Quotes about average
page 4

“Those numbers ay not sound like a bid deal until one reflects that average global temperatures were "only" 5 degrees cooler at the height of the last Ice Age.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

About global warming. Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "The most serious problems" (Penguin Books, 2011, page 493, ISBN 978-0-241-95868-1.
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005)

Age

“[BitCoin]'s the greatest scam of modern times. … the poor, the average mom-and-pop, the truck driver and the barber, who put their life savings into this, are going to lose their money, and be told to keep holding on, trust us, the value will go up. And they're gonna go bankrupt. They're gonna lose their life savings. … This is what happened with the dot-com boom, the grandma and grandpa lost their life savings. History is repeating itself. … We have these scamsters, basically, hyping the heck out of it, while all it's being used for is illegal money laundering. … It's simply gonna implode before you know it. And regular people who trust you are gonna lose their shirts. … Would you put your life savings into digital currency? You lose a password and you've lost everything. … They know it's gonna crash and burn. … it crashes and it goes to zero, and people lose their life savings. Don't do it. Get out of it, rather than losing everything you have. Yes, the price might increase, but more likely than not it's gonna be zero before you know it.”

Vivek Wadhwa American academic

Digital Gold or Ponzi Scheme? http://youtube.com/watch?v=mkSw04Guw0E on CNN (6 January 2018, 1045 EST)

Life, Money, People, History

“Listening to as many guitar solos as possible is the best method for someone in the early stages. But saxophone solos can be helpful. They're interesting because they're all single notes, and therefore can be repeated on the guitar. If you can copy a sax solo you're playing very well, because the average saxophonist can play much better than the average guitarist.”

Ritchie Blackmore (1945) British guitarist and songwriter

Ritchie Blackmore, in: Guitar Player. Vol. 7. (1973). p. 235:
Answer to the question Does listening to solos performed on other instruments than the guitar help the beginning guitarist develop a personal style?

Help

“With mankind the differences between the sexes are greater than in most species of Quadrumana, but not so great as in some, for instance, the mandrill. Man on an average is considerably taller, heavier, and stronger than woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly-pronounced muscles. … Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether relatively to the larger size of his body, in comparison with that of woman, has not, I believe been fully ascertained. In woman the face is rounder; the jaws and the base of the skull smaller; the outlines of her body rounder, in parts more prominent; and her pelvis is broader than in man; but this latter character may perhaps be considered rather as a primary than a secondary sexual character. She comes to maturity at an earlier age than man.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", pages 316-317 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=333&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Age, Sex, Courage, Parting

“Out of… average boys, if they are well brought up, come some of the most useful men to society, and sometimes great men; for the apparent dulness or slowness of some boys is only apparent: they do not apprehend quickly, because they see difficulties which sharper boys do not see, but when they emerge from the hide-bound state, they go on at a great rate, soberly and steadily. These boys become the men whom we trust… with weighty matters.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I

Men, Boy

“It is now known that the truth or falsity of the continuum hypothesis and other related conjectures cannot be determined by set theory as we know it today. This state of affairs regarding a classical and presumably well-posed problem must certainly appear rather unsatisfactory to the average mathematician. One is tempted to look more closely and perhaps more critically at the foundations of mathematics. Although our present "Cantorian" mathematics is highly successful in its treatment of abstractions, one must not overlook the fact that from the very beginning the use of infinite processes was regarded with suspicion by many people.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

Set theory and the continuum hypothesis, p. 1. https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4NCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1 Courier Corporation, 2008 (Dover reprint). Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966)

People, Truth, Mathematics, Problem

“Plowboy: You truly feel that all the major changes in history have been caused by science and technology?
Asimov: Those that have proved permanent—the ones that affected every facet of life and made certain that mankind could never go back again—were always brought about by science and technology. In fact, the same twin "movers" were even behind the other "solely" historical changes. Why, for instance, did Martin Luther succeed, whereas other important rebels against the medieval church—like John Huss—fail? Well, Luther was successful because printing had been developed by the time he advanced his cause. So his good earthy writings were put into pamphlets and spread so far and wide that the church officials couldn't have stopped the Protestant Reformation even if they had burned Luther at the stake.
Plowboy: Today the world is changing faster than it has at any other time in history. Do you then feel that science—and scientists—are especially important now?
Asimov: I do think so, and as a result it's my opinion that anyone who can possibly introduce science to the nonscientist should do so. After all, we don't want scientists to become a priesthood. We don't want society's technological thinkers to know something that nobody else knows—to "bring down the law from Mt. Sinai"—because such a situation would lead to public fear of science and scientists. And fear, as you know, can be dangerous.
Plowboy: But scientific knowledge is becoming so incredibly vast and specialized these days that it's difficult for any individual to keep up with it all.
Asimov: Well, I don't expect everybody to be a scientist or to understand every new development. After all, there are very few Americans who know enough about football to be a referee or to call the plays … but many, many people understand the sport well enough to follow the game. It's not important that the average citizen understand science so completely that he or she could actually become involved in research, but it is very important that people be able to "follow the game" well enough to have some intelligent opinions on policy.
Every subject of worldwide importance—each question upon which the life and death of humanity depends—involves science, and people are not going to be able to exercise their democratic right to direct government policy in such areas if they don't understand what the decisions are all about.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life, Death, People, World

“It's true that the average human in the Xeelee universe can't eat Jell-O with a straw without accident[al]ly removing an eye but these particular humans start off no stupider than than any other human of their era and proceed to breed themselves into imbecility. Well, farther into imbecility.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[cvo12q$oii$1@reader2.panix.com, 2005]
2000s

Stupidity, Lying, Universe

“To hit in, it's okay; for power, it's not. If you get a line drive in this park, you're in good shape. It's best to hit to right field in this park because of the wall." He explained that balls bounding off and around the right field wall produce more extra base hits. He also said that he doesn't try for the home run. "If I tried hard, I might hit 20 to 25 homers a year. But if you hit for a high average, you will help the ball club more.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

On hitting at Forbes Field; as quoted and paraphrased in "Clemente Unorthodox?" Well, He Gets Results"
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>

Home, Help

“I approached the problem of utility measurement in 1923 during a stay in Paris. There were three objects I had in view :
:(I) To point out the choice axioms that are implied when we think of utility as a quantity, and to define utility in a rigorous way by starting from a set of such axioms;
:(II) To develop a method of measuring utility statistically;
:(III) To apply the method to actual data.
The results of my study along these lines are contained in a paper “Sur un Problème d’Économic Pure”, published in the Series Norsk Matematisk Forenings Skrifter, Serie I, Nr 16, 1926. In this paper, the axiomatics are worked out so far as the static utility concept is concerned. The method of measurement developed is the method of isoquants, which is also outlined in Section 4 below. The statistical data to which the method was applied were sales and price statistics collected by the “Union des Coopérateurs Parisien”. From these data I constructed what I believe can be considered the marginal utility curve of money for the “average” member of the group of people forming the customers of the union. To my knowledge, this is the first marginal utility curve of money ever published.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch (1932) New Methods of Measuring Marginal Utility. Mohr, Tübingen. p. 2-3: Quoted in: Dagsvik, John K., Steinar Strøm, and Zhiyang Jia. " A stochastic model for the utility of income http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp358.pdf." (2003). 1930s

Money, People, Way, Knowledge

“Hay fever suffers tend to be above average in intelligence,…”

Andrew Tobias (1947) American journalist

Source: The Invisible Bankers, Everything The Insurance Industry Never Wanted You To Know (1982), Chapter 12, They Bet Your Life, p. 225.

Intelligence, Suffering

“On the average, people spend at least one-third of their lives asleep. While asleep, all of us dream, although we may not remember our dreams. It is important to understand exactly what is occurring while we are in that altered state so that we can use that time of sleep to enhance our functioning in the waking state.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 18

People, Dreams, Understanding, Sleep

“Finns live in smaller homes than Americans and consume a lot less. They spend relatively little on national defense, though they still have universal male conscription, and it is popular. Their per capita national income is about 30 percent lower than ours. Private consumption of goods and services represents about 52 percent of Finland's economy, and 71 percent of the United States'. Finns pay considerably higher taxes — nearly half their income — while Americans pay about 30 percent on average to federal, state and local governments.”

Robert G. Kaiser (1943) American journalist

2000s, "Why can't we be more like Finland?" (2005)

Home, Universe

“This means that if in a city seven accidents occur each week, then (assuming that all possible distributions are equally likely) practically all weeks will contain days with two or more accidents, and on the average only one week out of 165 will show a uniform distribution of one accident per day.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter II, Elements Of Combinatorial Analysis, p. 32.

“Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Sex

“If we observe the performance of only those funds that remain active, we will tend to find that the average performance of the surviving funds exceeds that of the market.”

Robert Haugen (1942–2013) American economist

Source: The Inefficient Stock Market - What Pays Off And Why (1999), Chapter 6, Counterattack-The First Wave, p. 63 (See also: Survival bias)

“Hall: Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a wonderful country - I've been there umpteen times and it is being brought to extinction by Mugabe. The average life expectancy is 33, so if you are not dying from Aids, malnutrition, starvation, deprivation or stagnation, don your flannels, black up, play leather on willow. Mugabe as captain and witch doctor, imagine him out at Lord's casting a tincture of bats' tongues and gorillas' gonads.”

Stuart Hall (1929–2014) sociologist and cultural theorist

BBC Fighting Talk (2005)

Life, Imagination, Time, Country

“The study's leaders claim to have bona fide research — I say "bonified" probably here — bonified research that says the average size of a penis is roughly 10% smaller than it was 50 years ago, and the researchers say air pollution is why. Air pollution, global warming has been shown to negatively impact penis size, Italian researchers. I don't buy this, I think it's feminism. If it's tied to the last 50 years — the average size of a member is 10 percent smaller than 50 years — it has to be the feminazis, the chickification and everything else. Give 'em time and they'll blame Bush. Give 'em time. But air pollution vs. feminazis? Ha!”

Rush Limbaugh (1951) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, author, and television personality

The Rush Limbaugh Show
2012-09-20
Radio, quoted in [2012-09-20, Limbaugh: Penises Now '10 Percent Smaller' and Shrinking Because of 'Feminazis', David, Crooks and Liars, http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/limbaugh-penises-now-10-percent-smaller-and-]

Thinking, Study, Time

“The average Russian of mature age today may some day have the moral satisfaction of seeing his government exercise a power unprecedented in history over the land masses of Asia and Europe. But it is not likely that he will ever know the comforts, in the line of housing, clothing, and other conveniences of civilized living, comparable to those that have existed in the advanced countries of the West. That renunciation of comfort is his involuntary contribution to something: either to the future comfort of his own children or to the increased military power of Russia. He hopes — and we hope with him — that it will not be only the latter.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

Memoirs 1925 - 1950 (1967), Russia — Seven Years Later (September 1944)

Children, Age, Hope, Exercises

“Historically … it is traditional and habitual for us to be inadequately prepared. This is the combined result of a number factors, the character of which is only indicated: democracy, which tends to make everyone believe that he knows it all; the preponderance (inherent in democracy) of people whose real interest is in their own welfare as individuals; the glorification of our own victories in war and the corresponding ignorance of our defeats (and disgraces) and of their basic causes; the inability of the average individual (the man in the street) to understand the cause and effect not only in foreign but domestic affairs, as well as his lack of interest in such matters. Added to these elements is the manner in which our representative (republican) form of government has developed as to put a premium on mediocrity and to emphasise the defects of the electorate already mentioned.”

Ernest King (1878–1956) United States Navy admiral, Chief of Naval Operations

p. 236-237.

War, People, Democracy, Understanding

“I believe people can solve complex problems eventually. By repeated trial and error they will get there; but they need a long time. At this point I agree with Herbert Simon. People do not learn immediately, as those rational expectations models seem to imply. I don't believe that.
The statement that assumptions do not matter is nonsense. It is funny. Yes, I assume people are consistent in their behavior. I assume that not because I believe everybody actually is, but because I believe, on the average, you do not get too far from it.”

Franco Modigliani (1918–2003) Italian-American economist

Conversations with Economists (1983)

People, Behavior, Error, Problem

“Don't cross a river if it is four feet deep on average.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 161

“Halliburton is not a "company" doing business in Iraq. It is a WAR PROFITEER, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars they would have been arrested — or worse.
The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

2004

War, Business, Past

“Tall, sandy blonde, with sort of blue eyes, skinny in places, fat in others. An average gal.”

Uma Thurman (1970) American actress and model

Interview with Laura Yorke. Reader's Digest. July 2006

“If I look in the mirror when I get up, or before going to bed a night, i see a man of average ugliness…But I also see a man who's completely happy with the figure staring back at him. Who's proud of every single second of his past.”

Andrea Pirlo (1979) Italian footballer

Ibid [p. 147]

Happiness, Past, Night

“In the beginning of 1917, two solutions of the field equations for a homogeneous isotropic universe had been found, which I… call the solutions "A" and "B."… at that time only static solutions were looked for. It was thought that the universe must be a stable structure… In one of these solutions (B) the average density was zero, it was empty; the other one (A) had a finite density…. In B, to get the real universe, we should have to put in a few galactic systems, in A we should have to condense the evenly distributed matter into galactic systems. The universe A… has an average density, but no expansion. It is therefore called the static universe. B, on the other hand… expands, and it could only parade in the garb of a static universe because there is nothing in it to show the expansion. B is therefore called the empty universe. Thus we had two approximations : the static universe with matter and without expansion, and the empty one without matter and with expansion. The actual universe… has both matter and expansion… In 1917… the actual value of the density was still entirely unknown, and the expansion had not yet been discovered.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Universe, Time

“In some domains, women are more sexually selected than men; one could say in these cases that women have the larger “peacock’s tail.” An example can be found in the domain of physical attractiveness. Women are typically rated as better looking than men, by both men and women. The difference is plausibly a consequence of the fact that, although both sexes care about good looks in a mate, on average, men care somewhat more. This means that, since this sex difference first evolved, there has been a somewhat stronger selection pressure on women than men for physical attractiveness — the opposite of what we find in peacocks.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

(p. 149)
The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013)

Women, Men, Sex

“Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

Richard Koch (1950) German medical historian and internist

Source: The 80/20 principle: the secret of achieving more with less (1999), p. 142

People, Effort

“One of the abiding mysteries of my life is the fact that lipstick disappears from my mouth five minutes after I put it on. I’m in awe of women who are always––always––lipstick intact, even during and after meals. I guess I’m a chronic lip-biter, lip-licker and mouth-wiper. But since I found out that the average woman eats nine pounds of lipstick in her lifetime, I can’t bring myself to reapply that often. Whatever chemicals they’ve added to make a lipstick long-wearing, I’d just swallow those too.”

Andrea Lewis (writer) Microsoft employee

“ Fire and Ice,” Cadillac Cicatrix (2009)
2000-09

Life, Women

“I'm just your average Mexican-American Jewish Italian.”

Eric Garcetti (1971) American politician

2016, 2016 Democratic National Convention speech

“Rev. Mr. Monday, the Prophet of Punch, has shown that he is the world's greatest salesman of salvation, and that by efficient organization the overhead of spiritual regeneration may be kept down to an unprecedented rock-bottom basis. He has converted over two hundred thousand lost and priceless souls at an average cost of less than ten dollars a head.”

Sinclair Lewis book Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), Ch. 7

World, Soul

“The capacity for self-deception, rarely acknowledged or understood by those who offer us supernatural answers to our problems, is huge: as easy as it is to make a medium’s cold-reading statements ‘fit’ our own situation and come to believe that he must have some paranormal insight, it is hardly any more difficult for a would-be psychic with an average ego, upon hearing frequently positive feedback, to believe over time that he must be blessed with a special gift. It’s harder to think you’re doing it for real when you’re tossing tambourines in the dark or have ready-made ectoplasm stuffed into your mouth or bottom.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Harry Houdini on Deception (foreword) (2009)

Problem, Thinking, Time, Reading

“That there is a difference between the average and the first class man is known to all employers, but that the first class man can do in most cases from two to four times as much is known to few, and is fully realized only by those who have made a thorough and scientific study of the possibilities of men.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Shop Management, 1903, p. 1346.

Men, Study, Time

“The public regards lawyers with great distrust. They think lawyers are smarter than the average guy but use their intelligence deviously. Well, they're wrong. Usually they are not smarter.”

F. Lee Bailey (1933) American lawyer

Los Angeles Times, January 9, 1972.

Guy, Intelligence, Thinking

“By standardization is meant the reduction of any one line to fixed types and sizes. Thus in the case of the manufacturer of shoes he selects a few types that, in his opinion, will find favor in the market. But each foot is not measured and a shoe of the required type made to these measurements. A limited number of sizes of each type is manufactured, these sizes being selected, by previous experience, so that any average man can find a pair that will fit him. The same holds true for the case of electric motors discussed above, and in fact for the entire field of manufactured products.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 42

Shoe

“A danger in emphasizing mean values for each sex is that these values may be projected onto all or most normally developing men and women. The mean may be treated as a description of the typical group member, despite the fact that the majority of individuals fall above or below it. Psychologists do make some effort to stress that means cannot be attributed to all members of any group, as evidenced by the fact that we often append the phrase “on average” to our descriptions of mean differences. But is this enough? Consider again the robust sex difference in willingness to engage in casual sex: The mean SO [sociosexuality] score for men is higher than that for women. What does this tell us, though, about individual men and women? It clearly does not tell us that all men are interested in casual sex and that all women are not. However, given the degree of overlap between the male and female distributions, it also does not tell us that a large majority of men are more interested in casual sex than a large majority of women. That is, it is not accurate to say even that “men are typically more interested in casual sex than women, but there are of course exceptions.””

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Here is what the data that the means are drawn from actually tell us:
Men and women can be found at virtually every level of interest in casual sex. At the right-hand tail of the distribution, only a small number of people are strongly interested in casual sex; however, of these people, more are men than women. At the left-hand tail, only a small number of people are strongly disinterested in casual sex; however, of these people, more are women than men. Most people — men and women — fall somewhere in between. If you were to choose one man and one woman at random, it would be somewhat more likely that the man would have higher SO. However, you wouldn't want to bet your life savings on it. Around a third of the time — i.e., closer to 50% than to 0% — the woman would have higher SO.
The Ape that Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2013)

Women, Men, Sex, Effort

“I hold in fact
(1) That small portions of space are in fact of a nature analogous to little hills on a surface which is on the average flat; namely, that the ordinary laws of geometry are not valid in them.
(2) That this property of being curved or distorted is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave.
(3) That this variation of the curvature of space is what really happens in that phenomenon which we call the motion of matter, whether ponderable or etherial.
(4) That in the physical world nothing else takes place but this variation, subject possibly to the law of continuity.”

William Kingdon Clifford On the Space-Theory of Matter

Abstract
On the Space-Theory of Matter (read Feb 21, 1870)

World, Law, Nature

“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.”

Charles Stross book Accelerando

Source: Accelerando (2005), Chapter 7 (“Curator”), p. 266

Intelligence

“I think the average Jew is probably sharper intellectually than the average gentile, because for years and years he's had to live by his wits. Consequently, there has evolved a race of Jews who are more agile mentally than the rest of us.”

George Lincoln Rockwell (1918–1967) American politician, founder of the American Nazi Party

Interview with Alex Haley

Thinking

“To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the "Hochschule für Politik", a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin
1920s

Love, Women, Men, People

“Now, Lincoln' position was consistent throughout the debates. A great deal is said—Dr. DiLorenzo says it, but it's been said countless times before—that Lincoln used racist language in the debates. That’s not true. Now what Lincoln argued for in the debates was the recognition of the natural rights of black people, when Douglas said that if the people of Nebraska are good enough to govern themselves, they certainly are good enough to govern a few miserable Negroes. And Lincoln replied by saying, "I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are as good as the average of people elsewhere, what I say is that no man is good enough to govern another without his consent."”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

People, Nature, Time

“Good management consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.”

John D. Rockefeller (1839–1937) American business magnate and philanthropist

As quoted in The Harper Book of Quotations (1993) by Robert I. Fitzhenry, p. 71; the earliest published occurrence of such remarks yet located were those of Jim Low in "The Human in Public Relations" a diner address in Proceedings, Seventh Annual Meeting of the Agricultural Research Institute, October 13-14, 1958, Washington, Pt. 3, p. 83
Disputed

People, For Team

“The average voter out there understands that the next president is going to have to be prepared to immediately step in without hesitation and end our involvement in Iraq. It's very difficult to figure out how to move on to broader foreign policy concerns without fixing Iraq first.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Biden officially running for president, MSNBC.com, January 31, 2007, 2007-02-01 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16901147/, 2000s

Understanding

“[The Joker is a] psychopathic, mass murdering, schizophrenic clown with zero empathy. … Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night. I couldn't stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind was still going.”

Heath Ledger (1979–2008) Australian actor

Speaking about playing the Joker, in an interview conducted by Sarah Lyall, during filming of The Dark Knight, in London, as quoted in [Sarah Lyall, Movies: In Stetson or Wig, He's Hard to Pin Down, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lyal.html, The New York Times, Movies, nytimes.com, Web, November 4, 2007, 2008-08-18]

Thinking, Night

“I am the guru of greatness, the shaman of sexy, the ECW champion John Morrison. I am beyond good and evil, a portal to the infinite. Punk, you are temporary, fleeting, a footnote to an average reality. You want me to embarrass you at SummerSlam? Is that it? Then go ahead, sign it, but the fact is you can't handle the pressure, Punk. You couldn't handle being the ECW champion.”

John Hennigan (1979) American professional wrestler

CM Punk/John Morrison contract signing http://youtube.com/watch?v=6EUO__hwKvE

Reality, Evil

“There ain't no man can avoid being born average. But there ain't no man got to be common.”

Satchel Paige (1906–1982) American baseball player and coach; Negro Leagues

"Words of the Week" Jet (Sep 4, 1958)

“The United States Congress, acting with large bipartisan majorities, at the urging of the President, enacted as the law of the land that all children are to be above average.”

Charles Murray (1943) American libertarian political scientist, author, and columnist

Regarding the No Child Left Behind Act. The Age of Educational Romanticism http://www.aei.org/article/27962, The New Criterion, Thursday, May 1, 2008.

Children, Law

“Zoos mislead their visitors by the way the species are housed. Birds are in the Bird House, of course, and crocodiles are always segregated to the Reptile House with the other naked-skinned, scale-covered brutes. So the average visitor leaves the zoo firmly persuaded that crocodilians are reptiles while birds are an entirely different group defined by "unreptilian" characteristics - feathers and flight. But a turkey's body and a croc's body laid out on a lab bench would present startling evidence of how wrong the zoos are once the two stomachs were cut into. The anatomy of their gizzards is strong evidence that crocodilians and birds are closely related and should be housed together in zoological classification, if not in zoo buildings.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 127
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Way, Bird, Strong, Housing

“If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x × y is less than y.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Sententiæ: The Citizen and the State
1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)

Democracy

“Understanding the methods of calculus is vital to the creative use of mathematics… Without this mastery the average scientist or engineer, or any other user of mathematics, will be perpetually stunted in development, and will at best be able to follow only what the textbooks say; with mastery, new things can be done, even in old, well-established fields.”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)

Mathematics, Understanding

“There are approximately 100,000 clerics in Iran and over 60,000 of them are in Qom. Most of them are theology students who have been studying there for many years, between 10-25 years on average…. Every student has to study a minimum of 25 years before he can attain the status of ‘ayatollah’, however most students spend 10 years studying in the hawza.”

Mohsen Kadivar (1959) Iranian philosopher

Inside Iran: Hujjat al Islam Mohsen Kadivar http://aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=3&id=8575 April 2007

Study

“An average idea enthusiastically embraced will go further than a genius idea no one gets.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.93

Idea

“Prior to his introduction to combat, the average flier possesses a series of intellectual and emotional attitudes regarding his relation to the war. The intellectual attitudes comprise his opinon concerning the necessity of the war and the merits of our cause. Here the American soldier is in a peculiarly disadvantageous position compared with his enemies and most of his Allies. Although attitudes vary from strong conviction to profound cynicism, the most usual reaction is one of passive acceptance of our part in the conflict. Behind this acceptance there is little real conviction. The political, economic or even military justifications for our involvement in the war are not apprehended except in a vague way. The men feel that, if our leaders, the “big-shots,” could not keep us out, then there is no help for it; we have to fight. There is much danger for the future in this attitude, since the responsibility is not personally accepted but is displaced to the leaders. If these should lose face or the men find themselves in economic difficulties in the postwar world, the attitude can easily shift to one of blame of the leaders. The the cry will rise: “We were betrayed—the politicians got us in for their own gain. The militarists made us suffer for it.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: Men Under Stress, 1945, p. 38-39 cited in: The Clare Spark Blog (2009) Strategic Regression in “the greatest generation” http://clarespark.com/2009/12/09/strategic-regression-in-the-greatest-generation/ December 9, 2009

Men, War, World, Way

“In eight simple ways, my Bill seeks to provide a framework for giving pensioners a decent living standard. First, it would fix old-age pensions for couples at half average industrial earnings, and for single people it would be a third…Secondly, my Bill would require central Government to appoint a Minister responsible for the co-ordination of policy on pensioners. Thirdly, it would require local authorities to produce a comprehensive annual report about their policies on pensioners and on the conditions of pensioners in their communities. Fourthly, every health authority would also be asked to do that. Fifthly, the present anomalous system means that in some parts of the country where there are foresighted Labour local authorities there are concessionary transport schemes — free bus passes. They do not exist in some parts of Britain and the Bill would make them a national responsibility and they would be paid for nationally…My sixth point is one of the most important. It is about the introduction of a flat-rate winter heating allowance instead of the nonsensical system of waiting for the cold to run from Monday to Sunday, and then if it is sufficiently cold a rebate is paid in arrears. Last winter that resulted in many old people living in homes that were too cold because they could not afford to heat them. If they did get any aid, it was far too late. My seventh point concerns the abolition of standing charges on gas, electricity and telephones for elderly people. They are paying about £250 million a year towards the profits of the gas industry and those profits will be about £1.5 billion. Standing charges should be cancelled, unit prices maintained and the cost of the standing charge should be taken from the profits of the gas board or the electricity board — if it ends up being privatised. They could well afford to pay for that rather than forcing old people to live in cold and misery throughout the winter. Finally, the Bill would prohibit the cutting off of gas and electricity in any pensioner household.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1987/dec/01/elimination-of-poverty-in-old-age-etc in the House of Commons (1 December 1987). 1980s

People, Health, Age, Way

“The European Commission uses an explicit relative poverty line of 60 per cent of national average income.”

Nicholas Barr (1943) British economist

Source: Economics Of The Welfare State (Fourth Edition), Chapter 6, Problems Of Definition And Measurement, p. 132

“The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out. The truth was in there somewhere, I knew it; the problem was coaxing it into the open.”

George Alec Effinger book When Gravity Fails

Source: When Gravity Fails (1986), Chapter 7 (p. 90).

Truth, Problem, Personality

“If you have standards, moral standards, you have to want to make them prevail, and at the very least you have to argue in their favor. Now, show me where libertarians have argued in some comprehensive way for a set of moral standards. … I don't think morality can be decided on the private level. I think you need public guidance and public support for a moral consensus. The average person has to know instinctively, without thinking too much about it, how he should raise his children.”

Irving Kristol (1920–2009) American columnist, journalist, and writer

Essay in the Wall Street Journal (1978).
1970s

Children, Way, Support, Thinking

“Optimism is normal, but some fortunate people are more optimistic than the rest of us. If you are genetically endowed with an optimistic bias, you hardly need to be told that you are a lucky person -- you already feel fortunate. Optimistic people play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders -- not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge.”

Daniel Kahneman (1934) Israeli-American psychologist

Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think (Part 1): Daniel Kahneman, bloomberg.com, 24 October 2011, 15 May 2014 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-24/bias-blindness-and-how-we-truly-think-part-1-daniel-kahneman.html, "Bias, Blindness and How We Truly Think" (2011)

People, Feeling, Optimism, Decision

“Creationists insist that mutations are very rare and are usually, if not always harmful. But the fact is that the vast majority of mutations are completely neutral. They’d have to be because, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, there is an overall average of 128 mutations per human zygote! So apparently, in creationist terms, “very rare” means “more than a hundred per person right from the point of conception”. Because those are just the mutations we start out with. Our cells will mutate again 30 more times over the course of our lives, and some of these subsequent mutations can be passed on to our children too –usually with no more effect than those we recognize as family traits.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism Source: "8th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU-7d06HJSs, Youtube (March 22, 2008)

Children, Family, Time, Personality

“She had called Martin a 'lie-hunter,' a 'truth-seeker.' They decided now that most people who call themselves 'truth-seekers'—persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as though it were a tangible separable thing, like houses or salt or bread—did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the 'secret of life' in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the Mind can do all sort of edifying things if one will but spend thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel. To these high matters Martin responded, 'Rot!' He insisted that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. He insisted that no one could expect more than, by stubbornness or luck, to have the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability to become better acquainted with the facts of that work than the average job-holder.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 25

Life, People, Truth, Lie

“So far as one understands a man, one is that man. The man of genius takes his place in the above argument as he who understands incomparably more other beings than the average man. Goethe is said to have said of himself that there was no vice or crime of which he could not trace the tendency in himself, and that at some period of his life he could not have understood fully. The genius, therefore, is a more complicated, more richly endowed, more varied man; and a man is the closer to being a genius the more men he has in his personality, and the more really and strongly he has these others within him.”

Otto Weininger book Sex and Character

Einen Menschen verstehen heißt also: auch er sein. Der geniale Mensch aber offenbarte sich an jenen Beispielen eben als der Mensch, welcher ungleich mehr Wesen versteht als der mittelmäßige. Goethe soll von sich gesagt haben, es gebe kein Laster und kein Verbrechen, zu dem er nicht die Anlage in sich verspürt, das er nicht in irgend einem Zeitpunkte seines Lebens vollauf verstanden habe. Der geniale Mensch ist also komplizierter, zusammengesetzter, reicher; und ein Mensch ist um so genialer zu nennen, je mehr Menschen er in sich vereinigt, und zwar, wie hinzugefügt werden muß, je lebendiger, mit je größerer Intensität er die anderen Menschen in sich hat.
Source: Sex and Character (1903), p. 106.

Life, Men, Understanding, Personality

“Average person has 3500 defective genes. But that would not be the case when the race was pure and clean.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Coast-to-Coast AM interview (August 2-3, 2000)

Personality

“Average Americans have little or no influence over the making of U. S. government policy. … Wealthy Americans wield a lot of influence. By investing money in politics, they can turn economic power into political power.”

Benjamin Page (1939) Professor of Decision Making

Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2017), p. 90

Money

“Britain, with the most completely socialized health system in the West, now spends the lowest fraction of GNP on health care of any major nation. There are frequent complaints of excessive waits for elective surgery and other inconveniences, but British citizens live slightly longer than Americans, on average, and our overall health conditions are comparable.”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 6, Welfare, p. 250

Health, Waiting

“The neurobiologist Harry Jerison has made a long study of the trajectory of brain evolution since the advent of life on dry land. …the origin of new faunal groups is usually accompanied by a jump in the relative size of the brain, known as encephalization. …the first archaic mammals… were equipped with brains four to five times bigger than the average reptilian brain… primates are twice as encephalized as the average mammal. Within primates, the apes… are some twice the average size. And humans are three times as encephalized as the average ape.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Life, Study, Time

“In Rwanda children inherit land from their parents but in a country where the average family has more than five children that can only mean one thing – smaller parcels of land to live off. m30s00-m30s12”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

Children, Family, Parent, Country

“Every year right after the Christmas holidays, our IQ scores were posted on the bulletin board at the Academy. We, the juniors and seniors, had taken our tests several weeks ago, and for the last few days we were all nervous wrecks waiting to see our results. Of course, we were all told that what was really crucial for us to get into the college of our choice was the grade point average of our last two years of high school, plus our SAT scores. But we knew that our IQ score could also make a big difference because our IQ, we’d been told, was what gave us a true measure of our intelligence. So if we hadn’t worked real hard in school or hadn’t tested well in our college entrance exams, then our IQ could make all the difference.”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

School, Intelligence, Waiting, Holiday

“You know, I think you see a model here in Arizona. They passed a law here that says — that says that people who come here and try and find work, that the employer is required to look them up on E-Verify. This E-Verify system allows employers in Arizona to know who's here legally and who's not here legally. And as a result of E-Verify being put in place, the number of people in Arizona that are here illegally has dropped by some 14 percent, where the national average has only gone down 7 percent. So going back to the question that was asked, the right course for America is to drop these lawsuits against Arizona and other states that are trying to do the job Barack Obama isn't doing.”

Mitt Romney (1947) American businessman and politician

CNN Arizona Republican Presidential Debate http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1202/22/se.03.html, posed question: "Should there be aggressive, seek them out, find them and arrest them as Sheriff Arpaio advocates?"; referring to lawsuits against Arizona SB1070 2012

People, Law, Question, Thinking

“The average man takes life as a trouble. He is in a chronic state of irritation at the whole performance.
He does not learn to differentiate between troubles and difficulties, usually, until some real trouble bowls him over. He fusses about pin-pricks until a mule kicks him. Then he learns the difference.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Herbert N. Casson in: Sheet Metal Workers' International Association (1928) Sheet Metal Workers Journal p. 22
1920s-1940s

Life, Learning

“…there is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state.”

Jacques Ellul book The Technological Society

Source: The Technological Society (1954), p. 274

Men, Secret, Understanding, Knowledge

“Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Uniformity and Catastrophe", p. 147
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

God, Home, Science, Time

“Our economy is a hundred times better, than the average African economy. Outside South Africa, what country is [as good as] Zimbabwe? … What is lacking now are goods on the shelves—that is all.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Interview with Heidi Holland (December 2007)
2000s, 2005 - 2009

Time, Country

“If values are fairly evenly distributed around an average, then roughly two-thirds of all outcomes will be one standard deviation other side of the average.”

Steve Keen (1953) Australian economist

Source: Debunking Economics - The Naked Emperor Of The Social Sciences (2001), Chapter 10, The Price Is Not Right, p. 235

“I don't believe that the average fellow has anything like a true line on the value of wrist action in hitting anything—a baseball, a golf ball, a tennis ball or a polo ball. If you watch most of them, you will see they are trying to hit with their bodies, with their shoulders, with their arms—with almost everything except their wrists. I think it comes because most of them are overanxious, all tied up, too tense. They start by gripping too tightly. That kills off the hands and wrists. Their wrists get locked and then they have to swing their shoulders and bodies in. You'd be surprised how far a fellow can hit a ball, using only his wrists. I know I've been caught off guard or out of position on a sharp breaking curve, have had to slap at the ball, using only my wrists and have now and then watched it sail over the fence. The wrist is the mainspring—both wrists in baseball and golf. If you get them to work the rest is fairly easy. If you don't get them to work you are not going to do any good hitting. You can't get any speed in closing a door if the hinges are rusty and won't work. Hack Wilson must have great wrist action, for no short, stocky guy is going to hit that many home runs without a lot of it.”

Babe Ruth (1895–1948) American baseball player

As quoted in "The Sportlight" by Grantland Rice, in The Baltimore Sun (August 22, 1930), p. 13

Guy, Home, Thinking, Speed

“If the question of the distribution of wealth were solved for all society and all lived in average comfort and without urgent anxiety, the question would still be how many would be at peace with their own souls and have that enduring joy and contentment which alone can make the outward things fair and sweet and rise victorious over change.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.2 The Social Aims of Jesus, p. 47

Peace, Soul, Question, Change

“Since 1965 […. ] the richest fifth of the world's population increased its average income by 75 percent. For the poorest fifth of the world's population, the increase has been faster still, with average incomes more than doubling during the same period.”

Johan Norberg book In Defense of Global Capitalism

In Defense of Global Capitalism

World

“He had made one of the greatest catches in Polo Grounds history; he had played third base as no Giant before or since ever played it; he was a slashing hitter and a scientific hitter; he played baseball with courage and spirit. Yet, somehow, failure hovered about him; a pebble in a base line is remembered more than his 24-game hitting streak; his feud with McGraw is recalled more vividly than his 4 hits in a single game against Walter Johnson or the three times he made three hits in a single game all the same season. His spat with Hornsby and his disagreement with Terry come more quickly to mind than those five years he tore pitchers apart; more quickly to mind than the years he hit.358 and.379.

It ought not to be that way. Two pebbles in a base line can cause a team to lose a World Series, but they can't wipe out the dazzling years, the.311 lifetime average. Two pebbles ought not persuade baseball men to say Devlin or Groh or Herzog, but somehow they do. So we put Lindstrom here, on this greatest Giant team, and we put the pebbles back where they belong—as part of a rocky past that littered his way, but in no way diminished the greatness of Fred Lindstrom.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

On Fred Lindstrom, from "Lindy," in Greatest Giants of Them All (1967), pp. 196-197
Sports-related

Men, World, Way, History

“While the average Malaysian or Thai household spends only 34% of its income on food.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Food

“The average Korean alive in 1945 was to a far greater degree the product of Japanese rule than the Choson Dynasty.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

Source: 2010s, North Korea's Juche Myth (October 2015), p. 24

“The three basic mechanisms of averaging, feedback and division of labor give us a first idea of a how a CMM [Collective Mental Map] can be developed in the most efficient way, that is, how a given number of individuals can achieve a maximum of collective problem-solving competence. A collective mental map is developed basically by superposing a number of individual mental maps. There must be sufficient diversity among these individual maps to cover an as large as possible domain, yet sufficient redundancy so that the overlap between maps is large enough to make the resulting graph fully connected, and so that each preference in the map is the superposition of a number of individual preferences that is large enough to cancel out individual fluctuations. The best way to quickly expand and improve the map and fill in gaps is to use a positive feedback that encourages individuals to use high preference paths discovered by others, yet is not so strong that it discourages the exploration of new paths.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Source: Collective Intelligence and its Implementation on the Web (1999), p.265

Way, Idea, Problem, Strong

“When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 144.

People, Feeling, Science

“While she was exceptional, I was average, a man whose major accomplishment in life was to love her without reservation, and that would never change.”

Nicholas Sparks (1965) American writer and novelist

Ira Levinson, Chapter 14 Ira, p. 187
2009, The Longest Ride (2013)

Love, Life, Change

“He [ Krishnamurti ] has received divine honors in India and in the West. I had a long interview with him, found him of average intelligence, of rather lovable disposition, of mediocre spiritual intuitions, and heard him swear in good, round English! I came away feeling that if he is all we, as a race, have to look to in order to get out of the muddle we are in, then God pity us.”

E. Stanley Jones (1884–1973) Methodist missionary and theologian

The Christ of the Indian Road (1925); Quoted by A. McD Redwood in Heresies Exposed (3rd edition, 1921) under the chapter Theosophy

God, Feeling, Intelligence

“The types of collection in the book -– microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us –- are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/edward-snowden-after-months-of-nsa-revelations-says-his-missions-accomplished/2013/12/23/49fc36de-6c1c-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html 2013 Christmas Message

26 December 2013

Books, Thinking, Personality

“Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Source: The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing (1949), Chapter II, The Investor and Stock-Market Fluctuations, p. 44

“The average man won't really do a day's work unless he is caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if people would do it.”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

Quoted in The Zanesville Sunday Times-Signal [Zanesville, Ohio] (15 March 1931): On reasons for the Great Depression

People

““Global warming” refers to the global-average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more. But to many politicians and the public, the term carries the implication that mankind is responsible for that warming. This website describes evidence from my group’s government-funded research that suggests global warming is mostly natural, and that the climate system is quite insensitive to humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions and aerosol pollution. Believe it or not, very little research has ever been funded to search for natural mechanisms of warming…it has simply been assumed that global warming is manmade. This assumption is rather easy for scientists since we do not have enough accurate global data for a long enough period of time to see whether there are natural warming mechanisms at work.”

Roy Spencer (1955) American meteorologist

Global Warming: Natural or Manmade? http://www.drroyspencer.com/global-warming-natural-or-manmade/

Search, Nature, Time

“I no longer believe that most traditional historians are emotionally equipped, even with training, to use their feelings as psychohistorical research tools, although there is a whole new generation of psychohistorians just now beginning to write who are able to do so. To expect the average historian to do psychohistory is like trying to teach a blind man to be an astronomer […]. Whenever I speak to a scholar of the emotional development necessary to make a good psychohistorian and get a blank look of total incomprehension, I try to find a way to leave the subject of psychohistory altogether. My listener usually is in another world of discourse where emotional reactions are not considered crucial to the results.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, ibid.

World, Way, Feeling, Training

“He is a farmer. He lives a simple life. He's pretty well educated. He's read Shakespeare, he's read Wordsworth. His wife is a teacher. They have a very comfortable life. They don't have anything to complain about in eighteen forty-nine. This is a key point. They did not have anything that would cause them distress. His expectations were perfectly comfortable expectations of an average family, a farming family in America. The Gold Rush changed that. Suddenly he wanted more. Suddenly he wasn't satisfied.”

J. S. Holliday (1924–2006) American historian

About William Swain
The West (1996)

Life, Education, Family, Teachers

“I was never capable of being an average pupil. I would either seem refractory to any teaching and give the impression of being completely dumb or I would fling myself on my work with a frenzy, a patience, and a willingness to learn that astonished everybody. But to awaken my zeal, it was necessary to offer me something I liked. Once my appetite had been whetted, I became ravenously hungry.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Source: Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1961 - 1970, Diary of a Genius (1964), pp. 5-6

Learning, Patience

“On the movie Monster: "I confess I went into the movie ready to dislike Miss Theron. I'm sick of newspaper articles detailing the amount of time, talent and technical wizardry required to turn some silver-screen beauty into an average-looking woman. There are plenty of average-looking women out there — gritty Britty TV drama seems to be full of them — and it seems excessively unfair that they can't even get a shot at the frumpy roles because Nicole Kidman's hogging the false nose again."”

Mark Steyn (1959) Canadian writer

" Soured dream https://archive.is/20130710195125/archive.spectator.co.uk/article/3rd-april-2004/82/soured-dream", 2 April 2004

Women, Beauty, Time, Falseness

“I think there are things of which I and the people who have worked with me can feel deservedly proud. They include restoring Russia's territorial integrity, strengthening the state, progress towards establishing a multiparty system, strengthening the parliamentary system, restoring the Armed Forces' potential and, of course, developing the economy. As you know, our economy has been growing by 6.9 percent a year on average over this time, and our GDP has increased by 7.7 percent over the first four months of this year alone.
When I began my work in the year 2000, 30 percent of our population was living below the poverty line. There has been a two-fold drop in the number of people living below the poverty line since then and the figure today is around 15 percent. By 2009-2010, we will bring this figure down to 10 percent, and this will bring us in line with the European average.
We had enormous debts, simply catastrophic for our economy, but we have paid them off in full now. Not only have we paid our debts, but we now have the best foreign debt to GDP ratio in Europe. Our gold and currency reserve figures are well known: in 2000, they stood at just $12 billion and we had a debt of more than 100 percent of GDP, but now we have the third-biggest gold and currency reserves in the world and they have increased by $90 billion over the first four months of this year alone.
During the 1990s and even in 2000-2001, we had massive capital flight from Russia with $15 billion, $20 billion or $25 billion leaving the country every year. Last year we reversed this situation for the first time and had capital inflow of $41 billion. We have already had capital inflow of $40 billion over the first four months of this year. Russia's stock market capitalisation showed immense growth last year and increased by more than 50 percent. This is one of the best results in the world, perhaps even the best. Our economy was near the bottom of the list of world economies in terms of size but today it has climbed to ninth place and in some areas has even overtaken some of the other G8 countries' economies. This means that today we are able to tackle social problems. Real incomes are growing by around 12 percent a year. Real income growth over the first four months of this year came to just over 18 percent, while wages rose by 11-12 percent.
Looking at the problems we have yet to resolve, one of the biggest is the huge income gap between the people at the top and the bottom of the scale. Combating poverty is obviously one of our top priorities in the immediate term and we still have to do a lot to improve our pension system too because the correlation between pensions and the average wage is still lower here than in Europe. The gap between incomes at the top and bottom end of the scale is still high here – a 15.6-15.7-fold difference. This is less than in the United States today (they have a figure of 15.9) but more than in the UK or Italy (where they have 13.6-13.7). But this remains a big gap for us and fighting poverty is one of our biggest priorities.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

When asked in June 2007 at the interview with G8 journalists about main achievements of his presidency http://web.archive.org/web/20070607221025/http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2007/06/04/2149_type82916_132772.shtml.

People, World, Feeling, Problem