote?
  I don't understand how that is meant to be supportive of trickle-down economics.
  
  "horse and sparrow" discourse was intended to be a criticism of supply side economics, not supportive of it.
  
  I don't think the original quote is what they use. I just found the relatively more glorified version commonly used:
  give the tax cuts to the top brackets, the wealthiest individuals and largest enterprises, and let the good effects 'trickle down' through the economy to reach everyone else.
  apparently also called "supply-side doctrine."

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"
You do realise that people who are awake during the night are of equal importance, who's gonna run those power plants and radio stations and petrol service stations and police forces and whatever else? If they shut off during the night, there'd be chaos. At least a chaos that most folks won't see because they're asleep or something.
- You realize that “important” is a different word not appearing in the set of “healthy, wealthy, and wise” right?
  
  I'm probably guessing that SOME night people are healthy, wealthy and wise. Huge emphasis on the word "some".
- To be fair: The people messing up their bio rhythms doing night shift after night shift might not necessarily be considered 'healthy'.
  
  Fair point
- I suspect that this one comes from a time when society was much more agrarian.
  
  Oh.

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times" -stupid monkeys
- It was the West of times, it was the East of times, and ever Mark Twain shall beat.
- I don't care if you're sick of it. I'm going to keep saying it, and nothing can stop me!

I said what I said...
- Even worse when they admit they were wrong and still say “I stand by what I said”

"Settled science." Used by people who don't understand that science at its heart is constantly questioning everything.
- We're taught that intelligence is performative. So most people think intelligence is answer driven, clever people know that it's question driven. But a gameshow where contestants ask the right questions might not do as well as Jeopardy.
  Edit: my dumb ass picks the gameshow where you famously have to literally ask the right questions as an example.

"You must be funny at parties"
Specially if you're not around, bitch

At the end of the day...
- It's tomorrow

"Blood is thicker than water" followed by the equally erroneous "covenant" explanation.
- Well, maple syrup is thicker than blood, so should I move to Canada?
  It's sad that such an answer isn't possible in my language, our version goes "blood is not water".
- English is not my first language, so I don't know every English saying, could you spell out what you mean?
  
  Basically, the family you're related to should always come first (that includes first before the people you have chosen to live with, like your partner) because you "share blood".
  Usually said by people whose only "quality" as a person is being related to someone.
  Seriously, if someone tells you this unironically, there's a pretty huge chance you should review your entire relationship with them and more often than not you should just stop talking to them whatsoever.
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water

We need to be like Amazon and hyper focus on the customer

640k ought to be enough for anyone.
Bill Gates didn't even say it. And even if one only takes the spirit out of that quote whereupon software and hardware should be planned with foresight, it's so overused.
- He denied he ever said it, but nearly 15 years after the quote. It was quoted heavily in 1980's computer magazine, always with a 1981 date. I've never seen the interview where he said it. Bill Gates is a consumate huckster, and I don't trust his word on anything, but without direct evidence, the most logical answer is all the times he did say in interviews that the (Microsoft) thought 640k would be enough memory for much longer than it was.

"Blood is thicker than water" a misquote of "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" which has the exact opposite meaning.
- That's not actually true (according to Wikipedia and a few other sources, at least). The 'blood is thicker than water' saying has been around for centuries in various forms with the current meaning, and the covenant/womb variation is relatively recent, and mostly stems from a few books that claim that it's the 'real meaning' without sources or proof.
  
  Thank you so much for saying this! One time there was a Twitter thread that started with someone asking, "What are some things that people believe/accept without having liked into it further." Someone responded with this "the original phrase is... covenant...womb" and the OP replied with someone like, "yeah people are such sheep". I wanted to explode.
  But to back your point, you can go and read for yourself the very first instance of this phrase in context as the very old book it comes from has been digitally scanned. It's old enough to be in middle English, but I still thought it was fairly easy to make out the original phrase as we know it today.

“Literally 1984”… unless I’m asking you what year the Macintosh 128k came out I don’t wanna hear it.

"This hurts me more than it hurts you"
No, I'm pretty sure being spanked hurts more than doing the spanking.
- Being spanked is physical harm, vs doing the spanking is emotional harm. The argument is that emotional is more harmful than physical.
  Of course this ignores that being spanked very likely also inflicts emotional harm. It also ignores that emotional harm isn't a scale.

“ One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
- https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/one-small-misstep/
  
  Now that’s interesting. Always thought it didn’t make a whole lot of sense strictly speaking. Never realized he intended the “a”.

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind".
No it doesn't. At most the world no longer has depth perception.
- Isn't the idea that you'll keep taking more eyes until there are none left? No mentions that it's limited to one eye per person.

"Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
An individual, uneducated observer might not be able to tell them apart, but that doesn't mean there isn't a distinction.
One of the avengers movies dropped that line, and I feel like it's spread like wild fire since then, and it's just objectively not correct.
- I understand much of the technology we use today isn't magic, but it may as well be with how much I understand about how it works.
  I don't think you quite grasp what Arthur C Clarke was going for with this one.
  
  I get what he was going for, I just think it was poorly executed.

This “Do you listen to Weezer?” stuff is getting pretty old

“This is the way”

Anything described as "just common sense." No, it's knowledge/awareness that you picked up from your particular environment. Not everyone has had the same exposure as you.
- I've found that "common sense" just means "things that I believe, but I can't explain why".
- I find the best retort to be: "Common sense ain't all that common."
- "Common sense is just the set of prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen."
  ~Albert Einstein

"The cloud is just someone else's computers."
If that's what you really think the cloud is, still, then you are a dinosaur who is not evolving with the times.
- I usually think of it this way, though I use the term server and acknowledge there are often many servers involved. Is this incorrect, or is there a better way to think about it?
  
  Servers and and sometimes services
- Wait what do you think the cloud is then? A bunch of computers owned by no one?
- It's reductive but not untrue.
- Do u think it's actually being stored in water vapor in the sky

Vote what is best for your pocketbook/wallet
- The saying is "vote with your wallet". It just means that if you are unhappy with what a company is doing, stop buying their products.
  
  People voting their wallet is why society is falling into disrepair.
  Nobody wants to pay for infrastructure, schools, social programs so they vote against any taxes, levy, etc.
  Off we slide into a Libertarian utopian dark age.
  
  Seems incredibly naive to think that's effective
  
  "If you don't like Nestle using slave labor for their chocolate and selling tainted baby formula in third world countries, just don't buy from them!"
  I have other ideas for how I could vote, but The Man doesn't want me talking about those
  
  Bbbbbut that's cancel culture!!1

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