“Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.”

Source: The Lay of the Land

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contr…" by Richard Ford?
Richard Ford photo
Richard Ford 28
American novelist and short story writer 1944

Related quotes

“Some things don't need to be cut back. They need to be cut off.”

Beth Moore (1957) American evangelist

Source: Daniel: Lives of Integrity, Words of Prophecy - Member Book

Hugh Gaitskell photo

“I am not easily roused to anger but I must say that this latest cry to cut back the spending of worse off people to cure a crisis mostly caused by too much spending by better off people is intolerable.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

The Daily Herald (7 October 1955), quoted in Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (1979), p. 360
Opposition MP

Peter D. Schiff photo
Charles Bukowski photo
Kurt Vonnegut photo
Hillary Clinton photo

“Many of you are well enough off that… the tax cuts may have helped you… We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Explaining her opposition to President Bush's tax cut in San Francisco (28 June 2004) http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/politics/20040629-0007-ca-clintons-sanfrancisco.html
Senate years (2001 – January 19, 2007)

Idries Shah photo
Howard S. Becker photo
Cormac McCarthy photo
Ward Cunningham photo

“Often as you move comments around and have similar comments adjacent to each other, you find that half of the words can be cut out. Because a sentence says it all if the sentence is in just the right place.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text
Context: Often as you move comments around and have similar comments adjacent to each other, you find that half of the words can be cut out. Because a sentence says it all if the sentence is in just the right place. On Ward's wiki, the process has been called "refactoring," which is what we call the process in software. Ward's wiki is about software and it has software people on it, so they call it refactoring. Anyplace else it would probably be called editing. So on Ward's wiki, refactoring is an ongoing process. The assumption is that when something turns out to not be ideal, it will be refactored again. Everything is subject to refactoring.

Related topics