Quotes about decrease (176 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The hallucinogens produce visionary states, sort of, but morphine and its derivatives decrease awareness of inner processes, thoughts and feelings. They are pain killers; pure and simple. They are absolutely contraindicated for creative work, and I include in the lot alcohol, morphine, barbiturates, tranquilizers — the whole spectrum of sedative drugs.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

Quoted in interview, The Paris Review (Fall 1965), in response to "The visions of drugs and the visions of art don't mix?"

Pain , Alcohol , Feeling

“If you are not capable of cruelty, then you are absolutely a victim of anyone who is. For those who are exceedingly agreeable, there is a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them, which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect, because it is impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth. And if you grow teeth, you realize that you're somewhat dangerous, or seriously dangerous. Then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and that other people do the same thing. That doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel. What it means is that being able to be cruel, and then not being cruel, is better than not being able to be cruel, because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naive, and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control. If you're competent at fighting, it actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight, because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence, and with any luck a reasonable show of confidence, which is a show of dominance, will be enough to make the bully back off.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLc_MC7NQek&t=0s "2017 Personality 04/05: Heroic and Shamanic Initiations"

People , Confidence , Fight , Parting

“Your Value Doesn't Decrease Based On Someone's Inability To See Your Worth.”

Keanu Reeves (1964) Canadian actor, director, producer and musician

https://successtutorship.com/10-famous-keanu-reeves-quotes/

“In proportion therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.”

Karl Marx book The Communist Manifesto

Source: The Communist Manifesto

“Days decrease, / And autumn grows, autumn in everything.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Autumn

“The increase in value of the world of things is directly proportional to the decrease in value of the human world.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844/The Communist Manifesto

World

“It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Back To Work

“Predictably, under democratic conditions the tendency of every monopoly - to increase prices and decrease quality - will be only more pronounced. Instead of a prince who regards the country as his private property, a temporary caretaker is put in charge of the country. He does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his proteges’ advantage. He owns its current use - usufruct - but not its capital stock. This will not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it will make exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock, i. e., short-sighted. Moreover, the perversion of justice will proceed even faster now. Instead of protecting pre-existing private property rights, democratic government becomes a machine for the redistribution of existing property rights in the name of illusory `social security.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

"The Future of Liberalism - A Plea For A New Radicalism" http://www.hanshoppe.com/publications/hoppe-plea.pdf

Justice , Country

“He found that if people wrote about uncertain things - past, present, or future - they could be traumatic things, they could be uncertain things, that their physical health improved. He did a lot of detailed research to find out why this is. He basically figured out that it is an uncertainty reduction mechanism at work, because your brain is always figuring out how well situated you are in the world. How much do you not know compared to how much have you mastered. You can tell that you've mastered things because when you go somewhere and you act, things turn out the way you want them to. That's an indication of mastery. And your brain is keeping track of your whole life, recording information about how many places you have been where things haven't worked out compared to how many places you have been where things have worked out. And if all those places in your past where things haven't worked out, you need to map and master. And that decreases the existential load on you, but that actually decreases your psych-physiological load. It makes you healthier. It makes you less stressed. And so we have put all that together in this Self-Authoring Suite to help people write about their past and to sort it out in a detailed auto-biography.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life , People , Health , World

“A name made great is a name destroyed. He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it.”

Hillel the Elder (-112–9 BC) Mishnah rabbi

1:13
Pirkei Avot

Knowledge

“The two preponderant forces at work are technological development, which made for a relative increase in demand and hence in the income ratio… and increased access to schooling, which made for a relative decrease.”

Jan Tinbergen (1903–1994) Dutch economist

Source: Income Distribution (1975), p. 35; Cited in: Acemoglu (2000, p. 16)

School

“And finally, rising inequality and declining mobility are bad for our democracy. Ordinary folks can’t write massive campaign checks or hire high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else’s expense. And so people get the bad taste that the system is rigged, and that increases cynicism and polarization, and it decreases the political participation that is a requisite part of our system of self-government.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Remarks on Economic Mobility (December 2013)

People , Democracy , Parting

“Why… are there any market transactions at all? Why not all production carried on by one big firm?… First, as a firm gets larger, there may be decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function, that is, the costs of organizing additional transactions within the firm may rise… Second, it may be that as the transactions which are organized increase, the entrepreneur fails to place the factors of production in the uses where their value is greatest, that is, fails to make the best use of the factors of production… Finally, the supply price of one or more of the factors of production may rise, because the "other advantages" of a small firm are greater than those of a large firm.”

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

Source: 1930s-1950s, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), p. 394-5

“Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Out Of The Crisis (1982), p. 23 (Point 5 from the "Condensation of the 14 Points for Management" presented in Chapter 2)

“I had a terrible dream yesterday with military helicopters and the Taliban. I have had such dreams since the launch of the military operation in Swat. My mother made me breakfast and I went off to school. I was afraid going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from attending schools. Only 11 students attended the class out of 27. The number decreased because of Taliban’s edict.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

Malala. "I am afraid", Saturday 3 January 2009; Cited in: Malala Yousafzai: Portrait of the girl blogger http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19899540, bbc.co.uk, 10 October 2012
Malala's diary, 2009

School , Dreams , Girl

“The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, Remarks on Economic Mobility (December 2013)
Context: So let me repeat: The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe. And it is not simply a moral claim that I’m making here. There are practical consequences to rising inequality and reduced mobility. For one thing, these trends are bad for our economy. One study finds that growth is more fragile and recessions are more frequent in countries with greater inequality. And that makes sense. When families have less to spend, that means businesses have fewer customers, and households rack up greater mortgage and credit card debt; meanwhile, concentrated wealth at the top is less likely to result in the kind of broadly based consumer spending that drives our economy, and together with lax regulation, may contribute to risky speculative bubbles.

Life , Dreams , Way

“Though we have achieved considerable success in our policy of increasing production and maintaining full employment, this has been accompanied by constant pressure for higher wages resulting in higher prices. We have not yet found out how we can maintain full employment in combination with stable or decreasing costs and prices.”

Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) British politician

Memorandum, 'The Dollar Situation: Forthcoming Discussions with U.S.A. and Canada' (4 July 1949), quoted in Correlli Barnett, The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities: 1945–1950 (London: Pan, 1996), p. 353
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Success

“Unfortunately, the clock is ticking, the hours are going by. The past increases, the future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

Haruki Murakami book Dance Dance Dance

Source: Dance Dance Dance

Past , Future

“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Life , Soul , Sense , Reading

“There is nothing supernatural about the process of self-organization to states of higher entropy; it is a general property of systems, regardless of their materials and origin. It does not violate the Second Law of thermodynamics since the decrease in entropy within an open system is always offset by the increase of entropy in its surroundings.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 44.

Law

“The major obstacle and most difficult challenge in pursuit of a genuinely loving and caring relationship is to overcome the seductive powers and the addiction to the content approach to entering, creating, and maintaining it. The elusive golden thread of understanding lies in the how, and not the what. Specifically, as gender polarization in a relationship decreases, the experience of it improves. Without that rebalancing, even the most perfect content will unravel increasingly. Once the process is balanced, the magic of having ideal content is no longer necessary. The rebalancing process which creates a relationship free of polarizing gender defenses is clearly difficult and threatening initially in the same way that giving up an addiction seems to be. Once achieved however, a relationship free of distortion, false illusions, resentment, and hopelessness truly becomes possible.”

Herb Goldberg (1937–2019) American psychologist

What Men Still Don't Know About Transforming Their Relationships, pp. 194–198
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)

Love , Way , Understanding , Perfection

“A series of ever-decreasing splashes drip and plop into black water… thus the beginning of the film is reprised.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Prospero's Books

Water

“The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must keep in mind. Economy of notation is therefore important.”

Kenneth E. Iverson (1920–2004) Canadian computer scientist

§1.4
Notation as a Tool of Thought (1979)

“The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what otherwise would be his taxes, or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted.”

George Sutherland (1862–1942) Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, United States Senator, member of the United States House of Re…

Gregory v. Helvering, 293 U.S. 465, 469 (1935)

Law

“The new information technologies can be seen to drive societies toward increasingly dynamic high-energy regions further and further from thermodynamical equilibrium, characterized by decreasing specific entropy and increasingly dense free-energy flows, accessed and processed by more and more complex social, economic, and political structures.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Laszlo (1992) "Information Technology and Social Change: An Evolutionary Systems Analysis". Behavioral Science 37: p. 247.

“Decades of providing technology in growing volume and at decreasing costs have driven great gains for developing nations, communities and people worldwide, but there is still much to do.”

Paul Otellini (1950–2017) former president & CEO of Intel

Intel: "Intel Commits $1 Billion To Further Emerging Markets Strategy" https://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/2006/20060502corp.htm (2 May 2006)

People , Communication

“A question which has long troubled astronomers and physicists is what becomes of the energy that is continually being poured out into space by the sun and the stars. To this question a complete answer is given by the new theory. It is used up, diluted, or degraded, by the expansion of the universe. …the light travelling through the expanding universe and, so to say, trying to reach a particular star, or stellar system, which is continually receding with great velocity, is losing energy in trying to catch up with it. It is this degradation of the light, technically known as the redshift of the spectral lines, by which we become aware of the receding velocities of the extra-galactic nebulae. It can be shown that the decrease of the total amount of radiant energy in the universe by this degradation exceeds the increase by the radiation of the stars. It would not be correct, however, to conclude that the expansion is caused by the energy thus lost by the radiation…”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932)

Travel , Star , Question , Light

“There is no general reason to expect evolution to be progressive – even in the weak, value-neutral sense. There will be times when increased size of some organ is favoured and other times when decreased size is favoured. Most of the time, average-sized individuals will be favoured in the population and both extremes will be penalised. During these times the population exhibits evolutionary stasis (i. e., no change) with respect to the factor being measured. If we had a complete fossil record and looked for trends in some particular dimension, such as leg length, we would expect to see periods of no change alternating with fitful continuations or reversals in direction – like a weathervane in changeable, gusty weather.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

The Evolutionary Future of Man (1993)

Sense , Change , Time , Weather

“To decrease geometrically is this, that in equal times, first the whole quantity then each of its successive remainders is diminished, always by a like proportional part.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1889)

Time , Success , Parting

“In New Directions for Organization Theory, Jeffrey Pfeffer offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the field of organization theory and its research literature. This work traces the evolution of organization studies, particularly its more recent history, and highlights the principle concepts and controversies characterizing the study of organizations. Pfeffer argues that the world of organizations has changed in several important ways, including the increasing externalization of employment and the growing use of contingent workers; the changing size distribution of organizations, with a larger proportion of smaller organizations; the increasing influence of external capital markets on organizational decision-making and a concomitant decrease in managerial autonomy; and increasing salary inequality within organizations in the US compared both to the past and to other industrialized nations. These changes and their public policy implications make it especially important to understand organizations as social entities. But Pfeffer questions whether the research literature of organization studies has either addressed these changes and their causes or made much of a contribution to the discussion of public policy…”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Book abstract.
New Directions for Organization Theory, 1997

World , Way , History , Literature

“How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?”

Isaac Asimov book The Last Question

The Last Question (1956)

Universe

“While man is growing, life is in decrease;
And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb.
Our birth is nothing but our death begun.”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night V, Line 717.

Life , Death , Birth

“It is picked out from numbers progressing in continuous proportion. Of continuous progressions, an arithmetical is one which proceeds by equal intervals; a geometrical one which advances by unequal and proportionally increasing or decreasing intervals. Arithmetical progressions: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, &c.; or 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, &c, Geometrical progressions: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, &c.; or 243, 81, 27, 9, 3, 1.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1889)

“Arthritis vanishes, myopia gets better, heart illness decreases, asthma disappears, stomachs function properly and the whole catalog of illnesses goes away and stays away.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

1987 Edition, p. 72.
Dianetics : The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

Heart

“The only possible way of decreasing Negro population is by means of controlling fertility.”

Gunnar Myrdal book An American Dilemma

Source: An American Dilemma (1944), p. 170

Way

“We know by actual observation only a comparatively small part of the whole universe. I will call this "our neighborhood." Even within the confines of this province our knowledge decreases very rapidly as we get away from our own particular position in space and time. It is only within the solar system that our empirical knowledge extends to the second order of small quantities (and that only for g44 and not for the other gαβ), the first order corresponding to about 10-8. How the gαβ outside our neighborhood are, we do not know, and how they are at infinity of space or time we shall never know. Infinity is not a physical but a mathematical concept, introduced to make our equations more symmetrical and elegant. From the physical point of view everything that is outside our neighborhood is pure extrapolation, and we are entirely free to make this extrapolation as we please to suit our philosophical or aesthetical predilections—or prejudices. It is true that some of these prejudices are so deeply rooted that we can hardly avoid believing them to be above any possible suspicion of doubt, but this belief is not founded on any physical basis. One of these convictions, on which extrapolation is naturally based, is that the particular part of the universe where we happen to be, is in no way exceptional or privileged; in other words, that the universe, when considered on a large enough scale, is isotropic and homogeneous.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Way , Mathematics , Nature , Knowledge

“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

People , Age , Knowledge , Time

“In 1872 we sent to the protected countries of Europe and to the United States of America 116,000,000 of exported manufactures. In 1882…it fell to 88,000,000. In 1892…it fell to 75,000,000. In 1902, last year, although the general exports had increased, the exports of manufactures had decreased again to 73½ millions. And the total result of this is that after 30 years you are sending 42½ millions of manufactures less to the protected countries than you did 30 years ago. Then there the neutral countries…they have fallen 3½ millions…you have lost altogether in your export of manufactures 46 millions. How is it that that has not impressed the people before? Because the change has been concealed by our statistics…You have failed to observe that the continuance of your trade is dependent entirely on British possessions. While these foreign countries have declined 46 millions your British possessions have increased 40 millions.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech in Glasgow (6 October 1903), quoted in The Times (7 October 1903), p. 4.
1900s

People , Change , Dependency , Country

“The tragedy of human history is decreasing happiness in the midst of increasing comforts.”

Chinmayananda Saraswati (1916–1993) Indian spiritual teacher

in A Treasury Of Inspirational Thoughts http://books.google.co.in/books?id=rdHW86GkUrMC&pg=PA68, p. 58
Quotations from Gurudev’s teachings, Chinmya Mission Chicago

History , Happiness

“Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to [the East's more affluent] civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whomever is upon it.”

Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) Arab historiographer and historian

Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East, Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 67.

God , World , Way , Change

“As Iraqi forces gain experience and the political process advances, we will be able to decrease our troop level in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists. These decisions about troop levels will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgment of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

during address to the United States Naval Academy, November 30, 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10253079/
2000s, 2005

Decision

“Caricatures speak through visual language and are therefore understandable by all people. They trigger a laugh which is also an international language and reaction. Caricatures can decrease violence and converge cultures. They aim to promote peace, and teach us to be moderate and laugh at our problems.”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in "Cartoonist Alizadeh, translating world into humor" in Press TV (23 April 2009) http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/92323.html

People , Peace , Understanding , Problem

“When you increase your focus, you decrease your options. Good things are not necessarily God things.”

Craig Groeschel (1967) American priest

It – How Churches and Leaders Can Get It and Keep It (2008, Zondervan)

God

“The university immediately published my pamphlet, and it was sent to ﬁfty People’s Commissariats. It was distributed only in the Soviet Union, since in the days just before the start of the World War it came out in an edition of one thousand copies in all.
Soviet Union, since in the days just before the start of the World War it came out in an edition of one thousand copies in all. The number of responses was not very large. There was quite an interesting reference from the People’s Commissariat of Transportation in which some optimization problems directed at decreasing the mileage of wagons was considered, and a good review of the pamphlet appeared in the journal "The Timber Industry."
At the beginning of 1940 I published a purely mathematical version of this work in Doklady Akad. Nauk [76], expressed in terms of functional analysis and algebra. However, I did not even put in it a reference to my published pamphlet—taking into account the circumstances I did not want my practical work to be used outside the country
In the spring of 1939 I gave some more reports—at the Polytechnic Institute and the House of Scientists, but several times met with the objection that the work used mathematical methods, and in the West the mathematical school in economics was an anti-Marxist school and mathematics in economics was a means for apologists of capitalism. This forced me when writing a pamphlet to avoid the term "economic" as much as possible and talk about the organization and planning of production; the role and meaning of the Lagrange multipliers had to be given somewhere in the outskirts of the second appendix and in the semi Aesopian language.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 41; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 19-20

War , People , World , School

“Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a cup of coffee.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Page 50
Trout Fishing In America

Guy , Flowers , Coffee , Sun

“The first article in the foregoing quotation brings to my recollection the extraordinary performances of a professed fire-eater, whose name was Powel, well known in different parts of the kingdom about forty years ago. Among other wonderful feats, I saw him do the following: He ate the burning coals from the fire; he put a large bunch of matches lighted into his mouth, and blew the smoke of the sulphur through his nostrils; he carried a red-hot heater round the room in his teeth; and broiled a piece of beef-steak upon his tongue. To perform this, he lighted a piece of charcoal, which he put into his mouth beneath his tongue, the beef was laid upon the top; and one of the spectators blew upon the charcoal, to prevent the heat decreasing, till the meat was sufficiently broiled. By way of conclusion, he made a composition of pitch, brimstone, and other compustibles, to which he added several pieces of lead; the whole was melted in an iron ladle, and then set on fire; this he called his soup; and, taking it out of the ladle with a spoon of the same metal, he ate it in its state of liquefaction, and blazing furiously, without appearing to sustain the least injury.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 237
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Way , Light , Appearance , Parting

“The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

65-66
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Life , Way , Communication , Idea

“Long ago, Sir Isaac Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were the work of genius. But Sir Isaac's talents didn't extend to investing: He lost a bundle in the South Sea Bubble, explaining later, "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men." If he had not been traumatized by this loss, Sir Isaac might well have gone on to discover the Fourth Law of Motion: For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2005 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2005.html
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Men , Law , Star , Loss

“Life After Hate groups have successfully reversed the hatred of thousands and replaced it with empathy, love, and self-forgiveness. If the haters can learn empathy, maybe we can learn empathy toward the haters. When our only response to haters is to hate, we increase our brain’s training to hate and decrease its training to empathize. We become a bit of the enemy we hate.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 32.

Love , Life , Hate , Forgiveness

“Lastly, isolation, by checking immigration and consequently competition, will give time for any new variety to be slowly improved; and this may sometimes be of importance in the production of new species. If, however, an isolated area be very small, either from being surrounded by barriers, or from having very peculiar physical conditions, the total number of the individuals supported on it will necessarily be very small; and fewness of individuals will greatly retard the production of new species through natural selection, by decreasing the chance of the appearance of favourable variations.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

This passage has been cited as an anticipation of the idea of punctuated equilibrium.
Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter IV: "Natural Selection", page 105 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=120&itemID=F373&viewtype=image

Support , Nature , Appearance , Chance

“As a physician I am embarrassed by the lack of initiative and obstructionist policies of my own medical profession toward healthier lifestyles. This is not surprising. Physicians lack training and knowledge of nutrition and are self-serving when they proclaim “patients won't follow plant-based nutrition.” Having counseled patients with severe coronary artery heart disease for over twenty years, I find the opposite to be true. Patients sent home to die by expert cardiologists after failing bypass or stents rejoice as they lose weight, eliminate angina chest pains, lessen their medication, lower their blood sugars, decrease or come off their insulin, revert their positive stress test back to normal, selectively diminish the plaque plugging their arteries, and resume a fully active life empowered by the knowledge that they, not their physicians, have become the locus of control for the disease that was destroying them.”

Caldwell Esselstyn (1933) American physician, author and rower

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=6Aosc1wlAXcC&pg=PA1 to No More Bull! by Howard Lyman (New York: Scribner, 2005).

Life , Pain , Disease , Home

“Let's bear in mind that the chances to multiply wealth are unlimited. All people can become rich. There is an error in our understandings - that all people cannot become equally rich. Wealth can not exist where the people are busy with mutual cheating, have no time for creating values and wealth. It is remarkable that we can find the greatest number of wealthy tradesmen and a population on a high standard of living in countries with a high level of business morality. On the other hand, we can find poor tradesmen and entrepreneurs and an impoverished population in countries with a low standard of business morality. This is natural because these people concentrate on cheating one another instead of trying to create value.
We are granting you the profit share not because we feel a need to give money to the people just out of the goodness of the heart. No, we are aiming at other goals by this step. By this measure we want to reach a further decrease of production costs. We want to reach the situation that the shoes are cheaper and workers earn even more. We think that our products are still too expensive and worker's salary too low.”

Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932) Czech businessman

Attributed to Tomáš Baťa in: Rybka, Zdeněk. Principles of the Bata Management System. Tomas Bata University, Faculty of Management and Economics, 2013.
Attributed to Tomas Bata

Money , People , Shoe , Error

“Education means an assimilation of white American culture. It decreases the dissimilarity of the Negroes from other Americans.”

Gunnar Myrdal book An American Dilemma

Source: An American Dilemma (1944), p. 879

Education

“The state sometimes makes mistakes. When one of these mistakes occurs, a decline in collective enthusiasm is reflected by a resulting quantitative decrease of the contribution of each individual, each of the elements forming the whole of the masses. Work is so paralysed that insignificant quantities are produced. It is time to make a correction.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Time

“Among the common changes in forests over the past two centuries are loss of old forests, simplification of forest structure, decreasing size of forest patches, increasing isolation of patches, disruption of natural fire regimes, and increased road building, all of which have had negative effects on native biodiversity.”

Reed Noss (1952)

[Assessing and monitoring forest biodiversity: a suggested framework and indicators, Forest Ecology and Management, 115, 2–3, 22 March 1999, 135–146, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112798003946] (quote from p. 135)

Nature , Change , Loss , Past

“the merchant had observed that the marginal utility of daughters decreases with surprising rapidity.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Source: Contributions to Modern Economics (1978), Chapter 24, Beauty and the Beast, p. 268

Daughters

“Part of the definition of guerrilla decontextualization is the attempt to intentionally misrepresent an individual’s character or intentions for purpose of decreasing any measure of influence or authority they might possess in either public or private circles. Hence: the popularity of such a technique among battling politicians.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(from 2012 article 47 Percenters and Guerrilla Decontextualization).
From Articles, Essays, and Poems, On Guerrilla Decontextualization

Parting

“Reaganites learned it is POLICY change that changes economic trajectory. Reagan’s successes were built on establishing a fiscal framework that invigorated our entire economy, revitalized growth and investment while decreasing spending, tax rates, over-reaching regulations, unemployment, and favoritism via individual subsidies. We need Reaganites in the new Administration. However well meaning, burdensome federal government imposition is never the solution. Never. Not in our homes, not in our schools, not in churches, not in businesses.”

Sarah Palin (1964) American politician

2016, But… Wait… The Good Guys Won’t Win With More Crony Capitalism (December 2, 2016)

School , Home , Business , Learning

“[The animals] are now especially bred for eating purposes, and if the demand decreased, the supply would decrease also. Further, how is it that we are not overrun by wild animals of all sorts? … People need not worry about the future welfare of the bovine race, if they would only be a little more humane in their treatment of its present representatives!”

Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) Jersey parapsychologist

Source: The Natural Food for Man, p. 159-160

People , Future , Animals

“The behavior of two individuals, consisting of effort which results in output, is considered to be determined by a satisfaction function which depends on remuneration (receiving part of the output) and on the effort expended. The total output of the two individuals is not additive, that is, together they produce in general more than separately. Each individual behaves in a way which he considers will maximize his satisfaction function. Conditions are deduced for a certain relative equilibrium and for the stability of this equilibrium, i. e., conditions under which it will not “pay” the individual to decrease his efforts. In the absence of such conditions "exploitation" occurs which may or may not lead to total parasitism.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport. "Mathematical theory of motivation interactions of two individuals," The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics(1947) 9: 17-28 , March 01, 1947
1940s

Way , Behavior , Effort , Parting

“In general, these phenomena are very easy to perceive and understand, but difficult to calculate. The danger of failure increases rapidly with decreasing depth or thickness of the structural member…”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Failure , Understanding

“The one major area of these negotiations where the end is in sight, yet where a fresh start is badly needed, is in a treaty to outlaw nuclear tests. The conclusion of such a treaty, so near and yet so far, would check the spiraling arms race in one of its most dangerous areas. It would place the nuclear powers in a position to deal more effectively with one of the greatest hazards which man faces in 1963, the further spread of nuclear arms. It would increase our security — it would decrease the prospects of war. Surely this goal is sufficiently important to require our steady pursuit, yielding neither to the temptation to give up the whole effort nor the temptation to give up our insistence on vital and responsible safeguards.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, American University speech

War , Effort

“There are four ways through which a nation's population can vanish: 1. Through obliteration in war; 2. Through their lands being swamped by labor-driven immigration; 3. Through physical mixing with newcomers; and 4. The second and third factors above combined with a decreasing birth rate amongst the original population. Ancient Rome vanished because of the last three factors: now exactly the same scenario is being played out in Western Europe, North America and Australia. Unless checked, the demographic trends show conclusively that Whites will be a minority in all three of these continents by the year 2100. After that, it is only then a question of time and Whites as a racial group will vanish completely.”

Arthur Kemp (1962) British writer

March of the Titans: A History of the White Race http://www.white-history.com/peril.htm
Quotes from other works:

War , Way , Birth , Question

“If so, her motion must be influenced by it; perhaps she is retained in her orbit thereby. However, though the power of gravity is not sensibly weakened in the little change of distance, at which we can place ourselves from the centre of the earth, yet it is very possible that, so high as the moon, this power may differ much in strength from what it is here. To make an estimate what might be the degree of this diminution, he considered with himself that, if the moon be retained in her orbit by the force of gravity, no doubt the primary planets are carried round the sun by the like power. And, by comparing the periods of the several planets with their distances from the sun, he found that if any power like gravity held them in their courses, its strength must decrease in the duplicate proportion of the increase of distance. This he concluded by supposing them to move in perfect circles concentrical to the sun, from which the orbits of the greatest part of them do not much differ. Supposing therefore the power of gravity, when extended to the moon, to decrease in the same manner, he computed whether that force would be sufficient to keep the moon in her orbit. In this computation, being absent from books, he took the common estimate, in use among geographers and our seamen before Norwood had measured the earth, that 60 English miles were contained in one degree of latitude on the surface of the earth. But as this is a very faulty supposition, each degree containing about 691/2 of our miles, his computation did not answer expectation; whence he concluded, that some other cause must at least join with the action of the power of gravity on the moon. On this account he laid aside, for that time, any farther thoughts upon this matter.”

Henry Pemberton (1694–1771) British doctor

Republished in: Stephen Peter Rigaud (1838) Historical Essay on the First Publication of Sir Newton's Principia http://books.google.com/books?id=uvMGAAAAcAAJ&pg=RA1-PA49. p. 50-51
Preface to View of Newton's Philosophy, (1728)

Books , Change , Time , Sun

“These… are the two observational facts about our neighbourhood, which have to be accounted for by the theory: there is a finite density of matter, and there is expansion, i. e. the mutual distances are increasing, and therefore the density is decreasing.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

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

“Owing to the incapacity of the higher price-rate to appeal to the "acquisitive sense," it would appear altogether plausible to attempt to do so by utilizing the opposite strategy: by decreasing piece-rates, to force workers to produce more in order to maintain their accustomed earnings. Moreover, two simple observations seem to have held true in the past, as they do today: a lower wage and higher profit are directly related, and all that is paid out in higher wages must imply a corresponding reduction of profits.
Capitalism has been guided by this axiom repeatedly, and even from its beginning, and it has been an article of faith for centuries that lower wages are "productive."”

Max Weber book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In other words, lower wages were believed to enhance worker productivity.
Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; 1920), Ch. 2 : The "Spirit" of Capitalism

Faith , Sense , Appearance , Past

“…the position of the body significantly influences the emotions and sensations during the desired stage of hypnotism; also, whatever the passion which one wants to express by the attitude of the patient, when the muscles necessary to this expression are brought into play, the passion itself bursts forth suddenly and the whole organism responds accordingly. The upright body, the expanded chest, the contracted extensors, all that suggests the feeling of self-esteem, self-determination, resolve and unconquerable pride. As soon as one decreases the contraction of these muscles, that gives to the patient a depressed attitude, with a sunken chest, the expression of the features changes in a very manifest way, the voice and the whole manner of being of the individual now express humility, abasement and pity.”

James Braid (1795–1860) Scottish surgeon, hypnotist, and hypnotherapist

Original Philosophy of Hypnotism The International College of Hypnosis & Hypnotherapy

Way , Feeling , Passion , Change

“A social aggregate which has chosen the fatal path of organic evolution must succumb to the same law of organic development to which all organisms are subject, namely greater and greater organization, increase of structure, greater differentiation, decrease of critical, personal, consciousness, loss of individual liberty, increased activity of the subconscious forces, falling into a state of somnambulism which can only be redeemed by revolution or by death.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Death , Law , Loss , Personality

“The central theme of this paper is the character and causes of long-term changes in the personal distribution of income. Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth? What factors determine the secular level and trends of income inequalities?”

Simon Kuznets (1901–1985) economist

Source: "Economic growth and income inequality," 1955, p. 1

Change , Personality , Country

“[In order to define the distinction between a grant and an exchange transaction, Boulding has used the net worth criterion] If there is no decrease in the net worth of either party, the transaction is exchange; if there is, it contains some grant element and is an explicit or implicit grant.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, The Economy of Love and Fear, 1973, p. 88 as cited in: Omicron Delta Epsilon, Omicron Chi Epsilon (1997) The American economist. Vol. 41-42. p. 20

“That austerity is a counterproductive economic policy in a situation of economic recession can be seen, rightly, as a “Keynesian critique.” Keynes did argue—and persuasively—that to cut public expenditure when an economy has unused productive capacity as well as unemployment owing to a deficiency of effective demand would tend to have the effect of slowing down the economy further and increasing—rather than decreasing—unemployment. Keynes certainly deserves much credit for making that rather basic point clear even to policymakers, irrespective of their politics, and he also provided what I would call a sketch of a theory of explaining how all this can be nicely captured within a general understanding of economic interdependences between different activities… I am certainly supportive of this Keynesian argument, and also of Paul Krugman’s efforts in cogently developing and propagating this important perspective, and in questioning the policy of massive austerity in Europe.
But I would also argue that the unsuitability of the policy of austerity is only partly due to Keynesian reasons. Where we have to go well beyond Keynes is in asking what public expenditure is for—other than for just strengthening effective demand, no matter what its content. As it happens, European resistance to savage cuts in public services and to indiscriminate austerity is not based only, or primarily, on Keynesian reasoning. The resistance is based also on a constructive point about the importance of public services—a perspective that is of great economic as well as political interest in Europe.”

Amartya Sen (1933) Indian economist

Amartya Sen, "What Happened to Europe?", New Republic (August 2, 2012)
2010s

Understanding , Question , Support , Effort

“Without access to the varied forms of education suitable for every individual temperament and every class of worker, the potential for continued growth and securing an authentically functional democracy in the United States decreased considerably. More than a means to a substantial paycheck, both education and satisfying work were the means to a substantial character.”

Aberjhani (1957) author

(Work and Education, p. 59).
Book Sources, The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003)

Education , Democracy

“Working yourself into the ground serves no one. It only decreases your chances of living a long and healthy life. Do you really want to sacrifice your health and long life for a big house, fancy car and hefty bank account?”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Life , Health , Cars , Chance

“I had not thought of this regular decrease of gravity, namely that it is as the inverse square of the distance; this is a new and highly remarkable property of gravity.”

Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) Dutch mathematician and natural philosopher

(1691) quoted in Popular Astronomy, Vol. 56 (1948), pp. 189–190.

“Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.”

Frederik Pohl book The Space Merchants

Source: The Space Merchants (1953), Chapter 9 (p. 111)

People

“The function just found cannot, it is true, express rigorously the probabilities of the errors: for since the possible errors are in all cases confined within certain limits, the probability of errors exceeding those limits ought always to be zero, while our formula always gives some value. However, this defect, which every analytical function must, from its nature, labor under, is of no importance in practice, because the value of our function decreases so rapidly… that it can safely be considered as vanishing. Besides, the nature of the subject never admits of assigning with absolute rigor the limits of error.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

Theoria motus corporum coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientum (1809) Tr. Charles Henry Davis as Theory of the Motion of the Heavenly Bodies moving about the Sun in Conic Sections http://books.google.com/books?id=cspWAAAAMAAJ& (1857)

Error , Nature

“An old oriental saying tells us, ‘when our willpower is concentrated upon a stone, it can pass through it. When our willpower is focused and in harmony with the universe, it can command the wind, rain and thunder’. But from where does our willpower come? Those who understand and answer this question are those who accomplish important tasks. When we coordinate mind and body by stilling the waves of our mind to imperceptible, infinitely decreasing ripples, we can send forth our great willpower that moves the universe.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

19 : Willpower
Ki Sayings (2003)

Understanding , Question , Universe

“Don't be scared of the high language of economists and Cabinet ministers, but think of politics at our own household level. After all, women live in contact with food supplies, housing shortages, and the ever-decreasing opportunities for children, and we must therefore face up to the position, remembering that as more power is taken away from the people, so there is less responsibility for us to assume.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Bexley Conservative Women (15 September 1949) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/100836
1940s

Women , Children , People , Food

“Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have … The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Commonly quoted on many websites, this quotation is actually from an address by President Gerald Ford to the US Congress (12 August 1974) http://www.bartleby.com/73/714.html
Misattributed

History

“A decrease in the quantity of legislation generally means an increase in the quality of life.”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Column, December 23, 2007, "The Gift Of Doing Very Little" http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/21/AR2007122101922.html at washingtonpost.com.
2000s

Life

“In many kinds of social interaction, unofficial communication provides a way in which one team can extend a definite but non-compromising invitation to the other, requesting that social distance and formality be increased or decreased, or that both teams shift the interaction to one involving the performance of a new set of roles.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 121

Way , Communication

“In the Middle Ages, people were born and baptized into the Church. But the Church was the corpus mysticum and it depended upon one's own free will whether one wanted to be a living or a dead member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The cry "traitor" was only raised against those who broke the solemn oath of allegiance, not those who chose to go ways different from their status of birth. The Connêtable Charles de Bourbon who served with Charles V, or Marshal Moritz of Saxony, the great general under Louis XV were hardly considered to be traitors. Soldiers picked out the countries they wanted to serve. Prospective monks chose their orders. There were no "traitors to the proletariat" or "traitors to democracy." Today we live in an age of increased predestination and decreased free will, where Calvin, Freud, Marx, Luther, Darwin, Dewey, and the host of racial biologists have laid down the inexorable laws of anthropological, religious, psychological, environmental, and sociological determinism with no hope for escape. We are merely exhorted to make a virtue out of necessity and to be loyal to our prison and prisoners. Every attempt from our side to escape the artificial shell or to use our dormant remainders of free will to destroy the chains is branded as treason and punished accordingly by State or Society or even by both.”

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909–1999) Austrian noble and political theorist

Pg 133, emphasis in the original
The Menace of the Herd (1943)

People , Age , Law , Hope

“Imagine each family as a kind of little factory--a multiperson unit producing meals, health, skills, children, and self-esteem from market goods and the time, skills, and knowledge of its members. This is only one of the remarkable concepts explored by Gary Becker in his landmark work on the family. Becker applies economic theory to the most sensitive and fateful personal decisions, such as choosing a spouse or having children. He uses the basic economic assumptions of maximizing behavior, stable preferences, arid equilibria in explicit or implicit markets to analyze the allocation of time to child care as well as to careers, to marriage and divorce in polygynous as well as monogamous societies, to the increase and decrease of wealth from one generation to another.”

Gary S. Becker book A Treatise on the Family

Book abstract 2009
A Treatise on the Family, 1981

Fate , Marriage , Children , Health

“Considering that our culture invented napalm and nuclear weapons, I'm not sure we're in a position to judge the smaller scale violence of other cultures. But it's important to note that none of the cannibal or headhunting groups were true hunter-gatherers. They had already begun to use agriculture. It is now generally conceded that agriculture usually leads to a rise in labor, a decrease in sharing, an increase in violence, and a shorter life expectancy. This is not to say that all agricultural societies are violent, but rather that violence is by and large not characteristic of true hunter-gatherers.”

John Zerzan (1943) American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

Life

“Spherical space is not very easy to imagine. We have to think of the properties of the surface of a sphere—the two-dimensional case—and try to conceive something similar applied to three-dimensional space. Stationing ourselves at a point let us draw a series of spheres of successively greater radii. The surface of a sphere of radius r should be proportional to r2; but in spherical space the areas of the more distant spheres begin to fall below the proper proportion. There is not so much room out there as we expected to find. Ultimately we reach a sphere of biggest possible area, and beyond it the areas begin to decrease. The last sphere of all shrinks to a point—our antipodes. Is there nothing beyond this? Is there a kind of boundary there? There is nothing beyond and yet there is no boundary. On the earth's surface there is nothing beyond our own antipodes but there is no boundary there.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

p, 125
Space, Time and Gravitation (1920)

Imagination , Thinking , Distant , Success

“There are not wanting, even to-day, chemists who advocate "purely chemical" methods in chemistry, and cannot appreciate the value of physical evidence in conjunction with mathematical calculations. We can only hope that their number is decreasing exponentially with time.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Hope , Mathematics , Time

“Often, when two teams enter social interaction, we can identify one as having the lower general prestige and the other team the higher. Ordinarily, when we think of realigning actions in such cases, we think of efforts on the part of the lower team to alter the basis of interaction in a direction more favourable to them or to decrease the social distance and formality between themselves and the higher team. Interestingly enough, there are occasions when it serves the wider goals of the higher team to lower barriers and admit the lower team to greater intimacy and equality with it.”

Erving Goffman book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Source: 1950s-1960s, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959, p. 126

Thinking , Effort , Parting

“Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules. The elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and increased complexity of formal organizational structures. Institutional rules function as myths which organizations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects. Organizations whose structures become isomorphic with the myths of the institutional environment-in contrast with those primarily structured by the demands of technical production and exchange-decrease internal coordination and control in order to maintain legitimacy. Structures are decoupled from each other and from ongoing activities. In place of coordination, inspection, and evaluation, a logic of confidence and good faith is employed.”

John W. Meyer (1935) Sociologist and professor at Stanford University

Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. " Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony http://www.sasse.se/akademiska/310/meyer%20rowan.pdf." American journal of sociology (1977): 340-363.

Faith , Confidence , Parting

“[To help combat climate change] Give up meat for one day (per week) initially, and decrease it from there. In terms of immediacy of action and the feasibility of bringing about reductions in a short period of time, it clearly is the most attractive opportunity.”

Rajendra K. Pachauri (1940–2020) Indian academic

“Eat less red meat to help the environment, UN climate expert says,” interview with The Telegraph (7 September 2008) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2699173/Eat-less-red-meat-to-help-the-environment-UN-climate-expert-says.html

Change , Time , Help

“some evidence is available to indicate that, in India, an increase in the income of the poorer people leads to an increase in the size of the family; and also that this tapers off after a certain critical level of income is attained, and is followed by a reduction in the size of the family at higher levels of living When a sufﬁcient number of people reach the critical income, there would be a gradual decrease in the average birth rate with further increase in income.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

People , Family , Birth

“It sounds rather strange to talk of an infinite universe still expanding. If we were certain that the curvature was negative, we might still, as in the case of positive curvature, replace the phrase "the universe expands" by the equivalent one "the curvature of the universe decreases." But if the curvature is zero, and remains zero throughout, what sort of meaning are we to attach to the "expansion"? The real meaning is, of course, that the mutual distances between the galactic systems, measured in so-called natural measure, increase proportionally to a certain quantity R appearing in the equations, and varying with the time. The interpretation of R as the "radius of curvature" of the universe, though still possible if the universe has a curvature, evidently does not go down to the fundamental meaning of it.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

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

Nature , Universe , Appearance , Time

“c) Decreased cost due to improved efficiency during the implementation or after the completion of the P/A/P; and”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

“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”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

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

People , Age , Knowledge , Time

“If grand unified theories are correct, we ought to be able to derive the relative power of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions at accessible energies from their presumed equality at much higher energies. When this is attempted, a wonderful result emerges. …in the form first calculated by Howard Georgi, Helen Quinn, and Steven Weinberg …The couplings of strong-interaction gluons decrease, those of the [weak interaction] W bosons stay roughly constant, and those of the [electromagnetic interaction] photons increase at short distances [or high energies]—so they all tend to converge, as desired.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

Longing for the Harmonies: Themes and Variations from Modern Physics (1987)

Strong

“Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Wealth

“A scheme is unjust when the higher expectations, one or more of them, are excessive. If these expectations were decreased, the situation of the less favored would be improved.”

John Rawls book A Theory of Justice

Source: A Theory of Justice (1971; 1975; 1999), Chapter II, Section 13, pg. 79

“The distance between folk society and literate society is ever decreasing, and Teresa Brewer will yet shake hands with Mrs. Texas Gladden. But until that happens—until my own culture, and Teresa Brewer's, develops a folk tradition of its own—If I want to learn something about real folk music, I'll stick with Mrs. Gladden.”

Sam Hinton (1917–2009) folk singer, artist, marine biologist

"Last Words", Journal of American Folklore 71, (Jan–Mar 1958), p. 75

Music , Learning

“The major challenges facing humanity today are global – climate change, accessible fresh water, ever decreasing bio-diversity and over population. These problems call for global solutions and these solutions will require co-operation on a global scale unparalleled in history. Peace is the essential prerequisite to create the environment to achieve the levels of co-operation necessary.”

Steve Killelea (1949) Australian businessman

Peace and Sustainability: Cornerstones to survival in the 21st century http://www.visionofhumanity.org/images/content/Documents/2007%20GPI%20Final%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf (2007)

Peace , History , Problem , Water

“My next proposition is that the North is in the course of acquiring this power to abolish slavery. Is that true? I say, gentlemen, the North is acquiring that power by two processes, one of which is operating with great rapidity-that is by the admission of new States. The public territory is capable of forming from twenty to thirty States of larger size than the average of the States now in the Union. The public territory is peculiarly Northern territory, and every State that comes into the Union will be a free State. We may rest assured, sit, that that is a fixed fact. The events in Kansas should satisfy every one of the truth of that. If causes now in operation are allowed to continue, the admission of new States will go on until a sufficient number shall have been secured to give the necessary preponderance to change the Constitution. There is a process going on by which some of our own slave States are becoming free States already. It is true, that in some of the slave States the slave population is actually on the decrease, and, I believe it is true of all of them that it is relatively to the white population on the decrease. The census shows that slaves are decreasing in Delaware and Maryland; and it shows that in the other States in the same parallel, the relative state of the decrease and increase is against the slave population. It is not wonderful that this should be so. The anti-slavery feeling has got to be so great at the North that the owners of slave property in these States have a presentiment that it is a doomed institution, and the instincts of self-interest impels them to get rid of that property which is doomed. The consequence is, that it will go down lower and. lower, until it all gets to the Cotton States-until it gets to the bottom. There is the weight of a continent upon it forcing it down. Now, I say, sir, that under this weight it is bound to go down unto the Cotton States, one of which I have the honor to represent here. When that time comes, sir, the free States in consequence of the manifest decrease, will urge the process with additional vigor, and I fear that the day is not distant when the Cotton States, as they are called, will be the only slave States. When that time comes, the time will have arrived when the North will have the power to amend the Constitution, and say that slavery shall be abolished, and if the master refuses to yield to this policy, he shall doubtless be hung for his disobedience.”

Henry L. Benning (1814–1875) Confederate Army general

Speech to the Virginia Convention (1861)

Truth , Fear , Feeling , Distant

“Wages have increased, the cost of living has decreased. The job of every man and woman has been made more secure. We have in this short period decreased the fear of poverty, the fear of unemployment, the fear of old age; and these fears that are the greatest calamities of human kind.”

Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) 31st President of the United States of America

The New Day: Campaign Speeches of Herbert Hoover (1928), Campaign speech in New York (22 October 1928)

Age , Fear