Futility

The proof of the futility of harsh drug laws is this: in the country that has come down the hardest on drugs and drug users, spending billions of dollars in a decades-long war on drugs, there have never been so many drug addicts.

Tom was overcome with a sense of futility.

This is the worst snowstorm to hit England in 18 years. And for some the journey into work became an exercise in futility.

an exercise of futility

His taking the bar exam for a third time was pure futility.

“Has my dad come?” he asked. “You can see he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Morel, cross with the futility of the question.

But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him, his sophisms, futilities, and incomprehensibilities, and what remains?

No man oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without reason shewn. […] No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee come or go: but thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetites for Money, Windsor Georges and such like?

An excessive solicitude to shield those others from one's own trials and hardships, to preserve the exact quality of the revelation, for example, had been the fruitful cause of crippling errors, spiritual tyrannies, dogmatisms, dissensions, and futilities.

But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump! upon our bobbing heads.