Quotes about contribution
page 4

Syama Prasad Mookerjee photo
Warren Farrell photo
Charles Erwin Wilson photo

“For years I thought that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the nation is considerable.”

Charles Erwin Wilson (1890–1961) American secretary of Defence

Charles E. Wilson (1952) in: Confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee, responding to Sen. Robert Hendrickson's question regarding conflicts of interest. Quoted in Safire's Political Dictionary (1978) by William Safire.

Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis photo
Mark Twain photo

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

Lawrence Durrell photo
Barbara Hepworth photo
Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
Dominique Bourg photo
David Eugene Smith photo
Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV photo

“I recall to mind on this occasion, said His Highness, "the words which I spoke nearly 21 years ago when I opened the Representative Assembly in person for the first time after I assumed the reins of Government. The hopes I then expressed of the value of the yearly gatherings of the Assembly in contributing to the well-being and contentment of my subjects have been amply fulfilled. The Legislative Council, too, which came into existence in 1907.”

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV (1884–1940) King of Mysore

At the Inauguration of the Reformed Legislative Council and the Representative Assembly on the 17th March 1924 Modern_Mysore, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Open University, 26 November 2013, archive.org, 330-32 http://archive.org/stream/modernmysore035292mbp/modernmysore035292mbp_djvu.txt,
As ruler of the state

Warren Farrell photo
Franklin D. Roosevelt photo
Paul Krugman photo
Alexander Bain photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Zeev Sternhell photo
Tenzin Gyatso photo

“Each of us has the potential to contribute … You have a great opportunity to make a new shape of the world.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

As quoted in "Dalai Lama urges students to shape world" in The Seattle Times (15 May 2001) http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20010515&slug=dalai15m0.

“The use of pictures was creeping into the church already in the third century, because the council of Elvira in Spain, held in 305, especially forbids to have any picture in the Christian churches. These pictures were generally representations of some events, either of the New or of the Old Testament, and their object was to instruct the common and illiterate people in sacred history, whilst others were emblems, representing some ideas connected with the doctrines of Christianity. It was certainly a powerful means of producing an impression upon the senses and the imagination of the vulgar, who believe without reasoning, and admit without reflection; it was also the most easy way of converting rude and ignorant nations, because, looking constantly on the representations of some fact, people usually end by believing it. This iconographic teaching was, therefore, recommended by the rulers of the church, as being useful to the ignorant, who had only the understanding of eyes, and could not read writings. Such a practice was, however, fraught with the greatest danger, as experience has but too much proved. It was replacing intellect by sight. Instead of elevating man towards God, it was bringing down the Deity to the level of his finite intellect, and it could not but powerfully contribute to the rapid spread of a pagan anthropomorphism in the church.”

Walerian Krasiński (1795–1855) historian

Introductory dissertation to John Calvin's Treatise on Relics (1854)

Calvin Coolidge photo
Warren G. Harding photo

“I want to see the time come when black men will regard themselves as full participants in the benefits and duties of American citizens. We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population... set off from real contribution to solving national issues, because of a division on race lines.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

Speech delivered to a segregated, mixed race audience at Woodrow Wilson Park in Birmingham, Alabama on the occasion of the city's semicentennial, published in the Birmingham Post (27 October 1921).
1920s

Igor Ansoff photo
Edmund Phelps photo
Ryan C. Gordon photo

“If I'm the only one pushing Linux gaming, we have a serious problem. I'm happy for the contributions I've made, but I would be happier to know that Linux gaming can continue if I get hit by a bus. There are others out there doing what I do. You should interview them too.”

Ryan C. Gordon (1978) Computer programmer

Quoted in Luboš Doležel, "Interview: Ryan C. Gordon" http://www.abclinuxu.cz/clanky/rozhovor-ryan-c.-gordon-icculus?page=1 AbcLinuxu.cz (2011-03-08)

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo

“In the current debate about immigration, it is worth noting that this award is yet another example of the numerous contributions that immigrants make to British society.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Quoted in "Knighthood for Venkatraman Ramakrishnan".

Norbert Wiener photo
Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“In 1965 alone we had 300 private talks for peace in Vietnam, with friends and adversaries throughout the world. Since Christmas your government has labored again, with imagination and endurance, to remove any barrier to peaceful settlement. For 20 days now we and our Vietnamese allies have dropped no bombs in North Vietnam. Able and experienced spokesmen have visited, in behalf of America, more than 40 countries. We have talked to more than a hundred governments, all 113 that we have relations with, and some that we don't. We have talked to the United Nations and we have called upon all of its members to make any contribution that they can toward helping obtain peace. In public statements and in private communications, to adversaries and to friends, in Rome and Warsaw, in Paris and Tokyo, in Africa and throughout this hemisphere, America has made her position abundantly clear. We seek neither territory nor bases, economic domination or military alliance in Vietnam. We fight for the principle of self-determination—that the people of South Vietnam should be able to choose their own course, choose it in free elections without violence, without terror, and without fear. The people of all Vietnam should make a free decision on the great question of reunification. This is all we want for South Vietnam. It is all the people of South Vietnam want. And if there is a single nation on this earth that desires less than this for its own people, then let its voice be heard. We have also made it clear—from Hanoi to New York—that there are no arbitrary limits to our search for peace. We stand by the Geneva Agreements of 1954 and 1962. We will meet at any conference table, we will discuss any proposals—four points or 14 or 40—and we will consider the views of any group. We will work for a cease-fire now or once discussions have begun. We will respond if others reduce their use of force, and we will withdraw our soldiers once South Vietnam is securely guaranteed the right to shape its own future. We have said all this, and we have asked—and hoped—and we have waited for a response. So far we have received no response to prove either success or failure.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Johanna Mikl-Leitner photo

“This alliance of reason has so far provided the decisive contribution to preserve stability and order for the people in Europe”

Johanna Mikl-Leitner (1964) Austrian politician (ÖVP), former Member of National Council of Austria and former Federal Interior Minister of …

Mikl-Leitner said in reference to the Balkan countries along the route to the recent immigrant crisis, quoted on Newsweek, "BALKAN ROUTE WILL STAY CLOSED 'PERMANENTLY', SAYS AUSTRIA" http://www.newsweek.com/balkan-route-closed-permanently-austria-435359, March 10, 2016.

Donald Ervin Knuth photo

“The important thing, once you have enough to eat and a nice house, is what you can do for others, what you can contribute to the enterprise as a whole.”

Donald Ervin Knuth (1938) American computer scientist

Jack Woehr. An interview with Donald Knuth http://www.drdobbs.com/an-interview-with-donald-knuth/184409858. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 16-22 (April 1996)

William T. Sherman photo

“You also remember well who first burned the bridges of your railroad, who forced Union men to give up their slaves to work on the rebel forts at Bowling Green, who took wagons and horses and burned houses of persons differing with them honestly in opinion, when I would not let our men burn fence rails for fire or gather fruit or vegetables though hungry, and these were the property of outspoken rebels. We at that time were restrained, tied by a deep seated reverence for law and property. The rebels first introduced terror as a part of their system, and forced contributions to diminish their wagon trains and thereby increase the mobility and efficiency of their columns. When General Buell had to move at a snail's pace with his vast wagon trains, Bragg moved rapidly, living on the country. No military mind could endure this long, and we are forced in self defense to imitate their example. To me this whole matter seems simple. We must, to live and prosper, be governed by law, and as near that which we inherited as possible. Our hitherto political and private differences were settled by debate, or vote, or decree of a court. We are still willing to return to that system, but our adversaries say no, and appeal to war. They dared us to war, and you remember how tauntingly they defied us to the contest. We have accepted the issue and it must be fought out. You might as well reason with a thunder-storm.”

William T. Sherman (1820–1891) American General, businessman, educator, and author.

1860s, 1864, Letter to James Guthrie (August 1864)

Ken Thompson photo
Marshall McLuhan photo
Joe Higgins photo

“In view of the fact that the Royal Family of Britain is one of the wealthiest families in the world and this country is almost sleeping rough, so to speak, figuratively, would you ask the Queen if she might make a contribution towards her own bed and breakfast costs to assist the unfortunate taxpayers, and go easier on them?”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

JOE http://joe.ie/news-politics/current-affairs/td-joe-higgins-says-queen-should-pay-bed-and-breakfast-for-visit-0011580-1, CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/05/16/ireland.uk.queen.higgins/

Jared Diamond photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Yehudi Menuhin photo
Frances Kellor photo
Ludwig Boltzmann photo
Henry David Thoreau photo
Tom Robbins photo
André Gide photo

“The artist who is after success lets himself be influenced by the public. Generally such an artist contributes nothing new, for the public acclaims only what it already knows, what it recognizes.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

“Characters,” p. 306
Pretexts: Reflections on Literature and Morality (1964)

“Let's consider first Hayek's claim that prices in free market capitalism do not give people what they morally deserve. Hayek's deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational. Free market prices send signals to producers as to where their products are most in demand (and to consumers as to the opportunity costs of their options). They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information, and then only in aggregate form. This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure: there is no way to collect individualized supply and demand information in a single mind or planning agency, to use as a basis for setting prices. Free markets alone can effectively respond to this information.
It's a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking. They aim to reward people for virtuous conduct that they undertook in the past. Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now, not where the demand was when individual producers decided on their production plans. Capitalism is an inherently dynamic economic system. It responds rapidly to changes in tastes, to new sources of supply, to new substitutes for old products. This is one of capitalism's great virtues. But this responsiveness leads to volatile prices. Consequently, capitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents. However virtuous they were, by whatever standard of virtue one can name, individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn't to reward people for past good behavior. It's to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past.
This isn't to say that virtue makes no difference to what returns one may expect for one's productive contributions. The exercise of prudence and foresight in laying out one's production and investment plans, and diligence in carrying them out, generally improves one's odds. But sheer dumb luck is also, ineradicably, a prominent factor determining free market returns. And nobody deserves what comes to them by sheer luck.”

Elizabeth S. Anderson (1959) professor of philosophy and womens' studies

How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income" http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2005/01/how_not_to_comp_1.html (January 26, 2005)

William T. Sherman photo
Patrick Buchanan photo
Frank B. Jewett photo
Simon Kuznets photo
Pierre Duhem photo

“The one who contributed most to break down the barrier between physical method and metaphysical method, and to confound their domains, so clearly distinguished in the Aristotelian philosophy, was surely Descartes.”

Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) French physicist, historian of science

Notice sur les Titres et Travaux scientifiques de Pierre Duhem rédigée par lui-même lors de sa candidature à l'Académie des sciences (mai 1913), The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (1906)

Anu Partanen photo
David Lloyd George photo
Lima Barreto photo
Youssef Bey Karam photo
Amartya Sen photo
Yehudi Menuhin photo
Christopher Langton photo
Jerry Coyne photo
François Englert photo

“At the ULB, Brout and I initiated a research group in fundamental interactions, that is, in the search for the general laws of nature. Joined by brilliant students, many of them becoming world renowned physicists, our group contributed to the many fields at the frontier of the challenges facing contemporary physics. While the mechanism discovered in 1964 was developed all over the world to encode the nature of weak interactions in a "Standard Model," our group contributed to the understanding of strong interactions and quark confinement, general relativity and cosmology. There we introduced the idea of a primordial exponential expansion of the universe, later called inflation, which we related to the origin of the universe itself, a scenario, which I still think may possibly be conceptually the correct one. During these developments, our group extended our contacts with other Belgian universities and got involved in many international collaborations.
With our group and many other collaborators I analysed fractal structures, supergravity, string theory, infinite Kac-Moody algebras and more generally all tentative approaches to what I consider as the most important problem in fundamental interactions: the solution to the conflict between the classical Einsteinian theory of gravitation, namely general relativity, and the framework of our present understanding of the world, quantum theory.”

François Englert (1932) Belgian theoretical physicist

excerpt[François Englert - Biographical, Nobel Prize in Physics (nobelprize.org), 2013, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/englert-bio.html]

Dorothy Thompson photo
William Bateson photo
Lyndall Urwick photo
Alexander Marlow photo
Lane Kirkland photo
Alexander Cockburn photo

“There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend.”

Alexander Cockburn (1941–2012) Leftist journalist and writer

"Is Global Warming a Sin?" Counterpunch (28-30 April 2007).

Alfred de Zayas photo

“A ten per cent reduction in military expenditures per year would be reasonable, coupled with a programme of retraining the workforce and redirecting the resources in a manner that creates employment and advances social welfare. I also encourage all States to contribute to the UN’s annual Report on Military Expenditures by submitting complete data on national defence budgets.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations expert urges states to cut military spending and invest more in human development http://www.unog.ch/80256EDD006B9C2E/(httpNewsByYear_en)/D5D061E9891363C1C1257CB7003055E0?OpenDocument.
2014

Nelson Mandela photo

“Bernoulli's real contribution was to coin a word. The word has been translated into English as "utility". It describes this subjective value people place on money.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Part Four, St. Petersburg Wager, Daniel Bernoulli, p. 184
Fortune's Formula (2005)

Robert Menzies photo
Giacomo Casanova photo
Frank Klepacki photo
Theodore Dalrymple photo

“If we can sympathise only with the utterly blameless, then we can sympathise with no one, for all of us have contributed to our own misfortunes - it is a consequence of the human condition that we should. But it does nobody any favours to disguise from him the origins of his misfortunes, and pretend that they are all external to him in circumstances in which they are not.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Addiction and the Ipswich Murders: Theodore Dalrymple argues that the five murdered women were driven on to the streets not by addiction itself, but by myths about addiction http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/001306.php (December 14, 2006).
The Social Affairs Unit (2006 - 2008)

Colin Wilson photo
Howard S. Becker photo

“Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer's responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Becker (1986) "Do Photographs Tell the Truth?” and “Aesthetics and Truth" as cited in: Ingolf Erler (2010) Das Buch als soziales Symbol. p. 147.

André Breton photo
Bill Gates photo
Adolf Hitler photo

“In the Far West, the United States of America openly claimed to be custodians of the whole planet. Universally feared and envied, universally respected for their enterprise, yet for their complacency very widely despised, the Americans were rapidly changing the whole character of man’s existence. By this time every human being throughout the planet made use of American products, and there was no region where American capital did not support local labour. Moreover the American press, gramophone, radio, cinematograph and televisor ceaselessly drenched the planet with American thought. Year by year the aether reverberated with echoes of New York’s pleasures and the religious fervours of the Middle West. What wonder, then, that America, even while she was despised, irresistibly moulded the whole human race. This, perhaps, would not have mattered, had America been able to give of her very rare best. But inevitably only her worst could be propagated. Only the most vulgar traits of that potentially great people could get through into the minds of foreigners by means of these crude instruments. And so, by the floods of poison issuing from this people’s baser members, the whole world, and with it the nobler parts of America herself, were irrevocably corrupted.
For the best of America was too weak to withstand the worst. Americans had indeed contributed amply to human thought. They had helped to emancipate philosophy from ancient fetters. They had served science by lavish and rigorous research. In astronomy, favoured by their costly instruments and clear atmosphere, they had done much to reveal the dispositions of the stars and galaxies. In literature, though often they behaved as barbarians, they had also conceived new modes of expression, and moods of thought not easily appreciated in Europe. They had also created a new and brilliant architecture. And their genius for organization worked upon a scale that was scarcely conceivable, let alone practicable, to other peoples. In fact their best minds faced old problems of theory and of valuation with a fresh innocence and courage, so that fogs of superstition were cleared away wherever these choice Americans were present. But these best were after all a minority in a huge wilderness of opinionated self-deceivers, in whom, surprisingly, an outworn religious dogma was championed with the intolerant optimism of youth. For this was essentially a race of bright, but arrested, adolescents. Something lacked which should have enabled them to grow up. One who looks back across the aeons to this remote people can see their fate already woven of their circumstance and their disposition, and can appreciate the grim jest that these, who seemed to themselves gifted to rejuvenate the planet, should have plunged it, inevitably, through spiritual desolation into senility and age-long night.”

Source: Last and First Men (1930), Chapter II: Europe’s Downfall; Section 1, “Europe and America” (p. 33)

Cassandra Clare photo
John Stossel photo

“There is some good evidence man contributes to global warming. But I say, so what? We can deal with that. It's not a catastrophe. And cold is far worse for hurting people than warmth.”

John Stossel (1947) American consumer reporter, investigative journalist, author and libertarian columnist

[Fox & Friends, John Stossel, 2014-12-11, Fox News, Television], quoted in Fox segment on ‘ridiculous’ climate change devolves into talk of humans living with dinosaurs, Raw Story, David Edwards, 2014-12-11, 2014-12-15 http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/fox-segment-on-ridiculous-climate-change-devolves-into-talk-of-humans-living-with-dinosaurs/,

Phillip Guston photo
Herbert Hoover photo
Melanie Phillips photo
John Maynard Smith photo
J. C. R. Licklider photo

“I came to MIT from Harvard University, where I was a lecturer. I had been at the Harvard Psychoacoustic Laboratory during World War II and stayed on at Harvard as a lecturer, mainly doing research, but also a little bit of teaching—statistics and physiological psychology—subjects like that.
Then there came a time that I thought that I had better go pay attention to my career. I had just been having a marvelous time there. I am not a good looker for jobs; I just came to the nearest place I could, which was in our city. I arranged to come down here and start up a psychology section, which we hoped would eventually become a psychology department. For the purposes of having a base of some kind I was in the Electrical Engineering Department. I even taught a little bit of electrical engineering.
I fell in love with the summer study process that MIT had. They had one on undersea warfare and overseas transport—a thing called Project Hartwell. I really liked that. It was getting physicists, mathematicians—everybody who could contribute—to work very intensively for a period of two or three months. After Hartwell there was a project called Project Charles, which was actually two years long (two summers and the time in between). It was on air defense. I was a member of that study. They needed one psychologist and 20 physicists. That led to the creation of the Lincoln Laboratory. It got started immediately as the applied section of the Research Laboratory for Electronics, which was already a growing concern at MIT.”

J. C. R. Licklider (1915–1990) American psychologist and computer scientist

Licklider in: " An Interview with J. C. R. LICKLIDER http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/107436/1/oh150jcl.pdf" conducted by William Aspray and Arthur Norberg on 28 October 1988, Cambridge, MA.