“Standards of better or worse are not illusory or unnecessary. If you hadn’t decided that what you are doing right now was better than the alternatives, you wouldn’t be doing it. The idea of a value-free choice is a contradiction in terms. Value judgments are a precondition for action. Furthermore, every activity, once chosen, comes with its own internal standards of accomplishment. If something can be done at all, it can be done better or worse.”
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
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Jordan Peterson 202
Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and profes… 1962Related quotes
“… no sooner had you done something than someone else appeared who threatened to do it better.”
Living to Tell the Tale (2002)
Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 109
Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
Pali Canon 42-43 Cittavagga The Mind http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.03.than.html.
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Quote of Duchamp's remark to Brancusi, visiting the Paris Aviation Show of 1919; as quoted in Looking at Dada, eds. Sarah Ganz Blythe & Edward D. Powers - The Museum of Modern Art New York, ISBN: 087070-705-1; p. 49
1915 - 1925
From 1980s onwards, Norie Huddle interview (1981)
Context: Neither the great political or financial powers of the world nor the population in general realize that the engineering-chemical-electronic revolution now makes it possible to produce many more technical devices with ever less material. We can now take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than anybody has ever known. It does not have to be “you or me,” so selfishness is unnecessary and war is obsolete. This has never been done before. Only twelve years ago technology reached the point where this could be done. Since then it has made it ever so much easier to do.
