Quotes about discipline
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Nigel Lawson photo
Richard L. Daft photo
Barry Boehm photo
Allen West (politician) photo
Ryan C. Gordon photo

“I find if you're targeting Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X right from the start, your code will probably work anywhere else that you might try it later… Writing code that is cross-platform from the start requires more discipline, but I find it is worth the effort.”

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)

Ernest Hemingway photo
James Gleick photo
David M. Buss photo
John Stuart Mill photo
William Jones photo
Phil Brooks photo
Nathanael Greene photo
Ingrid Newkirk photo
Henry Scott Holland photo
L. Ron Hubbard photo

“ENEMY: SP Order. Fair game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed.”

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

"Penalties for Lower Conditions" (18 October 1967).
Scientology Policy Letters

Stephen L. Carter photo
Bel Kaufmanová photo
Francis Heylighen photo
Jean Baptiste Massillon photo
Philip Kapleau photo
Milton Friedman photo
André Breton photo
Kwame Nkrumah photo

“The scientific study of the communication of information in society – “information science” in the sense of an academic discipline…”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Science in Theory and Practice (1987), p. 11; As cited in: Lyn Robinson and David Bawden (2011).

George Long photo
Russell L. Ackoff photo
Amanda Lear photo
Robert Erskine Childers photo

“An artillery man is not made in a month, nor an officer in a year; and unless we had had educated men as keen as mustard, and no trouble about discipline, I doubt if the battery in South Africa would have been much good for a long time.”

Robert Erskine Childers (1870–1922) Irish nationalist and author

"The H.A.C. in South Africa", by Erskine Childers and Basil Williams, Smith & Elder, (London, 1903), p. 193.
Literary Years and War (1900-1918)

Bernard Cornwell photo

“I'll put a word in for you, Sharpe, because a man shouldn't be disciplined for killing the enemy, but I don't suppose my help will do you any good.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Brigadier General Robert Craufurd, p. 319
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Battle (1995)

Thomas Szasz photo
Jean Dubuffet photo
Chris Rea photo
Daniel McCallum photo
Rajiv Malhotra photo
Gautama Buddha photo

“For fear of causing terror to living beings, Mahāmati, let the Bodhisattva who is disciplining himself to attain compassion, refrain from eating flesh.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

Mahayana, Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, Chapter Eight. On Meat-eating

Daniel McCallum photo
John McCain photo
Edsger W. Dijkstra photo
John Steinbeck photo

“The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

“In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, 75th anniversary edition, Exeter University (1930)

Joseph M. Juran photo
André Weil photo

“Alexandre Grothendieck was very different from Weil in the way he approached mathematics: Grothendieck was not just a mathematician who could understand the discipline and prove important results— he was a man who could create mathematics. And he did it alone.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

[Amir D. Aczel, The Artist and the Mathematician, http://books.google.com/books?id=fRCH-at7wgYC&pg=PA53, 29 April 2009, Basic Books, 978-0-7867-3288-3, 54]
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Gustav Cassel photo

“Economics is in high degree a pedagogical discipline, and an economist must be in close touch with popular psychology in order to know what ought to be said at any particular moment.”

Gustav Cassel (1866–1945) Swedish economist

Quoted in Bertil Ohlin (1972, 107); as cited in: Carlson, Benny, and Lars Jonung. "Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Eli Heckscher, Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal on the role of the economist in public debate." Econ Journal Watch 3.3 (2006): p. 525

Frederick William Robertson photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo
Calvin Coolidge photo

“For the profession as a whole, it is necessary that our hard-won understanding of our discipline be handed on to the next generation in a formal way.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: A Long Search for Information (2004), p. 30.

“By any reasonable criteria, the discipline of economics as a whole, in its present state, is sadly lacking.”

Part I, Chapter 5, Mechanistic Modelling, p. 112
The Death of Economics (1994)

“Science teachers have a special responsibility to study the nature of science as a discipline, how it works, how it is described by sociologists, historians, and philosophers from different points of view…. Science education cannot just be about learning science: Its foundation must be learning about the nature of science as a human activity.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. 175; as cited in: Hanuscin, Deborah L., and Michele H. Lee. "Teaching Against the Mystique of Science: Literature Based Approaches in Elementary Teacher Education." Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum presentations (MU) (2010).

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Ragnar Frisch photo

“Intermediate between mathematics, statistics, and economics, we find a new discipline which, for lack of a better name, may be called econometrics. Econometrics has as its aim to subject abstract laws of theoretical political economy or "pure" economics to experimental and numerical verification, and thus to turn pure economics, as far as possible, into a science in the strict sense of the word.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Ragnar Frisch (1926) "On a Problem in Pure Eco­nomics: Translated by JS Chipman." Preferences, Utility, and Demand: A Minnesota Symposium. 1926."
Original in French:
Intermediaire entre les mathematiques, la statistique et l'economie politique, nous trouvons une discipline nouvelle que ion peut, faute de mieux, designer sous le nom de reconometrie. L'econometrie se pose le but de soumettre les lois abstraites de l'economie politique theorique ou l'economie 'pure' A une verification experimentale et numeriques, et ainsi de constituer, autant que cela est possible, l'economie pure en une science dans le sens restreint de ce mot.
1920

Michel Foucault photo
Vladimir Lenin photo
Jeane Kirkpatrick photo

“Decades, if not centuries are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits. (for democracy) In Britain, the road to (democratic government) took seven centuries to traverse.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006) American diplomat and Presidential advisor

Dictatorship and Double Standards, Commentary (New York, Nov. 1979), quoted in The Economist , 23 December 2006:131

Robert T. Kiyosaki photo

“The power of self-discipline. If you cannot get control of yourself, do not try to get rich.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

Iwane Matsui photo

“Orderly discipline and morale within an army was the responsibility of the Division Commander.”

Iwane Matsui (1878–1948) Japanese general

Quoted in "Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity" - Page 232 - by Masahiro Yamamoto - History - 2000.

Kurien Kunnumpuram photo

“The 19th and first half of the 20th century conceived of the world as chaos. Chaos was the oft-quoted blind play of atoms, which, in mechanistic and positivistic philosophy, appeared to represent ultimate reality, with life as an accidental product of physical processes, and mind as an epi-phenomenon. It was chaos when, in the current theory of evolution, the living world appeared as a product of chance, the outcome of random mutations and survival in the mill of natural selection. In the same sense, human personality, in the theories of behaviorism as well as of psychoanalysis, was considered a chance product of nature and nurture, of a mixture of genes and an accidental sequence of events from early childhood to maturity.
Now we are looking for another basic outlook on the world -- the world as organization. Such a conception -- if it can be substantiated -- would indeed change the basic categories upon which scientific thought rests, and profoundly influence practical attitudes.
This trend is marked by the emergence of a bundle of new disciplines such as cybernetics, information theory, general system theory, theories of games, of decisions, of queuing and others; in practical applications, systems analysis, systems engineering, operations research, etc. They are different in basic assumptions, mathematical techniques and aims, and they are often unsatisfactory and sometimes contradictory. They agree, however, in being concerned, in one way or another, with "systems," "wholes" or "organizations"; and in their totality, they herald a new approach.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 7. Some Aspects of System Theory in Biology, p. 166-167 as quoted in Lilienfeld (1978, pp. 7-8) and Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Ian Morison photo

“Astronomy is probably the oldest of all the sciences. It differs from virtually all other science disciplines in that it is not possible to carry out experimental tests in the laboratory.”

Ian Morison (1943) astrophysicist

Introduction to Astronomy and Cosmology (2008), Ch. 1 : Astronomy, an Observational Science

Colin Wilson photo

“Wundt sought to achieve was a rejuvenation of philosophical inquiry by new means, not the constitution of a completely new discipline.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994, p. 39

Éric Pichet photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“I find it difficult to take these psycho-analysts at all seriously when they try to scrutinise spiritual experience by the flicker of their torch-lights,'yet perhaps one ought to, for half-knowledge is a powerful thing and can be a great obstacle to the coming in front of the true Truth. This new psychology looks to me very much like children learning some summary and not very adequate alphabet, exulting in putting their a-b-c-d of the subconscient and the mysterious underground super-ego together and imagining that their first book of obscure beginnings (c-a-t cat, t-r-e-e tree) is the very heart of the real knowledge. They look from down up and explain the higher lights by the lower obscurities; but the foundation of these things is above and not below, upari budhna esam [Rig-Veda, 1.24.7]. The superconscient, not the subconscient, is the true foundation of things. The significance of the lotus is not to be found by analysing the secrets of the mud from which it grows here; its secret is to be found in the heavenly archetype of the lotus that blooms for ever in the Light above. The self-chosen field of these psychologists is besides poor, dark and limited; you must know the whole before you can know the part and the highest before you can truly understand the lowest. That is the promise of the greater psychology awaiting its hour before which these poor gropings will disappear and come to nothing…. Wanton waste, careless spoiling of physical things in an incredibly short time, loose disorder, misuse of service and materials due either to vital grasping or to tamasic inertia are baneful to prosperity and tend to drive away or discourage the Wealth-Power. These things have long been rampant in the society and, if that continues, an increase in our means might well mean a proportionate increase in the wastage and disorder and neutralise the material advantage. This must be remedied if there is to be any sound progress…. Asceticism for its own sake is not the ideal of this yoga, but self-control in the vital and right order in the material are a very important part of it… and even an ascetic discipline is better for our purpose than a loose absence of true control. Mastery of the material does not mean having plenty and profusely throwing it out or spoiling it as fast as it comes or faster. Mastery implies in it the right and careful utilisation of things and also a self-control in their use…. There is a consciousness in [things], a life which is not the life and consciousness of man and animal which we know, but still secret and real. That is why we must have a respect for physical things and use them rightly, not misuse and waste, ill-treat or handle with a careless roughness. This feeling of all being consciousness or alive comes when our own physical consciousness'and not the mind only'awakes out of its obscurity and becomes aware of the One in all things, the Divine everywhere.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Undated
India's Rebirth

Charles Dupin photo
César Vallejo photo

“Mechanics is a means or discipline for the realization of life, but not life itself. It ought to carry us to life itself.”

César Vallejo (1892–1938) Peruvian writer

La mecánica es un medio o disciplina para pealizar la vida, pero no es la vida misma. Esa debe llevarnos a la vida misma, que está en el juego de sentimentos o sea en la sensibilidad.
Source: Aphorisms (2002), p. 53

Ibn Khaldun photo
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Daniel McCallum photo

“The enforcement of a rigid system of discipline in the government of works of great magnitude is indispensable to success. All subordinates should be accountable to and be directed by their immediate superiors only; as obedience cannot be enforced where the foreman in immediate charge is interfered with by a superior officer giving orders directly to his subordinates.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Chandler commented: To illustrate more clearly these lines of authority, McCallum drew up a detailed chart-certainly one of the earliest organization charts in an American business enterprise. (p. 103)
Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 40. Partly cited in: Chandler (1977, p. 102)

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Mark Hopkins (educator) photo

“All mental discipline and symmetrical growth are from activity of the mind under the yoke of the will or personal power.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 5.

“Suppose then I want to give myself a little training in the art of reasoning; suppose I want to get out of the region of conjecture and probability, free myself from the difficult task of weighing evidence, and putting instances together to arrive at general propositions, and simply desire to know how to deal with my general propositions when I get them, and how to deduce right inferences from them; it is clear that I shall obtain this sort of discipline best in those departments of thought in which the first principles are unquestionably true. For in all 59 our thinking, if we come to erroneous conclusions, we come to them either by accepting false premises to start with—in which case our reasoning, however good, will not save us from error; or by reasoning badly, in which case the data we start from may be perfectly sound, and yet our conclusions may be false. But in the mathematical or pure sciences,—geometry, arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, the calculus of variations or of curves,—we know at least that there is not, and cannot be, error in our first principles, and we may therefore fasten our whole attention upon the processes. As mere exercises in logic, therefore, these sciences, based as they all are on primary truths relating to space and number, have always been supposed to furnish the most exact discipline. When Plato wrote over the portal of his school. “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here,” he did not mean that questions relating to lines and surfaces would be discussed by his disciples. On the contrary, the topics to which he directed their attention were some of the deepest problems,—social, political, moral,—on which the mind could exercise itself. Plato and his followers tried to think out together conclusions respecting the being, the duty, and the destiny of man, and the relation in which he stood to the gods and to the unseen world. What had geometry to do with these things? Simply this: That a man whose mind has not undergone a rigorous training in systematic thinking, and in the art of drawing legitimate inferences from premises, was unfitted to enter on the discussion of these high topics; and that the sort of logical discipline which he needed was most likely to be obtained from geometry—the only mathematical science which in Plato’s time had been formulated and reduced to a system. And we in this country [England] have long acted on the same principle. Our future lawyers, clergy, and statesmen are expected at the University to learn a good deal about curves, and angles, and numbers and proportions; not because these subjects have the smallest relation to the needs of their lives, but because in the very act of learning them they are likely to acquire that habit of steadfast and accurate thinking, which is indispensable to success in all the pursuits of life.”

Joshua Girling Fitch (1824–1903) British educationalist

Source: Lectures on Teaching, (1906), pp. 291-292

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“Architecture has been a domain of architects, a discipline presumably dominated by immaculately dressed bookish pedants that have a stream of thought well displaced from regular human thought.”

Rem Koolhaas (1944) Dutch architect (b.1944)

Rem Koolhaas Interview with Jennifer Sigler in Index Magazine http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rem_koolhaas.shtml, (2000)

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Daniel Dennett photo

“I have grown accustomed to the disrespect expressed by some of the participants for their colleagues in the other disciplines. "Why, Dan," ask the people in artificial intelligence, "do you waste your time conferring with those neuroscientists? They wave their hands about 'information processing' and worry about where it happens, and which neurotransmitters are involved, but they haven't a clue about the computational requirements of higher cognitive functions." "Why," ask the neuroscientists, "do you waste your time on the fantasies of artificial intelligence? They just invent whatever machinery they want, and say unpardonably ignorant things about the brain." The cognitive psychologists, meanwhile, are accused of concocting models with neither biological plausibility nor proven computational powers; the anthropologists wouldn't know a model if they saw one, and the philosophers, as we all know, just take in each other's laundry, warning about confusions they themselves have created, in an arena bereft of both data and empirically testable theories. With so many idiots working on the problem, no wonder consciousness is still a mystery. All these charges are true, and more besides, but I have yet to encounter any idiots. Mostly the theorists I have drawn from strike me as very smart people – even brilliant people, with the arrogance and impatience that often comes with brilliance – but with limited perspectives and agendas, trying to make progress on the hard problems by taking whatever shortcuts they can see, while deploring other people's shortcuts. No one can keep all the problems and details clear, including me, and everyone has to mumble, guess and handwave about large parts of the problem.”

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Vladimir Lenin photo