
'On November 2, 1943, J.R.D. Tata spoke to the Bombay Rotary Club.
Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders
I Know You Got Soul (2004)
'On November 2, 1943, J.R.D. Tata spoke to the Bombay Rotary Club.
Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders
“A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.”
"Elements of Success," Speech at Spencerian Business College, Washington, D.C. (29 July 1869); in President Garfield and Education : Hiram College Memorial (1881) by B. A. Hinsdale, p. 326 http://books.google.com/books?id=rA4XAAAAYAAJ
1860s
Variant: A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck.
“A gram of experience is worth a ton of theory.”
Saturday Review (1859)
1850s
“A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck. ”
“An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.”
This expression is widely misattributed to Emerson in journalism, tweets, and memes on the internet. This quotation in an earlier phrasing of Jared Eliot's statement “It used to be the Saying of an old Man, That an Ounce of Experience is better than a Pound of Science.” (Essays upon Field Husbandry, 1748; quotation reprinted in "Jared Eliot, Minister, Physician, Farmer" by Rodney H. True. Agricultural History Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct., 1928) https://www.jstor.org/stable/3739311, p199). The quote has also been misattributed to Friedrich Engels, a claim possibly originating from the 1975 book The Strange Case of Victor Grayson by Reg Groves ( link http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Udk7LCxtvugJ:socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2010_05_02_archive.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)
Misattributed
“An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.”
As quoted in his obituary by Maynard Smith http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/maynardsmith/pdf/1965.pdf in Nature 206 (1965), p. 239
“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.”
" Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business http://books.google.com/books?id=aU_sxUxGtE0C&q=%22A+little+inaccuracy+sometimes+saves+tons+of+explanation%22&pg=PA560#v=onepage"
The Square Egg (1924)
Source: "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Long Wall Method of Coal-Getting", 1951, p. 18
Quoted in " Queen of the Quirky, Imelda Marcos Holds Court http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EED81E39F937A35750C0A960958260" at the New York Times (4 March 1996).
“Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it?”
Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 7 Pointer Readings <!-- p. 252 -->
Context: Never mind what two tons refers to. What is it? How has it entered in so definite a way into our exprerience? Two tons is the reading of the pointer when the elephant was placed on a weighing machine. Let us pass on. … And so we see that the poetry fades out of the problem, and by the time the serious application of exact science begins we are left only with pointer readings.