How To Use Futility In A Sentence
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It would not be so bad if these tests were actually based on science or some objective measure but they are usually exercises in bureaucratic futility.
Barack Obama Elected President of the United States | One Year Later...What's Changed?
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In the end, though, Smith was beginning to realise the futility of trying to liberate a proletariat that seemed quite content to remain unliberated.
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Its inconclusiveness demonstrated its futility.
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Modern improvements in the means for the diffusion of knowledge have not brought about the millennium, but they have reduced the old statecraft to a condition of inglorious futility.
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I am as always slightly awed by the sheer tragedy and futility of it all.
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And I had come to be oppressed by what seemed to me the futility of art -- a pompous legerdemain, a consummate charlatanry that deceived not only its devotees but its practitioners.
CHAPTER II
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At last realizing the futility of superior "kinetics" — roughly speaking, putting a lot of metal in the air — American forces belatedly adopted a counterinsurgency strategy.
The Surprising Lessons of Vietnam
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Some people think they can use drugs to fix these genetic defectives, but that's obviously an exercise in futility – you can't overcome something that's embedded in every cell in your body.
Child Abuse Alert
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Three months of futility with a team who finished eighteenth.
Times, Sunday Times
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When will he realize that futility is the act of making the same mistakes over and over again yet expecting a different result?
Is John Donahoe Finally Turning eBay Around?
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In these films, Naruse repeatedly found beautiful, economical, and multifaceted ways of exploring his favorite topic - the futility of hope (despite the admirability and beauty of the hopeful) - that forms his overarching pessimism.
GreenCine Daily: Shorts, 4/4.
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Higher and higher climbed the starlings, still maintaining tight formation, until the hawk, seeming to realize the futility of its effort, turned and volplaned to earth.
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During my stay in Maputo, for example, I was often advised of the futility of my research plans.
Where Women Make History: Gendered Tellings of Community and Change in Magude, Mozambique
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When are they going to realise the futility of giving organisations huge fines that only damage the services provided to the public?
Times, Sunday Times
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I ginned up all kinds of projects that didn't get off the runway--public radio programming, book proposals, magazine pieces--and got to the point where I'd write and pitch and battle the futility for a few hours in the morning and then what?
Mike Ragogna: Rough & Tumble, Stick & Stones, Moon Hotels & More: Conversations with John Waite, Jason Reeves, and Tom Moon, Plus Friday's Free George Harrison Concert
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At this moment of success I found only an unreasoning sense of futility.
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This week my graduate seminar students (at Parsons Fine Arts MFA) and I had a great discussion leading from Robert Smithson's writings on entropy to issues of pessimism about social change and what might be the point of human intervention towards ideals of progressive social activism in an entropically irreversible situation: interesting in this light to read Bob Herbert Op-Ed piece in the October 26, 2010 copy of The New York Times, "The Corrosion of America": do we just go along "haplessly"/hopelessly with the flow of entropy and the corrosion and ruin of our infrastructure (a ruin which is in a sense "always already" from before its inception, in Smithson's example of "The Monuments of Passaic") creating or suggesting an art which does not try to impose an idealist order or moral value to an entropic situation of urban and suburban decay, or do we believe enough in human labor despite ultimate futility or mortality to make the investment in our near futures by fixing the infrastructure?
Mira Schor: Corroded infrastructure 2010/Robert Smithson's Writings on Entropy, 1966-67
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In these films, Naruse repeatedly found beautiful, economical, and multifaceted ways of exploring his favorite topic - the futility of hope (despite the admirability and beauty of the hopeful) - that forms his overarching pessimism.
GreenCine Daily
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In the 1960s, Hugh Cudlipp of the Daily Mirror dismissed the Press Council as "an exercise in futility".
Murdoch's malign influence must die with the News of the World | Observer editorial
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In all this Ref sees only futility.
Times, Sunday Times
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The last two really best describe the futility from the title.
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Only die-hards or those of a philosophical cast of mind fail to see the futility of that.
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The play is, of course, about incomprehensibility and the total futility of all forms of human intercourse.
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an exercise in futility
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Taking these contemplations to heart one realizes the futility of relying on mundane sources of refuge such as money, friends, family, etc., and turns one's thoughts to practice.
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Perhaps it is right here that we catch the clew to their futility, put our hands on the pulse of their unpractical inability to put an end to violence by the perpetration of deeds of violence.
Jack London's Nonfiction Collection of Unpublished Book Forwards
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A theosophical discussion with a scientific basis is almost pointless and surely an exercise in futility.
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Lowell's Psalm 137 allusion, the futility of his song, also has a counterpart in Ginsberg: Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore
Yizkor
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She could see the utter futility of trying to protest.
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This is evident in the number of double dissolutions - though the futility of these has meant that after having had four between 1974 and 1987, there have not been any since.
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I tend to think trading virtual futility for spiritual futility is a step no sane person would take.
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Primarily, however, the drama is about yearning and the futility of attempting to suppress human emotion.
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Knowing the futility of dwelling on the past, she forced herself to focus on the present.
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But as he sat on his horse, trotting along in that seemingly endless line, he was struck by the sheer futility of war.
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He talked movingly of the futility of offenders going in and out of prison through a revolving door.
The Sun
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It is an exercise in futility to imagine that once water pipes of defaulters are physically removed, the company would contain any illegal connections on their water system.
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If it targets only a captive audience, the intelligentsia, it is an exercise in futility, he argues.
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‘The anchorite is not offended primarily by the world,’ Ramfos insists; ‘he is offended by futility.’
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_Keeling's_ wife is worthy of a place in the author's long gallery of woolly-witted matrons; while in _Silverdale_ he has given a study of clerical futility and egotism almost savage in its detestability, a portrait at which one laughs and shudders together.
Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 153, November 28, 1917
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These churches professed a belief in predestination, a theological tenet that suggests the futility of the ambitious pursuit of wealth.
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And, notwithstanding Santayana's too-often repeated mot about forgetfulness and history repeating, it is sometimes possible to see in such repetition not error or futility but constancy.
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Don Quixote is a monument to absurdity, a hymn to the inspiration and futility of the romantic anti-hero.
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An opposition spokesman said he hoped the agreement would give them pause for thought about the futility of violence.
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The catalyst required was the elixir of life, tincture, or philosophers' stone, the preparation of which long obsessed men of all ranks, despite its futility.
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But he dismisses criticism that the film glorifies violence and highlights the futility of life in the underworld.
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This is because we know the futility of putting on an act: the truth has a habit of coming out.
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The man's initial rage at his fate gradually turns into acceptance as he begins to see the futility of trying to escape by scaling the pit's steep, loose sand walls.
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Seven hundred years later, two things remain constant: first, the primacy of Francis' life, and second, the futility of trying to produce a canonical version of that life.
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In its place stands the conviction of the futility of life; of the awareness of existence in a dark room.
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Mr. Hirst's dead sharks and electrocuted flies, butchered lambs and diamond-studded crania are all reminders of the futility of human struggle and the inevitability of death.
The Difficult Art of Inspiring Olympians
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The desire to outthink this market, the temptation to overintellectualize the cues and the data and the noise is a money-losing exercise in futility.
Mad Money's Jim Cramer: Cramer Busts 5 Bearish Sentiments - CNBC
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Bull 1980 in which director Martin Scorsese and his leading man, Robert De Niro, take the poignant story of heavyweight champ Jake LaMotta and alchemise it into a parable about anger, masculinity and human frailty, providing - in the scene where De Niro's hero beats his fists against the walls of his concrete cell - one of cinema's great images of futility and rage.
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
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In other words, “superior expensiveness or futility.”
60 in 60: #38 – Thorstein Veblen’s Conspicuous Consumption (Penguin’s Great Ideas Series)
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In a voiceover, he remarks that it's not death he fears but a futile life, but, from his hangdog expression and recklessness toward his health, it's clear that he's already given into that feeling of futility.
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It has prompted a rethink: 'I realised the futility of just striving to earn money.
Times, Sunday Times
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The dash to Islington to recite a poem on war's futility.
The Sun
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The human skull is familiar from the tradition of vanitas paintings where it serves to indicate the futility of human aspirations by stressing the ephemerality of human life.
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The scrum, likewise, symbolises the essential futility of human existence.
Times, Sunday Times
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With new clarity, he sees the pettiness and futility of his life.
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Often at such conjunctures as these, when the futility of her great undertaking was more than usually manifest, did Ethelberta long like a tired child for the conclusion of the whole matter; when her work should be over, and the evening come; when she might draw her boat upon the shore, and in some thymy nook await eternal night with a placid mind.
The Hand of Ethelberta
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Three statesmen who occupied leading positions during the World War were so deeply struck by the deprivation of human life and economic resources, by the futility of war as a social institution, and by its amorality, that they became convinced pacifists and throughout the rest of their lives spared no effort to prevent such a calamity from ever again overtaking mankind.
The Nobel Peace Prize 1937 - Presentation Speech
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Getting a straight answer out of the carpenter is an exercise in futility.
There are some things that even gringos won't do!
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But like Saint Augustine, I eventually came to realize the double-minded futility of pretending to exalt Reason while spending my days in slavish service to Kundalini and the lizard brain.
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For two years in the midst of my distress over the poverty which, thus suddenly driven into my consciousness, had become to me the "Weltschmerz," there was mingled a sense of futility, of misdirected energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation would not in the end bring either solace or relief.
Twenty Years at Hull-House, With Autobiographical Notes
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I quit doing that, it was an exercise in futility, and it seemed that many Mexicans wanted to steal an Alaska license plate as a souvenir.
Page 2
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But realising the futility of such a course, I held my peace and waited agonisedly.
The Shame of Motley: being the memoir of certain transactions in the life of Lazzaro Biancomonte, of Biancomonte, sometime fool of the court of Pesaro
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He talked movingly of the futility of offenders going in and out of prison through a revolving door.
The Sun
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I've realised already the futility of fighting: life goes on impervious and one has to go with it.
Sand In My Shoes: Wartime Diaries of a WAAF
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He was backed by one of his co-stars, British actress, Saffron Burrows, who agreed that ‘the eternal question of the futility of war’ was at the heart of Troy.
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Skeptics called the nonbinding vote an exercise in futility for the proud region centered around Barcelona, which boasts a distinct cultural identity and accounts for about one-fifth of Spain's economy but says it get does not get enough in return.
Gaea Times (by Simple Thoughts) Breaking News and incisive views 24/7
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Decision making about futility and techniques of withdrawal is difficult and subject to differing opinion.
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On realizing the futility of his mission, he would return to staring at me.
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Aislinn found it useless to argue with her or try to make her see the futility of her efforts.
THE WOLF AND THE DOVE
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It is also easy to see the futility and ineffective nature of S curves and sweeping actions that use the smaller muscles of the arm and forearm to accomplish the task.
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Instead, the film-makers create an ever-expanding universe of accidental characters and sub-plot lines that perpetuate a sense of futility and detachment.
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Instead, his name crops up whenever a baseline of offensive futility is needed.
NYT > Home Page
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But always somehow returning to the futility of it all and the inevitability of death.
Times, Sunday Times
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He was backed by one of his co-stars, British actress, Saffron Burrows, who agreed that ‘the eternal question of the futility of war’ was at the heart of Troy.
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The point of religion, he used to say, was to reconcile us to the hollowness, the futility, the nothingness of life.
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The borders and limits of his language are self-imposed and they demonstrate the futility of speech as being truly inarticulate to the imprisoned passion of their leading characters.
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The sheer futility of it all exasperates her.
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(Telling a bookstore employee that a book is on the wrong shelf is generally an exercise in futility, so I would have had to go for it alone.)
June « 2010 « Haikasoru: Space Opera. Dark Fantasy. Hard Science.
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My entire point was related to the futility of funding organizations that parasitize the needy to batten themselves on the guilt of the fortunate.
Are we a Christian Nation?
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The futility of enacting mercantilist legislation within a confederated polity was also demonstrated with regard to the navigation laws.
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This psychology has not just made peace hard for Israelis to believe in, but by reinforcing the Israeli/Jewish sense of besiegement it has helped ensure the futility of Palestinian resistance - especially violent opposition - against the occupation.
Mark Levine: What Good is Winning the Wars if you Lose the Peace?
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No one could have anticipated that a president who "presided" over a fraudulent war, a disgrace in the Attorney General's office, an epic natural disaster outdone only by the epic futility of the response to that disaster, an economic downturn that shows no sign of moderating, stagnant wages, creeping unemployment, tainted food sources, skyrocketing energy prices and a stock market in need of serious psychoactive drugs would have such low approval ratings by the time he's ready to leave office.
Obama Entering White House With High Favorables -- And Bush Leaving With High Disapproval
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Reiteration of a decade-old deception could not fail to foster an enhanced sense of futility.
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In the face of war and mass slaughter, he has proved it retains the ability to shock us with the sheer frivolity of its efforts in futility.
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Another FDA formal rulemaking dealing with vitamin supplements was an even longer exercise in futility.
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I had been going to mark the 1000th posting here with a descant on futility and failure, as is traditional on New Year's Eve.
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Sir, can you reflect on the usefulness or futility of blocking all the highways?
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Anyone who's ever tried to blood-trail a turkey knows what an excercise in frustrated futility that can be.
Long-Range Shotgunning
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I faxed him a month or so ago about this - even in the face of futility I had to.
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The prosecutor will also now not be confronted with the International Committee of the Red Cross's stark conclusions about this programme pdf: "This regime was clearly designed to undermine human dignity and to create a sense of futility by inducing, in many cases, severe physical and mental pain and suffering, with the aim of obtaining compliance and extracting information, resulting in exhaustion, depersonalisation and dehumanisation.
George Bush: no escaping torture charges | Katherine Gallagher
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The key message is the futility of trying to cod us that our various national identities can somehow be subsumed into something called the European Union.
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Moroni tightened his lips to demonstrate the futility of discussion.
FINAL RESORT
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The toughest part of their work is the futility of using quantitative measurements to gauge performance.
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This sense of futility is what makes the project we're sharing with you today so interesting.
Boing Boing
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I don't think his task is any of those things, including "titanic" -- it'll just be the sound of an error being erased, and the winners will write his brief, four year history, and his even briefer Senatorial history as just what it is: A study in futility, where minorities and guilty White-women experimented with the economy, well-being, and future of America so they could feel a burst of liberal-orgasm...
Yahoo! News: Business - Opinion
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No the whole point of this little exercise in futility is to be able to point at this legislation and claim some credit for “protecting ppl from net nasties” with whichever special interest group the pollie or bureacrat is currently trying to curry favour with.
Outlaw ‘extreme porn’: UK
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The resulting definition, which was published in 1999 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, was distinctly influenced by traumatology in that it was broken down into two components: symptoms of separation distress (yearning, searching, loneliness) and traumatic distress (numbness, disbelief about the loss, anger, and a sense of futility about the future).
The Truth About Grief
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It is a rather static play; there is not much action, but the work certainly presents the costly futility of the conflict.
The Times Literary Supplement
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A popular bit of doggerel underlined their usual futility in this fashion: ‘Washington, first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.’
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The continuing problems of Northern Ireland demonstrate the futility of responding to a deeply ingrained political problem with a law-and-order response.
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In the face of war and mass slaughter, he has proved it retains the ability to shock us with the sheer frivolity of its efforts in futility.
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He recognised the futility of trying to impose Western ideas about fitness and fielding, preferring instead to act as a discreet sounding board and a father figure.
Times, Sunday Times
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I like the brashness of youth, particularly when counterpointed by the underlying futility of it all.…
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Then, against a tough wind, he misplayed Hernandez's fly ball to right, first coming in on the ball, then trying in futility to catch up to it at the wall, where it bounced past him for a triple.
Live blog: Braves at Nationals, Space Coast Stadium
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Instead it gave me a sense of futility, that I must witness my foster son committing the same foolish and sel.
THE GOLDEN FOOL: BOOK TWO OF THE TAWNY MAN
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It recognizes the futility of instituting a bimetallic system of currency, when the whole world is in opposition, and considers that such an act would be inimical to the welfare of the country.
The Principles of the Republican Party: A Rare Unpublished Jack London Essay
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His set-to with the federal agency not only underscores the often misguided intent of arts funding, but the futility of conforming to other people's standards.
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He well knew the futility of trying to contend against witches, so he gave up discouraged.
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The dash to Islington to recite a poem on war's futility.
The Sun
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Both reveal untold depths of futility and desperation.
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Within days they were as gaping as they had ever been, and this exercise in futility simply amounts to a scandalous waste of money.
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It was a pleasure worth waiting for - oblique, witty, antiheroic - particularly funny about the futility of love and ambition.
Times, Sunday Times
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The point is simply the implosion of the system, the swarming strangeness of others, the futility of organizing inquiry.
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An opposition spokesman said he hoped the agreement would give them pause for thought about the futility of violence.
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She potty-trained my oldest with ease; rescuing him from futility by having to sit down to pee.
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We must ask ourselves what purpose the sacrifices of so many on our behalf served - did they die in futility so that we could wallow in our life-repudiating self-absorption?
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Skeptics called the nonbinding vote an exercise in futility for the proud region centred around Barcelona, which boasts a distinct cultural identity and accounts for about one-fifth of Spain's economy but says it get does not get enough in return.
Brandon Sun Online - Top Stories
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In my lifetime, it has gone from being a nihilistic examination of the futility of life to being a surreal knockabout.
Times, Sunday Times
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The narrator is a pilgrim, wandering through an allegorical world, and he sees only futility.
Christianity Today
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For once in a lifetime, afternoon traffic in Tijuana is unsnarled and ERRE spurs his Chevy Silverado through the Zona Rio roundabouts, past the giant statue of Father Kino and the utopian sphere of the Cultural Center, until we reach the Avenida Internacional, the long straightaway next to the corrugated steel futility of the border wall.
Mike Davis: A Day Without Tourists
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To impose a logical outline on the various sections of the book is, somewhat ironically, an exercise in futility.
Christianity Today
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Why read stories concerning unheroic, unlovely people who fail to realise the futility of their modest dreams?
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It's hard to say anything fresh about the futility of modern life.
Times, Sunday Times
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Consider therefore this pitiable Twentieth of June as a futility; no catastrophe, rather a catastasis, or heightening.
The French Revolution
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He had just had a wonderful idea about how to cope with the terrible lonely isolation, the nightmares, the failure of all his attempts at horticulture, and the sheer futurelessness and futility of his life here on prehistoric Earth, which was that he would go mad.
Life, the Universe, and Everything
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The film is essentially a study of the futility, and, finally, uncontrollable, nature of revenge.
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Even the low-comedy scenes, in which Tom Smith's red-nosed Robin dabbles in devilry, emerge as a caustic reflection of Faustus's higher magic and demonstrate the futility of his quest for omnipotence.
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Before considering Mr Dennys' attack on the judgment I express my dismay at the futility of the litigation.
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What appears at first as a touching moment of grace reveals itself to be a searing commentary on the human condition, the incorrigibility of man, and the futility of high expectations.
The Ten Commandments
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You might be forgiven for thinking the above passage to be an excerpt from a lesser-known war poem, channelling the bitterness felt at the futility of conflict.
Times, Sunday Times
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The futility of constant correction of non-standard language in the classroom also receives support from academic research.
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I began to realise the futility of my plan to get away without arrest.
Times, Sunday Times
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She finally perceived the futility of her protest
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The narrator then steps in to comment on the pointlessness and futility of life on earth before the credits roll.
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Then you get older and you move out and you realise the futility of it all.
Everyday Violence
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At this moment of success I found only an unreasoning sense of futility.
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Such statistics can serve merely to overwhelm one with a sense of futility.
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Is de Oliveira making a statement about the futility of verbal intercourse, or the expressive language of feet?
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But the futility of such a debate deflates me before I start.
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The futility of constant correction of non-standard language in the classroom also receives support from academic research.
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People had grown weary of the fighting and saw the futility of fighting against each other.
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The toughest part of their work is the futility of using quantitative measurements to gauge performance.
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The title spreads a layer of hopefulness over the sense of futility that defines the novel's characters.
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I pity the mentality of the sickos who tried, in futility, to piggyback on the admiration that the Red Fort evokes.
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Solomon saw the futility of seeking satisfaction in people and things.
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Just as discrimination is more than a change in vocabulary and the futility of wondering whether we should change "manhole" to...er..."personhole"?
Archive 2009-10-01
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His urge to defend the traditional Spix's Macaw nest site in the old tree had overridden any sense of futility.
SPIX'S MACAW: THE RACE TO SAVE THE WORLD'S RAREST BIRD
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Work is the way that people seek to redeem their lives from futility.
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Keeping everything dry enough to ignite is the ultimate "exercise in futility"!
Electrifying Muzzleloaders: CVA's New Electronic Ignition System
