“The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.”

Variant: You see, the quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead.
Source: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide: Five Complete Novels and One Story

Last update Feb. 12, 2022. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "The quality of any advice anybody has to offer has to be judged against the quality of life they actually lead." by Douglas Adams?
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Douglas Adams 317
English writer and humorist 1952–2001

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Context: I believe that any "awareness" of life is "spiritual" since awareness can only be a quality of the spirit not of the material world or of matter and machines. Only a spiritual being has awareness. But if you mean "spiritual" in the sense of a kind of "celebration of Life", then yes, I write music to celebrate life. I think most artists do, no matter how they themselves describe it. It's the joy of creating. It's a way of life.

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“Quantity has a quality all its own.”

Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

No evidence that this phrasing is due to Stalin, and it does not appear in English translations of his philosphical works. Earliest English is found in 1979 in US defense industry, presumably defense consultant Thomas A. Callaghan Jr. The connection of sufficient quantitative change leading to qualitative change is found in Marxist philosophy, by Marx and Engels, drawing from Hegelian philosophy and Ancient Greek philosophy. Marx and Engels are quoted by Stalin, but this formulation appears to be a modern American form; see quantity for details.
Stalin may have said that way before World War II, there is evidence in his Russian-language books, for example here http://www.modernlib.ru/books/stalin_iosif_vissarionovich/tom_14/read_16/.
Misattributed
Variant: Quantity is quality.
Source: Re: "Quantity has a quality all its own" source? http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-russia&month=1004&week=a&msg=ljEwsM4dMrpmUGVfI7EGqg, Tim Davenport, h-russia https://networks.h-net.org/h-russia, April 5, 2010

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