What is a quote you see everywhere that you absolutely hate?

elkaki@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 90 points –
156

Unsure if this counts as a quote but here goes.

If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my best

Absolute fucking nonsense.

The worst part of this quote is that, in the original, she (Marilyn Monroe) actually framed her "worst":

>I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.

So in the context it sounds more like "here are my flaws - take me or leave me, but you won't change me". Which sounds reasonable. But without that context it sounds more like "I'm entitled because I like to pretend that I'm above other people".

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I feel like I've never seen or heard of anyone good using that quote. I'm sure it makes some sense if used in genuine good faith. The quote would make sense applied to someone with a disability, for example, by interpreting it more along the lines of having to deal with the person not always being outgoing and maybe even sometimes needing extra help.

But no, I've only ever seen shitty (or at least allegedly shitty) people use that quote, to justify their shittiness. The "worst" they refer to is usually bouts of anger or abuse.

It depends, at their worst are they abusive to their friends, family etc for no good reason? If so, then I'd agree it is nonsense used by abusers. If it's said by someone who gets treated awfully for having a rough day, week etc and gets treated badly, well then this quote is true.

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Not see it. But I hear this one.

"it's always in the last place you look"

No shit Sherlock. Why would I keep looking after I found it?

I always thought that was the joke?

I must say, in retrospect it kind of seems obvious, but this has somehow blown my mind

What people really mean when they say this is

it’s in the last place you think to look

This again is a misnomer because, not just because you stop looking… but because people find it hard to admit things are lost. All part of the half serious, half ridiculous psuedo science of Findology (disclaimer: my own blog)

Embarrassingly it took me years to realize what that quote meant. I had always interpreted it to mean that the item is found in an unexpected place. But of course what it really means is that you stop looking once the item is found, therefore that's the last place you looked 🤦

And it is a false statement:

sometimes you stop looking without finding anything so in those cases it isn't in the last place you look

so the clam "It's always in the last place you look" is obviously false.

otherwise you could say up front "I'm only gonna look in one place!" and then you would HAVE to find it in this last place you look!

One time I kept looking just to prove that statement wrong. I think I was 4yo.

"We only use x% of our brain."

Simply not true as shown since years by neurology

There are moments where people use more of their bran at once than they usually do.
We call these moments "seizures".

As an epileptic married to a monitor tech, we both had a good laugh when I shared this.

Thanks stranger.

This reminds me of the "you eat X amount of spiders in your sleep every year". It's also been debunked so many times and I see it popping up from time to time.

Even more ironic, this was created by some professor (?) to prove that starting fake viral facts was easy or something...

If you just add the words on average, suddenly it sounds more realistic, because who knows if there's a guy somewhere sleepwalking in a spider infested place

Oh, and X% of dust is dead skincells. There is a good Veritasium video on this clai.

Man, I always thought that one was suspect. If I eat 10 per year and have been alive 40+ years, then surely one of those times I would have woken up.

If i recall that explanation for the spider fact is itself just made up with no source.

I've almost never heard anyone quote that, but I've heard numerous people arguing against that statement. So much that I'm wondering it it has mandela-affected people to think it's a more common misconception than it really is.

I do remember it being more common back when I was in high school, and also there was a movie which mentioned that which could have helped with that

I also havent heard it being said seriously for years though

Right, it was the plot for the movie Lucy, where the protagonist increased the brain capacity beyond 10% and upon reaching 100%, she turned into an USB drive. I remember that now.

Such a good movie with such bad writing...

I am surprised no one yet has posted the infuriatingly worthless expression of affectless sympathy:

thoughts and prayers

As a nonnative speaker, the first time I heard the expression was on Bojack Horseman and it confused the hell out of me.

I agree most of the time, but when I have to sign a sympathy card at work for someone i barely know, what the hell am i supposed to say?

I can't change the work culture so i just say something generic like that most of the time lol

Btw I'm not even religious

Thing is if prayers did anything, life would be way better (utopia)

If prayers were always effective, life would be both better and far worse. You'd be surprised at the horrific things people pray for.

And some of the "good" things we pray for go against what we desperately need.

So you think you can tell heaven from hell?

  • Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd

Hard men create easy times.

Easy times create soft men.

Soft men create hard times.

Hard times create hard men.

Which is ironically said the most by soft men who grew up in easy times.

More cheese => more holes.

More holes => less cheese.

Therefore: More cheese => Less cheese

actually it ought to be:

More holes => more cheese

and subsequently:

More cheese => more cheese.

Tautology at it's best

One thing I never understood about that nonsense quote is why it would be a bad thing even if it were true. Like, who the heck wants people to be "hard" or have hard times? What's so awful about people having easy times and getting to relax and enjoy life?

It's also usually used by "back in my day" bigots who are usually using it to complain about people they don't like and quite frequently LGBT people, because they think that their generation pushing people into the closet was somehow a good thing (or that it meant LGBT people didn't exist).

"Life's not fair." It seems that more often than not the person saying it is in a position to make the situation fair. Usually it is people in positions of power saying it and it feels more like an excuse for their inaction.

Everything happens for a reason.

…often said with the unspoken implication that it’s a good reason, planned by a higher power, and that you should just meekly accept things and shut up.

Everything happens as the result of an infinite number of things that happened beforehand and led inevitably to this thing happening now. Free will is a lie.

... Sorry, that took a turn.

Super closely related is the "god works in mysterious ways" apology often used as the response if you ask what that reason was. It's bizarre that the people saying that quote are so insistent that everything happens for a reason even though they cannot answer what that reason might be (and usually get really uncomfortable if you press for an answer).

"Do or do not, there is no try"

The rallying cry of the kind of person who thinks every hobby has to become a side hustle.

You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.

I feel like that quote is better interpreted as "you haven't failed until/unless you give up." There is also value to "don't go into something without committing to it," but damn not everything has to be a fucking job.

Let's not let those people "have" Star Wars quotes. Same thing when Nazi trash in America tried to co-opt the "Ok" hand sign, Hawaiian shirts, etc. I was a bit dismayed by how fast people were willing to cede those things away. My take is: They can't have them, don't give up so easily.

I don’t see it anymore after leaving the hell that is Reddit, but I saw “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” multiple times in every thread.

I haven't seen "fuck around and find out" since the old Reddit days, either.

Thank goodness for that. Another comment that was posted over and over and over in every thread.

"Equal rights means equal lefts" or whatever tf it was, especially during the Depp/Heard thing. Basically condoning hitting women. But then if you disagree with it, it gets spun into endorsing women abusing men. Reddit comments can be fucking gross.

I mean I get that if used in a context where a person does something with great risk attached and with few and rare good possible outcomes (stupid games). And then they get a bad outcome (stupid prize).

For example Jackass-like stunts.

It’s just a stupid phrase that I hate, parroted to death multiple times in every Reddit thread ever.

I don't know who has to hear this but

I don't know who has to hear this but

that's a phrase, not a quote.

The friggin "definition of insanity" quote that is usually misattributed to Einstein. From some cursory research, a lot of first appearances of the quote come from the 80s, though I saw a few different sources from Narcotics Anonymous pamphlets to mystery novels.

We all know it's Vaas who said it first.

Jokes aside though, misattributed quotes are quite the phenomenon. Is it deliberate? Is it some sort of mandela effect? It's really weird sometimes, but like Gandhi said, don't believe anything that comes without a verifiable source.

I thought it was Lincoln who said you can't trust everything on the Internet? Sounds like Gandhi kinda stoled it, but changed it a little.

> but like Gandhi said, don’t believe anything that comes without a verifiable source.

He totally said that! It's written down in the Internet so it is true!

Plus, it's complete bullshit. Trying the same thing over and over, expecting different results, could describe practise, or experimentation.

And even if it were a sign of insanity, it would most certainly not be its definition.

Ehhhh, I want to agree but practice is expecting the same result, minor incremental improvement. In scientific experimentation, one should not be expecting anything, that's researcher bias.

Anything on a decorative sign meant to hang in a house. Examples include “Live, Laugh, Love” (which has already been mentioned) or something about wine.

This is a me problem, but it makes me cringe when someone has to explicitly write out who they are onto a sign.

I feel like that should be shown and not said. To me, it feel ingenuous when it's written onto a sign

My least favorite is

Just be yourself!

Even in grade school I knew this was hogwash. I didn't act the same in class as during recess, or in church as when at the dinner table. Exactly which me was I supposed to be? When someone asks, "What am I supposed to do?" They are really asking, "How should I behave?" And if you've never been on a date before, or this is your first job interview, then it's not obvious.

A: "So, how did the interview go?"

B: "Not so well, he threw my resume away, in front of me, and ordered me to leave."

A: "What? Why?"

B: "Well, I did just as your said, I was being myself. I walked in, gave him the ol' finger guns, then started with my best fart joke."

A: "Why the hell would you do that at an interview?"

B: "Because that routine always slays in the dorms and I was trying to be myself."

ask yourself: is it possible to be anybody else? no? then this saying is non-nonsensical!

I don't know, as a ttrpg'er, I'm being someone else every two weeks for three hours are a time. ;)

Anybody on the autism spectrum just laughs sadly, shakes head quietly, when told 'just be your self'

For me its the one that promoted me to write this, the futurama quote "you're are technically correct, the best kind of correct"

I hate how people use it over at forums, it is repeated ad nauseam, even if it doesn't make much sense. It's probably from people using it constantly that I hate the quote, and not something that has to do with the meaning.

"Don't be evil." -Google

Both hate and laugh it.

Agreed. This sounds good but immediately falls apart at the first scrutiny. It's the same with "Don't be a dick." Everyone nods their heads and thinks, "Oh, that's so obvious!" Of course, everyone agrees because they're imagining what they believe is 'evil' or 'being a dick' and just assume everyone else agrees. Imagine their surprised-Pikachu face when they learn that other humans use different criteria.

But, if you think you can sum up thousands of years of ethics and legal theories with one pithy sentence, then go for it.

The good old GNU/Linux quote.

I like Stallman's ideas on free software but this whole GNU/Linux thing is an absolute waste of time and I hate how it still gets brought up.

Let me interject for a moment!

What you guys are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux. Thank you for taking your time to cooperate with with me, your friendly GNU+Linux neighbor, Richard Stallman.

The quote attributed to Stallman is made up and is a distortion of his actual views.

He created GNU as an operating system. His position is that when talking about the GNU OS, it is appropriate to call it GNU/linux if it’s running the linux kernel, though he is also fine with calling it GNU.

The italicized parts are made up, the rest is true. He says so much in the article you linked.

In any case, we're repeating the same old discussion I'm tired of. Should've seen it coming.

"pull yourself up by the bootstraps" it's literally impossible

I always thought that was the point of the phrase.

It's weird that it's still used unironically today (and in fact feels like it's made a relatively recent revival). Like, you'd think they'd at least switch to a phrase that makes sense.

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Yeah maybe, but it also makes you stranger.

Also not necessarily true. You might loose a limb and survive, but it could mentally wreck you and you're definitely weaker with one vs. two arms.

Not to mention all the war veterans with PTSD for the rest of their life

Especially virusses and bacteria: Your immune system gets a bit stronger but organs probably have small irreversable damages because there is scartissue where the infection was the worst.

I can only imagine how much people with severe, long-term diseases hate that phrase.

I feel like it's just missing a very big caveat:
What doesn't kill you, and lets you reemerge in a healthy state once it passes, makes you stronger.

That I can more or less agree with. Whatever happened that prompted people to say this will probably still leave a mark though.

"The customer is always right" conveniently missing the second part: "...in matters of taste and style".

Also misinterpreting "customer" as an individual rather than as the aggregate of customer demand.

I don't think that's the original quote, but rather came later to try and improve the clearly flawed quote. Searching, I found https://grammarist.com/phrase/the-customer-is-always-right/, which says the original quote is the rather uninspiring "Rule number one: the customer is always right. Rule number two: If the customer is wrong, please refer to rule number one".

That said, I do agree with you completely. I think the quote is just so obviously flawed, as customers abuse the heck out of it. Treating it as applying to aggregates makes way more sense. e.g., if customers want a pink doodad and you only sell doodads in black... well, then you're wrong and should start selling them in pink.

As a corollary, I also like the quote that has been often attributed to Ford (but checking, it seems unproven if he actually said it), "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." I like that quote because customers often frankly don't actually know what they want. I've had countless times myself where I didn't know I wanted a product until after I learned about it. And myself, I'm a software dev. This quote constantly applies to my field. The idea of users not knowing what they want is an extremely popular meme in the field (example). Users often need expert guidance to identify what they actually want and what a practical solution might look like.

''what doesn't kill you, make you stronger'' it's just so overused and saturated

"G stands for graphics, so it's gif with a hard g"

The only thing more meaningless than arguing about how to pronounce gif is using that as an argument, and yet it always gets repeated.

"P stands for photographic, so it's JPEG with an f sound" is the one that gets me

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Not to mention it’s a made up rule that doesn’t apply to literally any other acronym (radar, sonar, NASA, NATO, scuba, etc.)

It also doesn’t apply when the whole point of the name was to be a spoof on the peanut butter. It even has a saying to go along with it so that more people would adopt it. “Choosy developers choose gif”. People can say they don’t care what the original creator intended, because words are malleable, but what other word on the planet comes with an actual pronunciation guide along with it to sell the word!

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"Survival of the fittest" (when used without trying to understand its actual meaning).

What is its meaning?

Fittest means most suited to the environmwnt, not necessarily strongest, fastest, smartest etc

This is from Darwin, I think. It describes the mechanism of selection in evolution: the organisms that are better adapted to their environments are the ones more likely to survive.

Bady likely hates it because it's often misused, by transforming it in a prescriptive statement (from "the fittest survives" to "the fittest deserves to survive) and/or ignoring that what's considered the fittest depends on the environment (e.g. a fish isn't fit in a dry environment, but a cactus isn't fit in the sea).

Also the word 'fitness' is colored a bit by our current corporal culture ('fit' is something one can become of one aspires to be it). Whilst in the Darwinian reading it's more like an accidental occurrence (a mutation made the species more fit by accident).

Specifically natural selection. Sexual selection is also a type survival of the fittest, but its fitness in attracting mates and assuring survival of offspring, regardless of how well this adapts to the environment. And artificial selection grants survival to the traits the selector wants, again not necessarily favoring environmental adaptations.

Worse, he probably refers to social darwinism.
A very nasty school of thought that’s (partly) responsible for everything from genocide to eugenics.

Social "Darwinism" relies on the fallacy that I mentioned, where you treat a descriptive statement as if it was prescriptive. (And yes, it's nasty.)

"You can't have your cake and eat it too". What is the flaming point of having cake if you can't eat it?

I wondered about this for years and years, never understanding, especially, since "having cake" and "eating cake" are used interchangeably. But, I finally figured it out! In this sense, the "having" is equivalent to "keeping" or "being in possession of."

Examples:

  • "What's it like having a Mercedes Benz?"
  • "The Smiths have a very nice home."

No eating implied!

Therefore, the saying is more inline with "You can't keep (to show off or admire) your cake, and eat it, too."

But you can. Just cut a hole in the bottom and eat it from there. Then it’s presentable and edible.

One time I baked a whole entire cake for myself. There was no occasion or anything I just wanted to have a cake and eat it too. It turns out cakes are really big and it's really hard for a single person to eat a cake faster than it turns all spongy and icky.

That moment when you are an adult and finally can have all the good foods.

"God is testing you." "God has a plan." "God never closes a door without opening a window." "I'll pray for you."

Or any other religious bullshit. Keep that shit to yourself. I'm living in the real world.

Oh sweet summer child

Yeah we get it, we've all seen Game of Thrones, too. If you have to be a condescending dick, at least be original.

I use that sometimes on my kids. But I've never seen GoT. That phrase WAY predates that show.

Here's a quote used by media shills to defend crappy movies all the time: "[formerly great franchise] is now shitty. And why that's a GOOD THING."

in Dutch we have the saying "act normal, then your already weird enough' I fucking hate that quote so much

Namaste. Anyone I've met who uses that word has always turned out to be a preachy, holier than thou, self involved tool.

"It is what it is." It's such a meaningless truism* and almost always comes across as dismissive of the person you're speaking to. Just say, "It sucks but we have to get through it," or "We can't change this situation" or something else. Literally any alternative. Please!

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"

Both my two-time-car-crash-survivor self with severe PTSD and my breast-cancer-surviving mom (who had to get her boobs chopped off) fucking hate that phrase with a passion. There are some times I have to walk across an intersection and just start crying right there because I'm so terrified. I want to kick the nuts off of whoever came up with that phrase.