
2010s, 2019
Source: prior to 15 November 2019 per Seattle Times reporter Jim Brunner https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/speaking-at-the-house-of-amazon-joe-biden-gently-raises-companys-role-in-middle-class-job-losses
2010s, 2019
Source: prior to 15 November 2019 per Seattle Times reporter Jim Brunner https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/speaking-at-the-house-of-amazon-joe-biden-gently-raises-companys-role-in-middle-class-job-losses
Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 87-88.
Context: The future will not "be with" anybody in the sense of falling to them as a conquest. The need for many different methods is not going to go away, dissolved in a quasi-physical heaven where all serious work is quantitative... Quantification, like surgery, is an excellent thing in the right place, but a very bad topic for obsession. Unless you know just what you are counting--unless you are sure that the things counted are standard units--and unless you understand what is proved by results of your counting, quantifying provide you only with the outward show of science, a mirage, never the oasis.
“Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count.”
“Weekends don't count unless you spend them doing something completely pointless.”
“Baseball's popularity and, more so, it's revenues continue to increase.”
Source: Baseball And Billions - Updated edition - (1992), Chapter 8, The Future, p. 168.
Speech in West Calder, Scotland (27 November 1879), quoted in W. E. Gladstone, Midlothian Speeches 1879 (Leicester University Press, 1971), p. 116.
1870s
Context: My fourth principle is—that you should avoid needless and entangling engagements. You may boast about them, you may brag about them, you may say you are procuring consideration of the country. You may say that an Englishman may now hold up his head among the nations. But what does all this come to, gentlemen? It comes to this, that you are increasing your engagements without increasing your strength; and if you increase your engagements without increasing strength, you diminish strength, you abolish strength; you really reduce the empire and do not increase it. You render it less capable of performing its duties; you render it an inheritance less precious to hand on to future generations.