Quotes about measure
page 6

“Those who think through possible outcomes with discipline, forge connections, in so doing, to other cosmi in which those outcomes are more than mere possibilities. Such a consciousness is measurably, quantitatively different from one that has not undertaken the same work and so, yes, is able to make correct decisions in an Emergence where an untrained mind would be of little use.”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Part 11, "Advent." Fraa Jad, on his polycosmic approach to problem-solving.
Anathem (2008)

Thinking, Decision

“San Domingo, with a stable government, under which her immense resources can be developed, will give remunerative wages to tens of thousands of laborers not now upon the island. This labor will take advantage of every available means of transportation to abandon the adjacent islands and seek the blessings of freedom and its sequence—each inhabitant receiving the reward of his own labor. Porto Rico and Cuba will have to abolish slavery, as a measure of self-preservation, to retain their laborers.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Second State of the Union Address (1870)

Freedom

“As a noun, design is the named (although sometimes unnamable) structure or behavior of a system whose presence resolves or contributes to the resolution of a force or forces on that system. A design thus represents one point in a potential decision space. A design may be singular (representing a leaf decision) or it may be collective (representing a set of other decisions).
As a verb, design is the activity of making such decisions. Given a large set of forces, a relatively malleable set of materials, and a large landscape upon which to play, the resulting decision space may be large and complex. As such, there is a science associated with design (empirical analysis can point us to optimal regions or exact points in this design space) as well as an art (within the degrees of freedom that range beyond an empirical decision; there are opportunities for elegance, beauty, simplicity, novelty, and cleverness).
All architecture is design but not all design is architecture. Architecture represents the significant design decisions that shape a system, where significant is measured by cost of change.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Grady Booch (2006) " On design https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/gradybooch/entry/on_design?lang=en" cited in: Frank Buschmann, ‎Kevlin Henney, ‎Douglas C. Schmidt (2007) Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, On Patterns and Pattern Languages. p. 214

Beauty, Art, Behavior, Optimism

“To strengthen the work of Congress I strongly urge an amendment to provide a four-year term for Members of the House of Representatives—which should not begin before 1972. The present two-year term requires most members of Congress to divert enormous energies to an almost constant process of campaigning—depriving this nation of the fullest measure of both their skill and their wisdom. Today, too, the work of government is far more complex than in our early years, requiring more time to learn and more time to master the technical tasks of legislating. And a longer term will serve to attract more men of the highest quality to political life. The nation, the principle of democracy, and, I think, each congressional district, will all be better served by a four-year term for members of the House. And I urge your swift action. Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam. That conflict is not an isolated episode, but another great event in the policy that we have followed with strong consistency since World War II. The touchstone of that policy is the interest of the United States—the welfare and the freedom of the people of the United States. But nations sink when they see that interest only through a narrow glass. In a world that has grown small and dangerous, pursuit of narrow aims could bring decay and even disaster. An America that is mighty beyond description—yet living in a hostile or despairing world—would be neither safe nor free to build a civilization to liberate the spirit of man. In this pursuit we helped rebuild Western Europe. We gave our aid to Greece and Turkey, and we defended the freedom of Berlin. In this pursuit we have helped new nations toward independence. We have extended the helping hand of the Peace Corps and carried forward the largest program of economic assistance in the world. And in this pursuit we work to build a hemisphere of democracy and of social justice. In this pursuit we have defended against Communist aggression—in Korea under President Truman—in the Formosa Straits under President Eisenhower—in Cuba under President Kennedy—and again in Vietnam.”

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

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Wisdom, Men, Hostility

“All the measurements in the world do not balance one theorem by which the science of eternal truths is actually advanced.”

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

March 14, 1824. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955) by Guy Waldo Dunnington. p. 360

Truth, World, Science

“The modern economist … is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

Buddhist Economics

Time

“But all evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence. Variation is the hard reality, not a set of imperfect measures for a central tendency. Means and medians are the abstractions.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

The Median Isn't the Message (1985)

Nature, Reality

“A reading test measures one's ability to read reading tests, and reading tests are in themselves… somewhat akin to the world of crossword puzzles or Scrabble or the game of twenty questions. Some people play these games well, and all praise is due them for their skill. But if we ask, What aspect of the world do they comprehend in doing these games well? the answer is, Only the world within the games themselves.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

People, World, Game, Question

“Upon the sunny grass-plot stood the dial,
Whose measured time strange contrast with ours made :
Ah! was it omen of life's after trial,
That even then the hours were told in shade,
In the old, old times,
The dear old times?”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1837 3) (Vol 51) The Old Times
The Monthly Magazine

Life, Grass, Time

“[T]he rooms which had been placed at my disposal by the American Museum of New York became temporarily unavailable. …[W]e determined to rent a house in New Haven, Conn., and thither the laboratory was removed in November, 1882. …[T]he city offered excellent library and other facilities for scientific work, such as can be met only in the immediate vicinity of a large university [Yale College]. …The work in New Haven was not satisfactorily completed. In July, 1883, with the appointment of Prof. F. W. Clarke as chief chemist of the Geological Survey, our laboratory was officially connected with the chemical laboratory. Conformably with the further decision of the Director, by which the divers laboratories of the Geological Survey were united in one central laboratory in Washington, it was again necessary to change our basis of operations, this time… from New Haven to Washington. In the quarters assigned to us in the U. S. National Museum, temperature work on so large a scale… appeared impracticable, and it was therefore abandoned. …In place of the dangerous and cumbersome apparatus of the former laboratory, the endeavor is made to reduce all apparatus to the smallest dimensions compatible with reasonable accuracy of measurement.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

"On the Thermo-Electric Measurement of High Temperatures" (April 8, 1889)

Decision, Universe, Appearance, Change

“The noble lord who moved the address had, in the course of his speech, warned the House not to let an anxiety for liberty lead to a compromise of the safety of the state. He, for his part, could not separate those things. The safety of the state could only be found in the protection of the liberties of the people. Whatever was destructive of the latter also destroyed the former…The discontent existing in the country had been insisted on as a ground for the adoption of some measures…But there was another axiom no less true—that there never was an extensive discontent without great misgovernment…When no attention was paid to the calls of the people for relief, when their petitions were rejected and their sufferings aggravated, was it wonderful that at last public discontents should assume a formidable aspect?”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Speech in the House of Lords (23 November 1819). The Speech from the Throne at the opening of the session of 1819-20 called for strong measures against the seditious spirit shown in the manufacturing districts. Grey moved an amendment in the Lords, calling for an enquiry into the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August, in order to maintain ‘that confidence in the public institutions of the country, which constitutes the best safeguard of all law and government.’ His amendment was defeated by 159 votes to 34. Parliamentary Debates, vol. xli, pp. 7-19, quoted in Alan Bullock and Maurice Shock (ed.), The Liberal Tradition from Fox to Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 5-6.
1810s

People, Suffering, Parting, Housing

“You served here how long, Cornelius?’
‘Long enough to learn about what they believe. Not long enough to learn to speak their language well enough to get their confidence. Not long enough to learn how to read their books. Now I’ve three years before retirement and a measure of spare time for getting down to it.’
‘This, you know,’ Marcellus said, ‘is all wrong. You’re not here to get their confidence or read their books. They’re a colonized people. We’re here to give orders.
‘They’d rather die than obey some of the Roman orders. Besides, it’s laid down that their religion is inviolate…”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Kingdom of the Wicked (1985)

People, Books, Religion, Confidence

“The formal structure of a decision problem in any area can be put into four parts: ( 1 ) the choice of an objective function denning the relative desirability of different outcomes; (2) specification of the policy alternatives which are available to the agent, or decisionmaker, (3) specification of the model, that is, empirical relations that link the objective function, or the variables that enter into it, with the policy alternatives and possibly other variables; and (4) computational methods for choosing among the policy alternatives that one which performs best as measured by the objective function.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Economics of Information (1984), p. 55

Problem, Decision, Parting

“As we look over the list of the early leaders of the republic, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and others, we discern that they were all men who insisted upon being themselves and who refused to truckle to the people. With each succeeding generation, the growing demand of the people that its elective officials shall not lead but merely register the popular will has steadily undermined the independence of those who derive their power from popular election. The persistent refusal of the Adamses to sacrifice the integrity of their own intellectual and moral standards and values for the sake of winning public office or popular favor is another of the measuring rods by which we may measure the divergence of American life from its starting point.”

James Truslow Adams (1878–1949) American writer and historian

The Adams Family, p. 95 (1930)

Life, Men, People

“This reaction of man upon himself, is one of his noblest attributes; it offers, indeed, the finest field for the display of his activity. As a member of the social body, he is subjected every instant to the necessity of these causes, and pays them a regular tribute; but as a man, employing all the energy of his intellectual faculties, he in some measure masters these causes, and modifies their effects, thus constantly endeavouring to improve his condition.”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)

“The premises being thus settled, I proceed to observe that the concatenation of self-existence, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produces a problematical dialogism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable.”

Oliver Goldsmith book The Vicar of Wakefield

Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 7.

Nature

“We humanitarians, as our name suggests, believe that man has an ethical duty to man. We believe that the value of any system is measured by the consideration given to all human beings, not just to a favored class: and by that standard, our present system is a miserable failure.”

Damon Knight book A for Anything

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 10 (p. 120)

Failure

“Thus when Plotinus speaks of "the flight of the alone to the Alone," and the positivist or the empiricist asserts that these words are meaningless, he is right. Yet this does not import that the words are nonsense locutions, mere senseless noises which a man makes like a cough or a sneeze though it is possible that this is what the positivist intends. If this were so, it would be impossible to explain why generations of men have quoted those famous words. The explanation is that the words evoke in us a measure of the same experience which the author of them had. Our experience may be but a dim reflection of what was in him bright and clear. Our spirits vibrate faintly in unison with the soul of the great mystic, as a tuning fork vibrates faintly in response to the sound of the clear bell. But it is our own spontaneous experience which is evoked; it is not his experience which is communicated to us. His words are as grappling irons let down into the depths of our subconsciousness, which draw our own inner experiences nearer to the conscious threshold. But they are not, for most of us, drawn above the threshold. They remain below the surface faintly visible. Therefore they appear at the upper levels of our consciousness as faint hints, glimpses, and sometimes as mere vague feelings.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

p. 91-92.

Men, Feeling, Quotes, Soul

“art is fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother. While the fruit of the plant grows independent forms and never resembles a balloon or a president in a cutaway suit the artistic fruit of man shows for the most part a ridiculous resemblance to the appearance of other things. Reason tells man to stand above nature and to be the measure of all things. thus man thinks he is able to live and to create against the laws of nature and he creates abortions. through reason man became a tragic and ugly figure. i dare say he would create even his children in the form of vases with umbilical cords if he could do so. reason has cut man off from nature.”

Hans Arp (1886–1966) Alsatian, sculptor, painter, poet and abstract artist

Arp wrote this in lowercase letters
Notes From a Dada Diary; published, 1932 in 'Transition magazine'; as quoted (in lowercase letters), “Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 17
1930s

Children, Law, Art, Nature

“Here we have drug that is not like opium. Opium has all of the good of Dr. Jekyll and all the evil of Mr. Hyde. This drug is entirely the monster Hyde, the harmful effect of which cannot be measured. Some people will fly into a delirious rage, and they are temporarily irresponsible and may commit violent crimes. Other people will laugh uncontrollably. It is impossible to say what the effect will be on any individual. Those research men who have tried it have always been under control. They have always insisted upon that. … It is dangerous to the mind and body, and particularly dangerous to the criminal type, because it releases all of the inhibitions.”

Harry J. Anslinger (1892–1975) 1st Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics

Hearing on H.R. 6385 (April 1937)

Men, People, Rage, Evil

“To apply any other test– to deny a man his hopes because of his color or race, his religion or the place of his birth — is not only to do injustice, it is to deny America and to dishonor the dead who gave their lives for American freedom. Our fathers believed that if this noble view of the rights of man was to flourish, it must be rooted in democracy. The most basic right of all was the right to choose your own leaders. The history of this country, in large measure, is the history of the expansion of that right to all of our people.”

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

1960s, The American Promise (1965)

People, Religion, Hope, Color

“Time is that which is measured by a clock. This is a sound way of looking at things. A quantity like time, or any other physical measurement, does not exist in a completely abstract way. We find no sense in talking about something unless we specify how we measure it. It is the definition by the method of measuring a quantity that is the one sure way of avoiding talking nonsense about this kind of thing.”

Hermann Bondi (1919–2005) British mathematician and cosmologist

Hermann Bondi (1980), Relativity and Common Sense: A New Approach to Einstein, p. 65

Way, Sense, Time

“Even bold and revolutionary thinkers bow to the judgment of science. Kropotkin wants to break up all existing institutions, but he does not touch science. Ibsen goes very far in his critique of bourgeois society, but he retains science as a measure of truth. Levi Strauss has made us realize that Western thought is not the lonely peak of human achievement it was once thought to be, but he and his followers exclude science from their relativization of ideologies. Marx and Engels were convinced that science would aid the workers in their quest for mental and social liberation.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

pg 75.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

Truth, Science

“In his reign Hajib Toghantugeen, an officer of his government, proceeded in command of an army towards Hindoostan, and being appointed governor of Lahore, crossed the Ganges, and carried his conquests farther than any Mussulman had hitherto done, except the Emperor Mahmood. Like him he plundered many rich cities and temples of their wealth, and returned in triumph to Lahore, which now became in some measure the capital of the empire, for the Suljooks having deprived the house of Ghizny of most of its territory both in Eeran and Tooran, the royal family went to reside in India.”

Firishta (1560–1620) Indian historian

About Sultãn Mas‘ûd III of Ghazni (AD 1099-1151) Uttar Pradesh Tãrîkh-i-Firishta, translated by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, first published in 1829, New Delhi Reprint 1981, Vol. I, p. 82

Family, Housing, Wealth

“A world that is faithless would not be without the arts, either. Those don’t rest on faith, so imaginative art, literature, and music would still be with us. Too, we would retain justice, law, and compassion, perhaps in even greater measure than now, for our judgment wouldn’t be warped by adherence to unevidenced divine strictures.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 261

World, Faith, Justice, Law

“In examining each local authority's performance, instead of penalising those which attempt to provide for the needs of the elderly and single people and the housing problems in inner city areas, the Government should look at the high unmet need in any inner city area…We would like more home helps working for the council, more day centres for the elderly and better facilities for the physically and mentally handicapped, because in all those areas there are waiting lists, not at the wish of the council but simply because the Government treat our local authority in the same way as every other…The Secretary of State has created a monster in his rate support grant proposals and his rate-capping proposals. He has created the most enormous opposition to himself and the Government. The Government may well squeeze this nasty little measure through the House tonight, but the opposition that they have created will live for a long time. The unity of that opposition will live for even longer. It will destroy him, his Government and this kind of attack on democracy, and it will lead to the election of a Labour Government committed to the restoration of genuine local democracy that has been so shamelessly destroyed by the Government.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1985/jan/16/rate-support-grant-england in the House of Commons (16 January 1985). 1980s

People, Way, Democracy, Home

“Should Congress, in the execution of its powers, adopt measures which are prohibited by the constitution; or should Congress, under the pretext of executing its powers, pass laws for the accomplishment of objects not entrusted to the government; it would become the painful duty of this tribunal, should a case requiring such a decision come before it, to say that such an act was not the law of the land. But where the law is not prohibited, and is really calculated to effect any of the objects entrusted to the government, to undertake here to inquire into the degree of its necessity, would be to pass the line which circumscribes the judicial department, and to tread on legislative ground. This court disclaims all pretensions to such a power.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 316, 423. Regarding the Supreme Courts judicial review power in the context of the Necessary and Proper Clause.
McCulloch v. Maryland (1819)

Pain, Law, Decision

“Let me tell you quite frankly: in one way or another we will have to finish with the Jews. The führer once expressed it as follows: should Jewry once again succeed in inciting a world war, the bloodletting could not be limited to the peoples they drove to war but the Jews themselves would be done for in Europe. If the Jewish tribe survives the war in Europe while we sacrifice our blood for the preservation of Europe, this war will be but a partial success. Basically, I must presume, therefore, that the Jews will disappear. To that end I have started negotiations to expel them to the east. In any case, there will be a great Jewish migration. But what is to become of the Jews? Do you think that they will be settled in villages in the conquered eastern territories? In Berlin we have been told not to complicate matters: since neither these territories, nor our own, have any use for them, we should liquidate them ourselves! Gentlemen, I must ask you to remain unmoved by pleas for pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we encounter them and wherever possible, in order to maintain the overall mastery of the Reich here… For us the Jews are also exceptionally damaging because they are being such gluttons. There are an estimated 2.5 million Jews in the General Government, perhaps. 3.5 million. These 3.5 million Jews, we cannot shoot them, nor can we poison them. Even so, we can take steps which in some way or other will pave the way for their destruction, notably in connection with the grand measures to be discussed in the Reich. The General Government must become just as judenfrei (free of Jews) as the Reich!”

Hans Frank (1900–1946) German war criminal

To senior members of his administration, December 16, 1941, quoted in "Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: the final solution in history" - Page 302 - by Arno J. Mayer - History - 1988

War, People, World, Way

“In the year 1660 being importuned by some friends of his, I undertook so to teach Mr. Daniel Whalley of Northampton, who had been Deaf and Dumb from a Child. I began the work in 1661, and in little more than a year's time, I had taught him to pronounce distinctly any words, so as I directed him… and in good measure to understand a Language and express his own mind in writing; And he had in that time read over to me distinctly (the whole or greatest part of) the English Bible; and did pretty well understand (at least) the Historical part of it. In the year 1662 I did the like for Mr. Alexander Popham… I have since that time (upon the same account) taught divers Persons (and some of them very considerable) to speak plain and distinctly, who did before hesitate and stutter very much; and others, to pronounce such words or letters, as before they thought impossible for them to do: by teaching them how to rectify such mistakes in the formation, as by some natural impediment, or acquired Custome, they had been subject to.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

p, 125
Dr. Wallis's Account of some Passages of his own Life (1696)

Understanding, Nature, Time, Reading

“The truth is, the people here know nothing of the republican Negro hate prevalent in our glorious land. They measure and esteem men according to their moral and intellectual worth, and not according to the color of their skin. Whatever may be said of the aristocracies here, there is none based on the color of a man's skin.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1840s, Letter to William Lloyd Garrison (1846)

Men, Hate, People, Truth

“It would be a mistake to think…that by what we are doing tonight we are giving a vote of confidence or congratulation to homosexuality. Those who suffer from this disability carry a great weight of loneliness, guilt and shame. The crucial question, which we are nearly at the end of answering decisively, is, should we add to those disadvantages the full rigour of the criminal law? By its overwhelming decisions, the House has given a fairly clear answer, and I hope that the Bill will now make rapid progress towards the Statute Book. It will be an important and civilising Measure.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1967/jul/03/clause-8-restrictions-on-prosecution in the House of Commons in favour of the Bill decriminalising homosexuality (3 July 1967). 1960s

Books, Law, Hope, Confidence

“Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed.”

Michael Hammer (1948–2008) American academic

Source: Reengineering the Corporation, 1993, p. 32

Business, Speed

“What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the "right" answers should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the "Accutrac personality test," which warns at the beginning that "Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or 'psych out' the questionnaire." Naturally, I "never" find it hard "to stop moods of self-pity," nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals."”

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941) American writer and journalist

The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us.
Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America (2001), Ch. 2: Scrubbing in Maine (p. 59)

Secret, Imagination, Mood, Nature

“Question: You wanna gut that safety net…
Ron Paul: But the safety net doesn't work.
Question: Tell me why it doesn't work.
Ron Paul: It does work for some people, but overall it ultimately fails, because you spend more money than you have, and then you borrow to the hilt. Now we have to borrow $800 billion a year just to keep the safety net going. It's going to collapse when the dollar collapses, you can't even fight the war without this borrowing. And when the dollar collapses, you can't take care of the elderly of today. They're losing ground. Their cost of living is going up about 10%, even though the government denies it, we give them a 2% cost of living increase.
Question: So do you think the gold standard would fix that?
Ron Paul: The gold standard would keep you from printing money and destroying the middle class. Every country where you have runaway inflation, there's no middle class. Mexico, there's no middle class, you have a huge poor class, and a lot of wealthy people. Today we have a growing poor class, and we have more billionaires than ever before. So we're moving into third world status…
Question: Who is the safety net that you're speaking of, who does benefit from all those programs and all those agencies?
Ron Paul: Everybody on a short term benefits for a time. If you build a tenement house by the government, for about 15 or 20 years somebody might live there, but you don't measure who paid for it: somebody lost their job down the road, somebody had inflation, somebody else suffered. But then the tenement house falls down after about 20 years because it's not privately owned, so everybody eventually suffers. But the immediate victims aren't identifiable, because you don't know who lost the job, and who had the inflation, the victims are invisible. The few people who benefit, who get some help from government, everyone sees, "oh! look what we did!", but they never say instead of what, what did we lose. And unless you ask that question, we'll go into bankruptcy, we're in the early stages of it, the dollar is going down, our standard of living is going down, and we're hurting the very people that so many people wanna help, especially the liberals…”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Mac McKoy on KWQW, December 17, 2007 http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=x3lxo9WIR6w 2000s, 2006-2009

Money, War, People, World

“[A] measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

About the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution http://www.grantstomb.org/ (30 March 1870). 1870s

“A proper measure of democracy should be put into effect in the army, chiefly by abolishing the feudal practice of bullying and beating and by having officers and men share weal and woe. Once this is done, unity will be achieved between officers and men, the combat effectiveness of the army will be greatly increased, and there will be no doubt of our ability to sustain the long, cruel war.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On Protracted Warfare (1938)
Original: (zh-CN) 军队应实行一定限度的民主化，主要地是废除封建主义的打骂制度和官兵生活同甘苦。这样一来，官兵一致的目的就达到了，军队就增加了绝大的战斗力，长期的残酷的战争就不患不能支持。

Men, War, Democracy

“In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action.”

Thomas H. Davenport (1954) American academic

Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology, 1993

Strong, Time

“Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. 'T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a "foot" a Chancellor's foot; what an uncertain measure would this be! One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot. 'T is the same thing in the Chancellor's conscience.”

John Selden (1584–1654) English jurist and scholar of England's ancient laws and constitution, and of Jewish law

Equity.
Table Talk (1689)

Law, Indifference

“If ones tries to vanquish foes in the outer world,
They increase in greater measure.
If one conquers his Self-mind within,
All his foes soon disappear.”

Milarepa (1052–1135) Tibetan yogi

Song to the Hunter

World

“Now, in order to claim some knowledge of painting, Vitruvius speaks of the consideration of the perfect human body and about how good sculptors and painters in order to make it give it a height of ten faces, and I say that according to them they have read and they say that this proportion is based on knowledge of measurement and that it happens that without it it is not possible to have proportion or consideration because those who are not cognizant of this do not count.”

El Greco (1541–1614) Greek painter, sculptor and architect

quoted by Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, in The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810 https://books.google.com/books?id=4xB9k7-Neb8C&pg=PT184; Routledge, New York, 2004) p. 165

Knowledge, Reading, Painting, Perfection

“I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Germany. I think we should be in a position which would be odious to every man who values freedom of action and independence, and also in a position of the utmost peril for our crowded, peaceful population, engaged in their daily toil. I dread that day, but it is not, perhaps, far distant. It is, perhaps, only a year, or perhaps 18 months, distant…There is still time for us to take the necessary measures, but what we want are the measures. We do not want this paragraph in this White Paper, we want the measures. It is no good writing that first paragraph and then producing £130,000. We want the measures to achieve parity.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1934/mar/08/air-estimates-1934#column_2072 in the House of Commons (8 March 1934) The 1930s

Peace, Thinking, Freedom, Distant

“Victorious Carthage measures the downfall of Rome by all the heap of gold that was torn from the left hands of the slain.”
Congesto laevae quodcumque avellitur auro metitur Latias victrix Carthago ruinas.

Silius Italicus Punica

Book VIII, lines 675–676
This refers to the mass of rings Hannibal plundered from the Roman knights slain in the Battle of Cannae.
Punica

Victory

“The lack of formal definition does not prevent us from noting the characteristics which are frequently present in large scale systems. Each such system has a certain integrity. It may or may not be rigidly controlled from some central point, but in every case, all the parts of the system have some common purpose; in some sense, they all contribute to the production of a single set of optimum outputs from the given set of inputs, with respect to some appropriate measure of effectiveness.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

Source: System Engineering (1957), p. 5; As cited in: Allen B. Rosenstein (1965) " Systems engineering and Modern Engineering Design http://books.google.com/books?id=HDp9ReqM314C&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false"

Sense, Parting

“I venture to think that in future the Czechoslovak State cannot be maintained as an independent entity. You will find that in a period of time which may be measured by years, but may be measured only by months, Czechoslovakia will be engulfed in the Nazi régime. … It is the most grievous consequence which we have yet experienced of what we have done and of what we have left undone in the last five years—five years of futile good intention, five years of eager search for the line of least resistance, five years of uninterrupted retreat of British power, five years of neglect of our air defences.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/05/policy-of-his-majestys-government#column_366 in the House of Commons (5 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement The 1930s

Search, Thinking, Time, Future

“Numbers are the product of counting. Quantities are the product of measurement. This means that numbers can conceivably be accurate because there is a discontinuity between each integer and the next. Between two and three there is a jump. In the case of quantity there is no such jump, and because jump is missing in the world of quantity it is impossible for any quantity to be exact. You can have exactly three tomatoes. You can never have exactly three gallons of water. Always quantity is approximate.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Bateson (1978) " Number is Different from Quantity http://www.oikos.org/batesnumber.htm". In: CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1978, pp. 44-46

World, Water

“In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.”

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) Swiss sculptor and painter (1901-1966)

Alberto Giacometti (1945), as cited in: Joel Shatzky, ‎Michael Taub (1999), Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets. p. 302

Art

“The main lesson for Europe and the world is clear: as a matter of urgency, globalization must be fundamentally re-oriented. The main challenges of our times are the rise in inequality and global warming. We must therefore implement international treaties enabling us to respond to these challenges and to promote a model for fair and sustainable development. Agreements of a new type can, if necessary, include measures aimed at facilitating these exchanges. But the question of liberalizing trade should no longer be the main focus. Trade must once again become a means in the service of higher ends. It never should have become anything other than that.”

Thomas Piketty (1971) French economist

We must rethink globalization, or Trumpism will prevail (16 November 2016)

World, Question, Time

“But the first ingredient, let me emphasize, is the cessation of work on missile sites on Cuba and measures to render such weapons inoperable, under effective international guarantees. The continuations of this threat, or prolonging of this discussion concerning Cuba by linking these problems to the broader questions of European and world security, would surely lead to the peace of the world. For this reason I hope we can quickly agree along the lines outlined in this letter of October 26th.”

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

1962, Second Letter to Nikita Khrushchev

World, Peace, Hope, Question

“From Taylor and his associates, on the one hand, and Allen, Bruere, and Cleveland, on the other, there extends a firm resolve to enlarge the domain of measurement, an unbroken missionary endeavor to extend the suzerainty of "the facts." The pioneers began with inquiries into the proper speed of cutting tools and the optimum height for garbage trucks; their followers seek to place large segments of social life or even the whole of it upon a scientific basis.”

Dwight Waldo (1913–2000) American political scientist

Source: The Administrative State, 1948, p. 182

Life, Speed

“The art and mystery of banks… is established on the principle that 'private debts are a public blessing.' That the evidences of those private debts, called bank notes, become active capital, and aliment the whole commerce, manufactures, and agriculture of the United States. Here are a set of people, for instance, who have bestowed on us the great blessing of running in our debt about two hundred millions of dollars, without our knowing who they are, where they are, or what property they have to pay this debt when called on; nay, who have made us so sensible of the blessings of letting them run in our debt, that we have exempted them by law from the repayment of these debts beyond a give proportion (generally estimated at one-third). And to fill up the measure of blessing, instead of paying, they receive an interest on what they owe from those to whom they owe; for all the notes, or evidences of what they owe, which we see in circulation, have been lent to somebody on an interest which is levied again on us through the medium of commerce. And they are so ready still to deal out their liberalities to us, that they are now willing to let themselves run in our debt ninety millions more, on our paying them the same premium of six or eight per cent interest, and on the same legal exemption from the repayment of more than thirty millions of the debt, when it shall be called for.”

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

ME 13:420
1810s, Letters to John Wayles Eppes (1813)

People, Law, Art

“Though "none by searching can find out God, or the Almighty to perfection," yet I am persuaded, that if mankind would dare to exercise their reason as freely on those divine topics as they do in the common concerns of life, they would, in a great measure, rid themselves of their blindness and superstition, gain more exalted ideas of God and their obligations to him and one another, and be proportionally delighted and blessed with the views of his moral government, make better members of society, and acquire, manly powerful incentives to the practice of morality, which is the last and greatest perfection that human nature is capable of.”

Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American general

Source: Reason: The Only Oracle Of Man (1784), Chapter I Section I - Of Reforming Mankind from Superstition and Error, and the Good Consequences of it"

Life, God, Exercises, Search

“There is another and very important ground for standardization and that is the desirability of having parts interchangeable. Standards of exchange have long been in general use, and these have, most usually, been fixed with a view to convenient use rather than on a scientific basis. The units of weight and measure are examples of this form of standard. They may not even be the most logical, or most convenient, but once established they can, in general, be changed only by slow degrees, if at all.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

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

Change, Parting

“The idea that elimination of coherence, in one way or another, implies the replacement of 'and' by 'or', is a very common one among solvers of the 'measurement problem.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

It has always puzzled me.
Against 'measurement' (1990)

Way, Idea, Problem

“…the power of this line [the cycloid] to measure time.”

Christiaan Huygens book Horologium Oscillatorium

Horologium Oscillatorium (1673) as quoted by Joella G. Yoder, "Christiaan Huygens, Book on the Pendulum Clock" in Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics 1640-1940 ed., Ivor Grattan-Guinness (2005)

Time

“In order to receive in the eye all the light diffracted through a narrow opening, and to see the phenomena strongly magnified; still more in order to directly measure the inflection of the light, I placed in front of the objective of a theodolite-telescope a screen in which there was a narrow vertical opening which could be made wider or narrower by means of a screw. By means of a heliostat I threw sunlight into a darkened room through a narrow slit so that it fell upon this screen, through whose opening the light was therefore diffracted. I could then observe through the telescope the phenomena produced by the diffraction, magnified, and yet seen with sufficient brightness; and at the same time I could measure the angles of inflection of the light by means of the theodolite.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra: Memoirs (1899) Tr. & Ed. J. S. Ames p. 14-15

Light, Time

“Man's position in the world is defined by the fact that in every dimension of his being and behavior he finds himself at every moment between two boundaries. This condition appears as the formal structure of our existence, filled always with different contents in life's diverse provinces, activities, and destinies. We feel that the content and value of every hour stands between a higher and a lower; every thought between a wiser and a more foolish; every possession between a more extended and a more limited; every deed between a greater and a lesser measure of meaning, adequacy, and morality.”

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) German sociologist, philosopher, and critic

Source: The View of Life (1918), p. 1. Opening line of first essay "Life as Transcendence"

Life, World, Behavior, Feeling

“School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like Feldwebel (sergeants). I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam. What I hated most was the competitive system there, and especially sports. Because of this, I wasn't worth anything, and several times they suggested I leave. This was a Catholic School in Munich. I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement. How can a teacher understand youth with such a system?... from the age of twelve I began to suspect authority and distrust teachers. I learned mostly at home, first from my uncle and then from a student who came to eat with us once a week. He would give me books on physics and astronomy. The more I read, the more puzzled I was by the order of the universe and the disorder of the human mind, by the scientists who didn't agree on the how, the when, or the why of creation. Then one day this student brought me Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Reading Kant, I began to suspect everything I was taught. I no longer believed in the known God of the Bible, but rather in the mysterious God expressed in nature.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: William Hermanns, Einstein and the Poet: In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983), First conversation, p. 8

God, Hate, Books, Youth

“…I do not say any form which you construct this way is a good form, or must lead to a good solution; but there are forms which can lead to good solutions, and of course that is only the first link in a whole chain of investigations, and the other links in the investigation, model tests, measuring of the first structure, or a model test in scale 1:1 as we have it out here, these are of primary importance. So the engineer[‘s] problem is remaining all the same, but it is the first link, here, the shaping which has been lacking up to now, and this method can lead to a very nice solution.”

Heinz Isler (1926–2009) engineer

First Congress of the International Association of Shell Structures (now IASS), Madrid (1959) discussion following presentation of his paper paper ‘New Shapes for Shells’, as quoted by John Chilton, "39 etc… : Heinz Isler’s infinite spectrum of new shapes for shells" (2009) Proceedings of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) Symposium 2009, Valencia, Evolution and Trends in Design, Analysis and Construction of Shell and Spatial Structures, 28 September – 2 October 2009, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, eds. Alberto Domingo, Carlos Lazaro.

Way, Problem

“it was the period I think of as the age of the pillow... What I wanted to bring out - is that which cannot be measured - I wanted to bring out the tired movement in the eyelids - the lips must look as though they are whispering - she must look as though she is breathing - I want life - what is alive.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

on his painting 'The sick Child'
As quoted in 'From my rotting body, flowers shall grow, and I am in them, and that is eternity', Potter P. Emerg Infect Dis, 2011
after 1930

Life, Age, Thinking, Painting

“I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things, and this has led many people to talk about childish drawing.... this position of seeing them [the objects] without looking at them too much, without focusing more attention on them than any ordinary man would in normal everyday life..”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 105

Life, People, Way, Drawing

“World peace is continually threatened by the paranoia of power, as internal and international conflicts plague humanity. Confronted by the danger of weapons of mass destruction, humanity must take effective measures towards disarmament. Albert Einstein warned us: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.””

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/IntOrder/A-68-284_en.pdf. 2013

War, World, Peace

“Wherefore it is impossible to succeed in comparing wealth of different eras or different nations. This, in political economy, like squaring the circle in mathematics, is impracticable, for want of a common mean or measure to go by.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book I, On Production, Chapter XXI, Section VI, p. 244

Mathematics, Wealth

“We can all agree– it has already been a measure of the debate– that Saddam Hussein is an evil tyrant with no regard for the sanctity of human life, for either his own citizens or the people of other countries. We all agree that he is in flagrant breach of a series of UN resolutions, and in particular those relating to his duty to allow the inspection, and indeed participate in the destruction, of his weapons of mass destruction. We can also agree that he most certainly has chemical and biological weapons and is working towards a nuclear capability. The dossier contains confirmation of information that we either knew or most certainly should have been willing to assume.”

Menzies Campbell (1941) British Liberal Democrat politician and advocate

Hansard HC 6ser vol 390 col 43 http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200102/cmhansrd/vo020924/debtext/20924-12.htm#20924-12_spnew1. Speech in the House of Commons, 24 September 2002.

Life, People, Evil, Country

“I had the benefit of background and infrastructure, success would have come rather easily and my independent contribution would not have been easily measurable. Here there was so much to be done - how could I not try? I had a trained butler. Mumbai was close. The Mathais were there but I would stay at the Taj for Rs 50 per night. I could afford it because in Anand I had no expenses at all. **When asked why with aristocratic background how reconciled to stay in a garage.”

Verghese Kurien (1921–2012) Indian founder of dairy-cooperative Amul

In p. 143.
Quote, Thought Leaders

Success, Training, Night

“We can't use a double standard — there’s no room for double standards in American politics — for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantee of those practices in our own country.”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Address to the Democratic National Convention http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/huberthumphey1948dnc.html (July 14, 1948), Convention Hall, Philadelphia.

People, Country

“Exploitative is the key word here. It suggests that while you are free to be as sexually miserable as you like, the moment you exchange hard cash for a copy of Playboy, you are in the pornography perpetuation business, and your misery becomes political.
The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all around. It is there because men in their hundreds of millions want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger. The extent to which Larkin was "dependent" on pornography should be a measure our pity, or even our sympathy. But Motion hears the beep of his political pager, and he stands to attention.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Men, Truth, Sadness, Business

“Consider an event, for example the outburst if a nova… Suppose this event is observed from two stars in line with the nova, and suppose further that the two stars are moving uniformly with respect to each other in this line. Let the epoch at which these stars passed by each other be taken as the zero of time measurement, and let an observer A on one of the stars estimate the distance and epoch of the nova outburst to be x units of length and t units of time, respectively. Suppose the other star is moving toward the nova with velocity v relative to A. Let an observer B on the star estimate the distance and epoch of the nova outburst to be x' units of length and t' units of time, respectively. Then the Lorentz formulae, relating x' to t', arex' = \frac {x-vt}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}; \qquad t' = \frac {t-\frac{vx}{c^2}}{\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2}{c^2}}}
These formulae are… quite general, applying to any event in line with two uniformly moving observers. If we let c become infinite then the ratio of v to c tends to zero and the formulae becomex' = x - vt; \qquad t' = t.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

p, 125
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

Star, Time

“In life's small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscle trained: know'st thou when Fate
Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee,
"I find thee worthy; do this deed for me?"”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Epigram.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life, Fate, Training

“Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an œconomy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)

Truth, Exercises

“Companies are in the midst of a revolutionary transformation. Industrial age competition is shifting to information age competition. During the industrial age, from 1850 to about 1975, companies succeeded by how well they could capture the benefits from economies of scale and scope. Technology mattered, but, ultimately, success accrued to companies that could embed the new technology into physical assets that offered efficient, mass production of standard products.
During the industrial age, financial control systems were developed in companies, such as General Motors, DuPont, Matsushita, and General Electric, to facilitate and monitor efficient allocations of financial and physical capital. A summary financial measure such as return-on-capital employed (ROCE) could both direct a company’s internal capital to its most productive use and monitor the efficiency by which operating divisions used financial and physical capital to create value for shareholders.
The emergence of the information era, however, in the last decades of the twentieth century, made obsolete many of the fundamental assumptions of industrial age competition. No longer could companies gain sustainable competitive advantage by merely deploying new technology into physical assets rapidly, and by excellent management of financial assets and liabilities.”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2-3

Age, Success

“Speaking generally, I am desirous to push forward the argument from the interests of the people more than has hitherto been done. As I have said, I consider it to be our true rule and measure of action, and our observance of it is the one justification for our presence in India.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Source: Letter to Lord Northbrook (25 August 1875), quoted in S. Gopal, British Policy in India, 1858-1905 (Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 65

People

“After all, in both languages we were dealing in large measure not with English and French, but with Scots and Irish, Bretons and Normans…. There could be no more eloquent illustration of the colonial mind-set than a bunch of Celts and Vikings in a distant northern territory insulting each other as les anglais and the French as if they were the descendants of the people who had subjected and ruined them.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Reflections of a Siamese Twin (1997)

People, Distant

“One of the pupils of Artur Schnabel told me that he never heard his teacher practice a difficult passage slowly, but he was struck by the way Schnabel would play one chord of a slow movement over and over, measuring and remeasuring the different components of the harmony.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Source: Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist (2002), Ch. 2 Listening to the Sound of the Piano

Way, Teachers

“Every man feels himself wounded, where he finds himself neglected, and that in proportion as he is conscious of endeavouring to merit attention. I shall be satisfied with any measure that the Congress shall take, that has not a direct tendency to degrade me in the public estimation. A measure of that sort would sink me in my own esteem, and render me spiritless and uneasy in my situation, and consequently unfit for the service.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (May 1776)

Feeling

“A Logarithmic Table is a small table by the use of which we can obtain a knowledge of all geometrical dimensions and motions in space, by a very easy calculation. It is deservedly called very small, because it does not exceed in size a table of sines; very easy, because by it all multiplications, divisions, and the more difficult extractions of roots are avoided; for by only a very few most easy additions, subtractions, and divisions by two, it measures quite generally all figures and motions.”

John Napier (1550–1617) Scottish mathematician

The Construction of the Wonderful Canon of Logarithms (1889)

Knowledge

“An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have intended — the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and that it must therefore have been intended.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

People, Feeling, Motivation

“The greatness of an estate, in bulk and territory, doth fall under measure; and the greatness of finances and revenue, doth fall under computation. The population may appear by musters; and the number and greatness of cities and towns by cards and maps. But yet there is not any thing amongst civil affairs more subject to error, than the right valuation and true judgment concerning the power and forces of an estate.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates
Essays (1625)

Error, Appearance

“The Bolsheviks themselves will not want, with hand on heart, to deny that, step by step, they have to feel out the ground, try out, experiment, test now one way now another, and that a good many of their measures do not represent priceless pearls of wisdom. Thus it must and will be with all of us when we get to the same point–even if the same difficult circumstances may not prevail everywhere.”

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) Polish Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary

Source: The Russian Revolution (1918), Chapter Six, "The Problem of Dictatorship"

Wisdom, Way, Feeling, Heart

“I just want to explain what I mean when I say that we should try to hold on to physical reality.
We are … all aware of the situation regarding what will turn out to be the basic foundational concepts in physics: the point-mass or the particle is surely not among them; the field, in the Faraday-Maxwell sense, might be, but not with certainty. But that which we conceive as existing ("real") should somehow be localized in time and space. That is, the real in one part of space, A, should (in theory) somehow "exist" independently of that which is thought of as real in another part of space, B. If a physical system stretches over A and B, then what is present in B should somehow have an existence independent of what is present in A. What is actually present in B should thus not depend the type of measurement carried out in the part of space A; it should also be independent of whether or not a measurement is made in A.
If one adheres to this program, then one can hardly view the quantum-theoretical description as a complete representation of the physically real. If one attempts, nevertheless, so to view it, then one must assume that the physically real in B undergoes a sudden change because of a measurement in A. My physical instincts bristle at that suggestion.
However, if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I don't see at all what physics is supposed to be describing. For what is thought to be a "system" is after all, just conventional, and I do not see how one is supposed to divide up the world objectively so that one can make statements about parts.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

"What must be an essential feature of any future fundamental physics?" Letter to Max Born (March 1948); published in Albert Einstein-Hedwig und Max Born (1969) "Briefwechsel 1916-55", and in Potentiality, Entanglement and Passion-at-a-Distance: Quantum Mechanical Studies for Abner Shimony, Volume Two edited by Robert Cohen, Michael Horn, and John Stachel (1997), p. 121 http://books.google.com/books?id=DsNoIcQemTsC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q&f=false 1940s

World, Reality, Sense, Change

“"One thing more, son. Do you believe in God?"
Slowly Frost put the spoon back into the bowl.
He asked: "You really want an answer?"
"I want an answer," said the man. "I want an honest one."
"The answer," said Frost, "is that I don't know. Not, certainly, in the kind of God that you are thinking of. Not the old white-whiskered, woodcut gentleman. But a supreme being — yes, I would believe in a God of that sort. Because it seems to me there must be some sort of force or power or will throughout the universe. The universe is too orderly for it to be otherwise. When you measure all this orderliness, from the mechanism of the atom at one end of the scale, out to the precision of the operation of the universe at the other end, it seems unbelievable that there is not a supervisory force of some kind, a benevolent ruling force to maintain that sort of order."”

Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988) American writer, journalist

Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967)

God, Thinking, Universe

“Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

A note Einstein wrote underneath an etching of himself (made by Hermann Struck) which he sent to a friend, Dr. Hans Mühsam. According to the book, "the date is 1920 or perhaps earlier", p. 24
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

Truth, Passion

“The development of plastic art is determined by the will to visualize. Art of the past represented the subjective vision of 'naturalistic relationships'. Neoplasticism embodies a subjective vision of 'plastic' relationships… Pure thought, which does not signify a concept derived from natural phenomena but which is contained in numbers, measures, relationships and abstract lines, is revealed conceptually (as Reason) by Chinese, Greek and German philosophy, and aesthetically by contemporary Neoplasticism [= De Stijl.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Van Doesburg's art-review, published in: 'Thought – Vision – Creation', in De Stijl Vol ll, 2 December 1918; as quoted in 'Theo van Doesburg', Joost Baljeu, Studio Vista, London 1974, pp. 108–109
1912 – 1919

Art, Nature, Past

“Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 251
Other works

Truth, Beauty, Nature, Reading

“What we need is courage and determination in facing up to seemingly insurmountable odds. What we have to do is not so difficult on the face of it, if we just look at the direct ecological measures that we need to take. What makes it seem like an insurmountable problem is the monstrosity of global capitalist society.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice (2017)

Courage, Problem

“No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.”

David Jenkins (bishop)

Quoted in The Guardian ( 24 December 1984 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/186552854.html)

God

“My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”

George Eliot (1819–1880) English novelist, journalist and translator

Letter to Charles Bray (15 November 1857)

Suffering, Joy

“For some reason I was attracted to civil government and took that. This was my first introduction to the Constitution of the United States. Although I was but thirteen years old the subject interested me exceedingly. The study of it which I then began has never ceased, and the more I study it the more I have come to admire it, realizing that no other document devised by the hand of man ever brought so much progress and happiness to humanity. The good it has wrought can never be measured.”

Calvin Coolidge book The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge, Cosmopolitan Book Corporation (1929), p. 40.
1920s

Happiness, Study

“I will make the land [so] desolate- This is [actually] a kindly measure for Israel, for their enemies will not find any satisfaction in their land, for it will be desolate of its inhabitants.”

Rashi (1040–1105) French rabbi and commentator

Leviticus 26,32
Land of Israel

“But mainly I learned, in approaching the measurement of new phenomena, not just to consider using existing apparatus but to allow the mind to wander freely and invent new ways of doing the job.”

Val Logsdon Fitch (1923–2015) American physicist

Nobel Prize Autobiography, from Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1980, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, (Nobel Foundation), Stockholm (1981).

Way, Learning

“Dr Koenraad Elst, in his two-volume book titled The Saffron Swastika, marshals an incontrovertible array of facts to debunk slanderous attacks on the BJP by a section of the media. About the Rath Yatra, he writes: ‘But what about Advani’s bloody Rath Yatra (car procession) from Somnath to Ayodhya in October 1990? Very simple: it is not at all that the Rath Yatra was a bloody affair. While in the same period, there was a lot of rioting in several parts of the country (particularly Hyderabad, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh), killing about 600 people in total, there were no riots at all along the Rath Yatra trail. Well, there was one: upper-caste students pelted stones at Advani because he had disappointed them by not supporting their agitation against the caste-based reservations which V. P. Singh was promoting. Even then, no one was killed or seriously wounded. It is a measure of the quality of the Indian English-language media that they have managed to turn an entirely peaceful procession, an island of orderliness in a riot-torn country, into a proverbial bloody event (“Advani’s blood yatra”). And it was quite a sight how the pressmen in their editorials blamed Advani for communal riots of which the actual, non-Advanirelated causes were given on a different page of the same paper. Whether Advani with his Rath Yatra was at 500 miles distance from a riot (as with the riot in Gonda in UP), or under arrest, or back home after the high tide of the Ayodhya agitation, every riot in India in the second half of 1990 was blamed on him’.”

L. K. Advani book My Country My Life

L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008). ISBN 978-81-291-1363-4, quoting Koenraad Elst, The Saffron Swastika (2001)

People, Books, Peace, Disappointment

“I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the centre of the world.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 45

World

“But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.”

Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) author and editor

Source: The God of the Machine (1943), p. 250, emphasis in the original

Death, People, Support, Personality

“I am convinced of the necessity to take an effective measure of self defense.”

Seishirō Itagaki (1885–1948) Japanese general

Quoted in "Oakland Tribune (Newspaper)" - February 21, 1939, Oakland, California.

“There being several strong fortifications in and about King's Bridge, if the enemy should throw in a thousand or fifteen hundred men,, they could cut off our communication effectually; and, as the state of the barracks is, they would find exceeding good cover for the men. But if we were to take the barracks down, if the boards were not removed, it would, in a great measure, deprive them of that advantage. However, I have not had it in my power to do either as yet.”

Nathanael Greene (1742–1786) American general in the American Revolutionary War

Letter to George Washington (24 October 1776)

Men, Communication, Strong

“The only measurable and therefore undebatably existing human value is the instrumental value of an individual. There can be a justified hierarchy of individuals based on how much the removal of their talents or skills would weaken the community.”

Jussi Halla-aho (1971) Finnish Slavic linguist, blogger and a politician

Jussi Halla-aho (2005), published in the blog Scripta Ihmisarvosta http://www.halla-aho.com/scripta/ihmisarvosta.html, April 13, 2005 2005-09

Communication

“We have merely (!) to measure the volume V of a sphere of radius r or the sum \sigma of the angles of a triangle of measured are \delta, and from the results to compute the value of K.”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

Geometry as a Branch of Physics (1949)

“But let the individual man lay claim to ever so many rights because Man or the concept man ‘entitles’ him to them, because his being man does it: what do I care for his right and his claim? If he has his right only from Man and does not have it from me, then for me he has no right. His life, for example, counts to me only for what it is worth to me. I respect neither a so-called right of property (or his claim to tangible goods) nor yet his right to the ‘sanctuary of his inner nature’ (or his right to have the spiritual goods and divinities, his gods, remain un-aggrieved). His goods, the sensuous as well as the spiritual, are mine, and I dispose of them as proprietor, in the measure of my — might.”

Max Stirner book The Ego and Its Own

Cambridge 1995, p. 219
The Ego and Its Own (1845)

Life, God, Nature

“Erdogan really needs to get a grip on himself, if only because, sadly, Turkey needs him right now as the least bad option in a confused situation. He may be every Turk’s first choice but he sure is the second choice of many. The first thing he needs to do is to take a deep breath since breathing is not one of those things that the ruler had better not do. Next, he needs to restore a measure of discipline within his camp, at least as far as the narrative of the events is concerned.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Opinion: Turkey – Towards a “One and a Half Party” System http://english.aawsat.com/2016/08/article55355819/opinion-turkey-towards-one-half-party-system, Ashraq Al-Awsat (5 Aug, 2016).

“He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in every different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social business among men; that the doing of it well, or the doing of it ill, measures accurately what degree of well-being or of ill- being there is in the world's affairs. He thinks that we, on the whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any Nation in this world ever did it before: that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the Mahomet a Prophet of God. It is this Editor's clear opinion, accordingly, that we must learn to do our Hero-worship better; that to do it better and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,—Heaven's blessed life, not Mammon's galvanic accursed one. To resuscitate the Asphyxied, apparently now moribund, and in the last agony if not resuscitated: such and no other seems the consummation. 'Hero-worship,' if you will,—yes, friends; but, first of all, by being ourselves of heroic mind.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Life, Men, God, World

“We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight the people of London were asked to cast their votes as to whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of all cities, an overwhelming majority would cry, "No, we will mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, they have meted out to us." {applause} The people of London with one voice would say to Hitler: "You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We remember Warsaw! In the first few days of the war. We remember Rotterdam. We have been newly reminded of your habits by the hideous massacre in Belgrade. We know too well the bestial assaults you're making upon the Russian people, to whom our hearts go out in their valiant struggle! {cheers} We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will! You do your worst!”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

and we will do our best! {sustained cheering} Perhaps it may be our turn soon. Perhaps it may be our turn now."
July 14, 1941, in a speech before the London County Council. The original can be found in Churchill's The Unrelenting Struggle (English edition 187; American edition 182) or in the Complete Speeches VI:6448.
The Second World War (1939–1945)

War, People, Sun, Heart

Quotes about measure page 6

Quotes about measure
page 6