Quotes about method (1831 quotes, page 4)

“God made Homo sapiens a problem-solving creature. The trouble is that He gave us too many resources: too many languages, too many phases of life, too many levels of complexity, too many ways to solve problems, too many contexts in which to solve them, and too many values to balance.
First came the law, accounting, and history which looks backward in time for their values and decision-making criteria, but their paradigm (casuistry) cannot look forward to predict future consequences. Casuistry is overly rigid and does not account for statistical phenomena. To look forward man used two thousand years to evolve scientific method - which can predict the future when it discovers the laws of nature. In parallel, man evolved engineering, and later, systems engineering, which also anticipates future conditions. It took man to the moon, but it often did, and does, a poor job of understanding social systems, and also often ignores the secondary effects of its artifacts on the environment.
Environmental impact analysis was promoted by governments to patch over the weakness of engineering - with modest success - and it does not ignore history; but by not integrating with system design, it is also an incomplete philosophy. System design and architecture, or simply design, like science and engineering is forward-looking, and provides man with comforts and conveniences - if someone will tell them what problems to solve, and which requirements to meet. It rarely collects wisdom from the backward-looking methodologies, often overlooks ordinary operating problems in designing its artifacts, whether autos or buildings, and often ignores the principles of good teamwork.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life , Wisdom , God , Law

“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

“The attack of the Luddites was not occasioned by the introduction of new machinery, however, as is commonly thought, for there is no evidence of such in 1811 and 1812 when Luddism proper began. Rather, the destruction was leveled at the new slip-shod methods which were ordered into effect on the extant machinery. Not an attack against production on economic grounds, it was above all the violent response of the textile workers (soon joined by others) to their attempted degradation in the form of inferior work; shoddy goods — the hastily-assembled "cut-ups," primarily — was the issue at hand.”

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

Source: Elements of Refusal (1988), p. 108

“Only a few of us had been able to face directly the obscene conditions we inflicted on animals in our farm factories and modern slaughter houses; but most of us knew on some level that they entailed a suffering that was too much to “stomach.” We can appreciate now what it did to us to eat animals kept long in pain and terror. Because the mass methods employed to raise and kill animals for our tables were relatively new, we did not fully realize the deprivation and torture they entailed. Only a few of us guessed that the glandular responses of the cattle and pigs and chickens pumped adrenalin into their bodies and that we ate with their flesh the rage of the chickens, the terror of the pigs and cattle… Acting now with more respect for other beings, we find we have more respect for ourselves.”

Joanna Macy (1929) American activist

Foreword https://books.google.it/books?id=h-9ARz2YAlgC&pg=PT5 to Diet for a New America by John Robbins (H J Kramer, 2011)

Pain , Suffering , Rage , Animals

“To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Attributed to Auguste Rodin by Isadora Duncan, As quoted in Modern Dancing and Dancers (1912) by John Ernest Crawford Flitch, p. 105.
1900s-1940s

Nature

“Unschooling is first and foremost an educational approach. Unschooling was not created by Holt, nor propagated by my colleagues and me since Holt’s death in 1985, to be an ideological parenting method, though I think unschooling certainly informs one’s parenting. Just as we trust children to discover and learn things in their own way, so, too, can parents be trusted to figure out how unschooling will work in their family and adapt it to their relationships with each of their children.”

Pat Farenga American activist

On Unschooling, Parenting, and Video Addiction (2011)

Death , Children , Education , Family

“The price, then, that the professional study of ethics for bureaucrats exacts from the curriculum is that questions of political philosophy ("Is the regime just?") must yield to less fundamental questions such as "How can I promote the values of the regime?" The method of regime values eschews metaphysics and addresses the students in the existential situation in which it finds them—persons who have taken or are about to take an oath to uphold the values of a particular regime. It admonishes them that taking such an oath presupposes an acceptance of the fundamental justice of the regime but does not require into how the students arrived at the conclusion that the regime is just.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

(1989, p. 70-71)
Ethics for bureaucrats, 1988

Justice , Question , Study , Personality

“One of the most important skills of the economist, therefore, is that of simplification of the model. Two important methods of simplification have been developed by economists. One is the method of partial equilibrium analysis (or microeconomics), generally associated with the name of Alfred Marshall and the other is the method of aggregation (or macro-economics), associated with the name of John Maynard Keynes.”

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

Source: 1950s, The Skills of the Economist, 1958, p. 19

“We worked together for seven years. Tenniel and other artists declared I would not work with Carroll for seven weeks! I accepted the challenge, but I, for that purpose, adopted quite a new method. No artist is more matter-of-fact or businesslike than myself: to Carroll I was not Hy. F., but someone else, as he was someone else. I was wilful and erratic, bordering on insanity. We therefore got on splendidly.”

Harry Furniss (1854–1925) Irish artist and illustrator

On Lewis Carroll; pp.104-5.
"Confessions of a Caricaturist", vol. 1 (1901)

“We needn’t take things like reasoning on faith. We use reason because it works. And science isn’t really based on axioms: it’s not math. It’s based on a method that, refined over time, leads us to widely accepted facts about the universe: the facts that we can rely on to do things like establish the genealogy of species, cure disease, and land probes on comets. You can’t accomplish such things through prayer.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" The TLS on Plantinga and me https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/05/03/the-tls-on-plantinga-and-i/" May 3, 2017

Disease , Faith , Universe , Science

“The prayer is the standard of Islam. Whosoever loves prayers, and observes their limits, timings and methods, is a true believer.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Kanzul `Ummal, Volume 7, Tradition 18870
Shi'ite Hadith

Love , Time

“Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 24

Truth , Thinking

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.”

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English mystery novelist and Christian apologist

"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Men , Age , World , Faith

“It can not be denied that the present tendency is not in harmony with this spirit. The individual, instead of working out his own salvation and securing his own freedom by establishing his own economic and moral independence by his own industry and his own self-mastery, tends to throw himself on some vague influence which he denominates society and to hold that in some way responsible for the sufficiency of his support and the morality of his actions. The local political units likewise look to the States, the States look to the Nation, and nations are beginning to look to some vague organization, some nebulous concourse of humanity, to pay their bills and tell them what to do. This is not local self-government. It is not American. It is not the method which has made this country what it is. We can not maintain the western standard of civilization on that theory. If it is supported at all, it will have to be supported on the principle of individual responsibility. If that principle be maintained, the result which I believe America wishes to see produced inevitably will follow.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

Way , Support , Freedom , Country

“If things are ever to move upward, some one must take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

“They've worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and tools, and especially the goals—the aims, the ideals, the moral purposes—that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous! Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough, at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy.”

Sinclair Lewis book Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith (1925), Ch. 40

Age

“Most, if not all, of the great ideas of modern mathematics have had their origin in observation. Take, for instance, the arithmetical theory of forms, of which the foundation was laid in the diophantine theorems of Fermat, left without proof by their author, which resisted all efforts of the myriad-minded Euler to reduce to demonstration, and only yielded up their cause of being when turned over in the blow-pipe flame of Gauss’s transcendent genius; or the doctrine of double periodicity, which resulted from the observation of Jacobi of a purely analytical fact of transformation; or Legendre’s law of reciprocity; or Sturm’s theorem about the roots of equations, which, as he informed me with his own lips, stared him in the face in the midst of some mechanical investigations connected (if my memory serves me right) with the motion of compound pendulums; or Huyghen’s method of continued fractions, characterized by Lagrange as one of the principal discoveries of that great mathematician, and to which he appears to have been led by the construction of his Planetary Automaton; or the new algebra, speaking of which one of my predecessors (Mr. Spottiswoode) has said, not without just reason and authority, from this chair, “that it reaches out and indissolubly connects itself each year with fresh branches of mathematics, that the theory of equations has become almost new through it, algebraic 31 geometry transfigured in its light, that the calculus of variations, molecular physics, and mechanics” (he might, if speaking at the present moment, go on to add the theory of elasticity and the development of the integral calculus) “have all felt its influence.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

James Joseph Sylvester. "A Plea for the Mathematician, Nature," Vol. 1, p. 238; Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), pp. 655, 656.

Law , Mathematics , Idea , Effort

“The longwall method [can be] regarded as a technological system expressive of the prevailing outlook of mass-production engineering and as a social structure consisting of the occupational roles that have been institutionalized in its use.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Long Wall Method of Coal-Getting", 1951, p. 5

“Investigative practice therefore constitutes an area of considerable anxiety within the discipline of psychology. Concern with questions of methodological orthodoxy often takes the place of concern about theoretical orthodoxy when research or its results are discussed and evaluated. These preoccupations with the purity of method frequently deteriorate to a kind of method fetishism or "methodolatry." From this point of view there may be something distinctly subversive about the suggestion that the sphere of methodology is not a realm of pure reason but an area of human social activity governed by mundane circumstances like any other social activity. Nevertheless, the consequences of this suggestion should be explored, for not to do so exposes one to all the risks entailed by a naive and self-deluded style of scientific practice.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: Constructing the subject: Historical origins of psychological research. 1994, p. 5-6

Question

“Hippocrates… is said to have proved the theorem that circles are to one another as the squares on their diameters, and it is difficult to see how he could have done this except by some form, or anticipation, of the method”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

of exhaustion
Achimedes (1920)

“Social unrest and a deepening sense of unfairness are dangers to our national life which we must minimize by rigorous methods. People know that vast personal incomes come not only through the effort or ability or luck of those who receive them, but also because of the opportunities for advantage which Government itself contributes. Therefore, the duty rests upon the Government to restrict such incomes by very high taxes.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

1930s, Message to Congress on tax revision (1935)

Life , People , Sense , Effort

“Wherever we look the dreadful disintegration of the bridges of life, the capillaries and the bodies they have created, is evident, which has been caused by the mechanical and mindless work of man, who has torn away the soul from the Earth's blood - water. The more the engineer endeavors to channel water, of whose spirit and nature he is today still ignorant, by the shortest and straightest route to the sea, the more the flow of water weighs into the bends, the longer its path and the worse the water will become. The spreading of the most terrible disease of all, of cancer, is the necessary consequence of such unnatural regulatory works. These mistaken activities - our work - must legitimately lead to increasingly widespread unemployment, because our present methods of working, which have a purely mechanical basis, are already destroying not only all of wise Nature's formative processes, but first and foremost the growth of the vegetation itself, which is being destroyed even as it grows. The drying up of mountain springs, the change in the whole pattern of motion of the groundwater, and the disturbance in the blood circulation of the organism - Earth - is the direct result of modern forestry practices. The pulse-beat of the Earth was factually arrested by the modern timber production industry. Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests. The forest is the habitat of water and as such the habitat of life processes too, whose quality declines as the organic development of the forest is disturbed. Ultimately, due to a law which functions with awesome constancy, it will slowly but surely come around to our turn. Our accustomed way of thinking in many ways, and perhaps even without exception, is opposed to the true workings of Nature. Our work is the embodiment of our will. The spiritual manifestation of this work is its effect. When such work is carried out correctly, it brings happiness, but when carried out incorrectly, it assuredly brings misery.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Viktor Schauberger: Our Senseless Toil (1934)

Life , Death , People , Disease

“[Darwin’s] inquiry characteristically confines itself to the process of cumulative change. His results, as well as his specific determination of the factors at work in this process of cumulative change, have been questioned; perhaps they are open to all the criticisms levelled against them as well as a few more not thought of; but the scope and method given to scientific enquiry by Darwin and the generation whose spokesman he is has substantially not been questioned, except by that diminishing contingent of the faithful”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of Business Enterprise

Source: The Theory of Business Enterprise, 1904, p. 370

Faith , Question , Change

“That original intelligence, say the MAGIANS, who is the first principle of all things, discovers himself immediately to the mind and understanding alone; but has placed the sun as his image in the visible universe; and when that bright luminary diffuses its beams over the earth and the firmament, it is a faint copy of the glory which resides in the higher heavens. If you would escape the displeasure of this divine being, you must be careful never to set your bare foot upon the ground, nor spit into a fire, nor throw any water upon it, even though it were consuming a whole city. Who can express the perfections of the Almighty? say the Mahometans. Even the noblest of his works, if compared to him, are but dust and rubbish. How much more must human conception fall short of his infinite perfections? His smile and favour renders men for ever happy; and to obtain it for your children, the best method is to cut off from them, while infants, a little bit of skin, about half the breadth of a farthing. Take two bits of cloth, say the Roman catholics, about an inch or an inch and a half square, join them by the corners with two strings or pieces of tape about sixteen inches long, throw this over your head, and make one of the bits of cloth lie upon your breast, and the other upon your back, keeping them next your skin: There is not a better secret for recommending yourself to that infinite Being, who exists from eternity to eternity.”

David Hume The Natural History of Religion

Part VII - Confirmation of this doctrine
The Natural History of Religion (1757)

Men , Children , Lie , Secret

“In addition to technical problems, systems also have organizational and logistical problems. Many different people may be involved over a wide physical or geographic coverage and over a long period of time. Many may work for different companies or organizations with different rules and methods of operating. Very many data and much knowledge are involved. The organizational problem concerns itself with the question of how all these people can work together most effectively for the common purpose.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 24; First paragraph of Ch. 2. System Organization, Scheduling, and Record-Keeping

People , Question , Knowledge , Problem

“Every expression of human mental life can be understood as a kind of language, and this understanding, in the manner of a true method, everywhere raises new questions.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Jede Äußerung menschlichen Geisteslebens kann als eine Art der Sprache aufgefaßt werden, und diese Auffassung erschließt nach Art einer wahrhaften Methode überall neue Fragestellungen.
"On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" (1916), translated by E. Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (1996), p. 62

Life , Understanding , Question

“The reason we are finding it hard to win this battle is that we're not actually fighting it properly. We're not actually standing up to these people and saying, "It's not just your methods that are wrong, your ideas are absurd. Nobody is oppressing you. Your sense of grievance isn't justified."”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

" Blair launches stinging attack on 'absurd' British Islamists http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,2115929,00.html", 1 July 2007.
Remarks made on the eve of his departure from Downing Street, 26 June 2007.
2000s

People , Idea , Sense , Fight

“I remember reading a Scientific American article about the use of new physical techniques – including neutron scattering – as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated. I knew ribosomes were a big fundamental problem in science and this was a method for chipping away at it.”

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

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan interview: 'It takes courage to tackle very hard problems in science

Problem , Science , Reading

“The majority of humans solve their issues by relying on dead methods because those majorities are dead. Attempts and errors, blindly imitations, putting into practice the first idea that comes to mind, reactions based on conditioning and dealing with problems in a linear pattern or by using fragile methods are some instances. Most of the people are not aware that these dead methods will end up to dead results.”

Elia M. Ramollah (1973) founder and leader of the El Yasin Community

The Great Master of Thought (Amen- Vol.3), Observing management

People , Error , Idea , Problem

“Structured design does not scale up well for extremely complex systems, and this method is largely inappropriate for use with object-based and object-oriented programming languages.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 19

“I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
Letters and interviews

Reading

“Shōnen Jump: Several readers have asked if Namekians are plants. Of course, based on their names, they seem to be slugs… but they are green, they have a strange method of reproduction, and they live on water.”

Akira Toriyama (1955) manga artist and video game character designer

Interview with Shōnen Jump

Water

“…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

“Grosseteste appears to have been the first medieval writer to recognize and deal with the two fundamental methodological problems of induction and experimental verification and falsification which arose when the Greek conception of geometrical demonstration was applied to the world of experience. He appears to have been the first to set out a systematic and coherent theory of experimental investigation and rational explanation by which the Greek geometrical method was turned into modern experimental science. As far as is known, he and his successors were the first to use and exemplify such a theory in the details of original research into concrete problems.”

Alistair Cameron Crombie (1915–1996) Australian zoologist, historian of science

Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science 1100-1700 (1953)

World , Problem , Appearance , Science

“Buddha's teachings are scientific methods to solve the problems of all living beings permanently.”

Kelsang Gyatso (1931) Tibetan writer and lama

Modern Buddhism: The Path of Compassion and Wisdom (2011)

Problem

“On 11 October 1908, having worked for six years at my international magazine Poesia, in an attempt to free the Italian lyrical genius that was under sentence of death from its traditional and commercial fetters, I suddenly felt that articles, poetry and controversies were no longer enough. It was absolutely crucial to switch methods, get out into the streets, lay siege to theaters, and introduce the fisticuffs into the artistic struggle... My Italian blood raced faster when my lips coined out loud the word FUTURISM.
It was the new formula of Action-Art and a code of mental health. It was a youthful and innovative banner, anti-traditional, optimistic, heroic and dynamic, that had to be hoisted over the ruins of all attachment to the past.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

quote from 'Guerra sola igiene del mundo', in Edizione Futuriste di Poesia', Milan 1915; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 21
1910's

Death , Health , Youth , Art

“Voluntary birth control methods only work on the people who choose to use ’em. A population check that doesn’t work on everybody doesn’t work at all, because it simply breeds out the ones who use it. The only population check that really works is one that affects everybody, like a limit of space or food.”

Damon Knight book A for Anything

Source: A for Anything (1959), Chapter 10 (p. 122)

People , Food , Birth

“After this first approximation, the various aspects of the situation undergo a more and more detailed analysis. In contrast to this the second method [for analysis of life space] begins with the life space as a whole and defines its fundamental structure. The procedure in this case is not to add disconnected items but to make the original structure more specific and differentiated. This method therefore proceeds by steps from the more general to the particular and thereby avoids the danger of a "wrong simplification" by abstraction.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 4; partly cited in: Chris Argyris (1952) An introduction to field theory and interaction theory.

Life

“Diophantus shows great Adroitness in selecting the unkown, especially with a view to avoiding an adfected quadratic…. The most common and characteristic of Diophantus' methods is his use of tentative assumptions which is applied in nearly every problem of the later books. It consists in assigning to the unknown a preliminary value which satisfies one or two only of the necessary conditions, in order that, from its failure to satisfy the remaining conditions, the operator may perceive what exactly is required for that purpose…. a third characteristic of Diophantus [is]… the use of the symbol for the unknown in different senses…. The use of tentative assumptions leads again to another device which may be called… the method of limits. This may best be illustrated by a particular example. If Diophantus wishes to find a square lying between 10 and 11, he multiplies these numbers by successive squares till a square lies between the products. Thus between 40 and 44, 90 and 99 no square lies, but between 160 and 176 there lies the square 169. Hence x^2 = \tfrac{169}{16} will lie between the proposed limits.”

James Gow (scholar) (1854–1923) scholar

p, 125
A Short History of Greek Mathematics (1884)

Lie , Books , Lying , Failure

“The strategist's method is very simply to challenge the prevailing assumptions with a single question: Why? And to put the same question relentlessly to those responsibles for the current way of doing things until they are sick of it.”

Kenichi Ohmae (1943) Japanese academic

Source: The Mind Of The Strategist, 1982, p. 57

Way , Question

“Science has adapted itself entirely to the wealthy classes and accordingly has set itself to heal those who can afford everything, and it prescribes the same methods for those who have nothing to spare.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What then must we do? (1886)

Science

“Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.”

Joan Robinson book An Essay on Marxian Economics

Source: An Essay on Marxian Economics (Second Edition) (1966), Chapter XI, Dynamic Analysis, p. 95

Law , Hope , Problem

“We have to frankly break the back of the secular-socialist machine, elect people committed to representing the American people, and then methodically rip the system apart.”

Newt Gingrich (1943) Professor, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives

The Mark Levin Show
ABC Radio Networks
2010-06-24
Gingrich: We have to "break the back of the secular socialist machine … and then methodically rip the system apart"
2010-05-25
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201006250048
2011-03-30
2010s

People

“It is the usual though inequitable method of the world, to pronounce an action to be either right or wrong, as it is attended with good or ill success.”
Est omnino iniquum, sed usu receptum, quod honesta consilia vel turpia, prout male aut prospere cedunt, ita vel probantur vel reprehenduntur.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 9, 7.
Letters, Book V

World , Success

“Bracquemond tells me that he looked attentively at my works at our exhibition. Far from objecting to them, as I expected, he said they were compactly drawn, and modeled, but he is shocked by the dots; he enjoined me to stick to divisionism but not to use the dot. - I said nothing to him of our experiments. He told me that of all the impressionist painters he liked my work best; this was not the first time he had said this; to each one his own taste. He does completely accept my view that the old disorderly method of execution has become impossible.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Camille Pissarro, in a letter, Eragny, 23 January 1887, to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 97
1880's

Time

“Generally speaking, if we look at sports we find that their strong point is that because they are competitive they are interesting, and young people are likely to be attracted to them. No matter how valuable the method of physical education, if it is not put into practice, it will serve no purpose — therein lies the advantage of sports. But, in this regard there are matters to which we must also give a great deal of consideration. First, so-called sports were not created for the purpose of physical education; one competes for another purpose, namely, to win. Accordingly, the muscles are not necessarily developed in a balanced way, and in some cases the body is pushed too far or even injured. For that reason, while there is no doubt that sports are a good thing, serious consideration must be given to the selection of the sport and the training method. Sports must not be undertaken carelessly, over-zealously, or without restraint. However, it is safe to say that competitive sports are a form of physical education that should be promoted with this advice in mind. The reason I have worked to popularize sports for more than twenty years and that I have strived to bring the Olympic Games to Japan is entirely because I recognize these merits. However, in times like these, when many people are enthusiastic about sports, I would like to remind them of the adverse effects of sports as well. I also urge them to keep in mind the goals of physical education—to develop a sound body that is useful to you in your daily life — and be sure to consider whether or not the method of training is in keeping with the concept of”

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka

http://www.judoinfo.com/seiryoku2.htm seiryoku zenyo
"Judo and Physical Training" in Mind Over Muscle : Writings from the Founder of Judo (2006) edited by Naoki Murata, p. 57

Life , People , Education , Way

“After centuries of relative silence and enforced acceptance, we adapted a technique of exposing the problem by direct and dramatic methods. We had confidence that when we awakened the nation to the immorality and evil of inequality, there would be an upsurge of conscience followed by remedial action. We knew that there were solutions and that the majority of the nation were ready for them. Yet we also knew that the existence of solutions would not automatically operate to alter conditions. We had to organize, not only arguments, but people in the millions for action. Finally we had to be prepared to accept all the consequences involved in dramatizing our grievances in the unique style we had devised.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern (1966)

People , Confidence , Problem , Silence

“The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which a good thing may pass over unobserved, or be lost among commissions of bankrupt.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 224.
The Tatler (1711–1714)

Art

“[This book] is intended as a text from which the student can learn and the teacher can teach the methods and results of economic analysis. It also seeks to be a contribution to the development and systematization of the body of economic analysis itself. These purposes are not separate. The task of presenting a systematic, orderly, and accurate account of economic analysis is identical with the task of preparing the material for teaching. It must be emphasized, however, that the purpose of this work is not primarily to entertain the student, or to enable him to regurgitate appropriate material into examination books, or to learn a few pat phrases, or to indoctrinate him with an abstract discipline which he will never use. Economics is like photography in this respect, that under-exposure is less desirable than no exposure at all.”

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

Source: 1940s, Economic Analysis, 1941, p. xv

Books , Learning , Teachers

“Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back into it — to reach God a posteriori — rather than start from it, like Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

God , Way , Motivation

“It may be necessary to use methods other than constitutional ones.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

"ZAPU deposes Mr. Nkomo as Leader", The Times, 9 July 1962, p. 9
Remarks to the press, 8 July 1962, concerning the future strategy of ZAPU in achieving majority rule.
1960s

“It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' "… In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

Fools , Thinking , Learning

“Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U. S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture — "enhanced interrogation techniques" — is a term originally coined enhanced interrogation techniques by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.”

Andrew Sullivan (1963) Journalist, writer, blogger

" 'Verschärfte Vernehmung' http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/verschfte_verne.html#more " The Daily Dish (29 May 2007)

Death , War , Past

“Experience has convinced me that the proper way of teaching is to bring together that which is simple from all quarters, and, if I may use such a phrase, to draw upon the surface of the subject a proper mean between the line of closest connexion and the line of easiest deduction. This was the method followed by Euclid, who, fortunately for us, never dreamed of a geometry of triangles, as distinguished from a geometry of circles, or a separate application of the arithmetics of addition and subtraction; but made one help out the other as he best could.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

Advertisement, p.4
The Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Dreams , Way , Help , Drawing

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward, written by Lenin, an outstanding member of the Iskra group, is a methodical exposition of the ideas of the ultra-centralist tendency in the Russian movement. The viewpoint presented with incomparable vigor and logic in this book, is that of pitiless centralism.”

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

Leninism or Marxism? (1904)

Books , Idea

“If we are to oppose evildoers, especially if we are to make use of non-violent methods of restraining wrongdoers, we must not only refrain from animosity, but we must reveal our devotion to mankind by exhibiting a willingness to endure suffering, rather than submit to the exploitation of our fellows or to retaliate with weapons of violence.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

The Personality of Jesus (1932)

Suffering

“It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. The latter can serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life only if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.”

Emma Goldman book My Disillusionment in Russia

My Disillusionment in Russia (1923)

Life , Dependency

“Her point of view about student work was that of a social worker teaching finger-painting to children or the insane.
I was impressed with how common such an attitude was at Benton: the faculty—insofar as they were real Benton faculty, and not just nomadic barbarians—reasoned with the students, “appreciated their point of view”, used Socratic methods on them, made allowances for them, kept looking into the oven to see if they were done; but there was one allowance they never under any circumstances made—that the students might be right about something, and they wrong. Education, to them, was a psychiatric process: the sign under which they conquered had embroidered at the bottom, in small letters, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?—and half of them gave it its Babu paraphrase of Can you wait upon a lunatic? One expected them to refer to former students as psychonanalysts do: “Oh, she’s an old analysand of mine.” They felt that the mind was a delicate plant which, carefully nurtured, judiciously left alone, must inevitably adopt for itself even the slightest of their own beliefs.
One Benton student, a girl noted for her beadth of reading and absence of coöperation, described things in a queer, exaggerated, plausible way. According to her, a professor at an ordinary school tells you “what’s so”, you admit that it is on examination, and what you really believe or come to believe has “that obscurity which is the privilege of young things”. But at Benton, where education was as democratic as in “that book about America by that French writer—de, de—you know the one I mean”; she meant de Tocqueville; there at Benton they wanted you really to believe everything they did, especially if they hadn’t told you what it was. You gave them the facts, the opinions of authorities, what you hoped was their own opinion; but they replied, “That’s not the point. What do you yourself really believe?” If it wasn’t what your professors believed, you and they could go on searching for your real belief forever—unless you stumbled at last upon that primal scene which is, by definition, at the root of anything….
When she said primal scene there was so much youth and knowledge in her face, so much of our first joy in created things, that I could not think of Benton for thinking of life. I suppose she was right: it is as hard to satisfy our elders’ demands of Independence as of Dependence. Harder: how much more complicated and indefinite a rationalization the first usually is!—and in both cases, it is their demands that must be satisfied, not our own. The faculty of Benton had for their students great expectations, and the students shook, sometimes gave, beneath the weight of them. If the intellectual demands were not so great as they might have been, the emotional demands made up for it. Many a girl, about to deliver to one of her teachers a final report on a year’s not-quite-completed project, had wanted to cry out like a child, “Whip me, whip me, Mother, just don’t be Reasonable!””

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Chapter 3, pp. 81–83

Life , Children , Books , Youth

“I believe that economic theory has arrived at a point in its development where the appeal to quantitative empirical data has become more necessary than ever. At the same time its analyses have reached a degree of complexity that require the application of a more refined scientific method than that employed by the classical economists.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Ragnar Frisch (1926); Quoted in: " Ragnar Frisch 1895-1995 https://www.ssb.no/a/histstat/doc/doc_199403.pdf." O. Bjerkholt, 1994.
1920

Time

“I am fully assured, that no general method for the solution of questions in the theory of probabilities can be established which does not explicitly recognize, not only the special numerical bases of the science, but also those universal laws of thought which are the basis of all reasoning, and which, whatever they may be as to their essence, are at least mathematical as to their form.”

George Boole (1815–1864) English mathematician, philosopher and logician

George Boole, " Solution of a Question in the Theory of Probabilities http://books.google.nl/books?id=9xtDAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA32" (30 November 1853) published in The London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science‬‎ (January 1854), p. 32
1850s

Law , Mathematics , Question , Universe

“Around 1650 I came across the mathematical writings of Torricelli, where among other things, he expounds the geometry of indivisibles of Cavalieri. …His method, as taught by Torricelli… was indeed all the more welcome to me because I do not know that anything of that kind was observed in the thinking of almost any mathematician I had previously met.”

John Wallis (1616–1703) English mathematician

Arithmetica Infinitorum (1656)

Mathematics , Thinking

“Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

Truth , Knowledge

“In reinforced concrete we have not only a new material but, of far greater consequence, new constructions and a new method for designing buildings. Therefore, in using [reinforced concrete], we have to renounce the old traditions and concern ourselves with meeting new tasks.”

Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) Russian artist

Quote in: 'Zodchii 19' (1915), p. 198; as quoted by Vasilii Rakitin, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 30
Quotes, 1910 - 1925

“The rational elites, obsessed by structure, have become increasingly authoritarian in a modern, administrative way. The citizens feel insulted and isolated. They look for someone to throw stones on their behalf. Any old stone will do. The cruder the better to crush the self-assurance of the obscure men and their obscure methods. The New Right, with its parody of democratic values, has been a crude but devastating stone with which to punish the modern elites. The New Left, which will eventually succeed it, could easily turn out to be equally crude.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

Men , Way , Feeling

“If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions…. But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterize belief.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 21

Life , Question

“It seems hard to sneak a look at God's cards. But that He plays dice and uses "telepathic" methods… is something that I cannot believe for a single moment.”

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

Letter to Cornel Lanczos (21 March 1942), p. 68
Attributed in posthumous publications, Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979)

God

“As it is not by the methods of the laboratory that we learn to know life, so it is not by the methods of the intellect that we learn to know God.”

Evelyn Underhill book Practical Mysticism

Source: Practical Mysticism (1914), Chapter VIII, The Second Form Of Contemplation, p. 140

Life , God , Learning

“The hypostasis of the particular methods of procedure employed by natural science … results in the view that all theoretical differences which rest on historically conditioned antagonisms of interest are to be settles by a “crucial experiment” rather than by struggle and counter-struggle. The harmonious relation of individuals to one another becomes a fact, therefore, that has even more general character than a law of nature.”

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) German philosopher and sociologist

Source: "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics" (1937), p. 148.

Law , Nature , Science

“Because of experimental science we know a very large number of things about the natural world of which our predecessors were ignorant. In the great books we can observe the birth of science, applaud the development of the experimental technique, and celebrate the triumphs it has won. But we can also note the limitations of the method and mourn the errors that its misapplication has caused. We can distinguish the outlines of those great persistent problems that the method … may never solve and find the clues to their solutions offered by other methods and other disciplines.”

Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) philosopher and university president

Great Books: The Foundation of a Liberal Education (1954)

Books , World , Error , Birth

“Many of the greatest masters of the mathematical sciences were first attracted to mathematical inquiry by problems relating to numbers, and no one can glance at the periodicals of the present day which contain questions for solution without noticing how singular a charm such problems still continue to exert. The interest in numbers seems implanted in the human mind, and it is a pity that it should not have freer scope in this country. The methods of the theory of numbers 271 are peculiar to itself, and are not readily acquired by a student whose mind has for years been familiarized with the very different treatment which is appropriate to the theory of continuous magnitude; it is therefore extremely desirable that some portion of the theory should be included in the ordinary course of mathematical instruction at our University. From the moment that Gauss, in his wonderful treatise of 1801, laid down the true lines of the theory, it entered upon a new day, and no one is likely to be able to do useful work in any part of the subject who is unacquainted with the principles and conceptions with which he endowed it.”

James Whitbread Lee Glaisher (1848–1928) English mathematician and astronomer

Source: "Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science," 1890, p. 467 : On the theory of numbers

Mathematics , Question , Problem , Universe

“The creation and implementation of integrated information systems involves a variety of collaborators including people from specialist departments, informatics, external advisers and manufacturers. They need clear rules and limits within which they can process their individual sub-tasks, in order to ensure the logical consistency of the entire project. Therefore, an architecture needs to be established to determine the components that make up the information system and the methods to be used to describe it. The ARIS architecture developed in this book is described in concrete terms as an information model within the entity-relationship approach. This information model provides the basis for the systematic and rational application of methods in the development of information systems. It also serves as the basis for a repository in which the enterprise's application - specific data, organization and function models can be stored. The ARIS architecture constitutes a framework in which integrated applications systems can be developed, optimized and converted into EDP - technical implementations. At the same time, it demonstrates how business economics can examine and analyze information systems in order to translate their contents into EDP-suitable form.”

August-Wilhelm Scheer (1941) German business theorist

August-Wilhelm Scheer, I. Cameron (1992) Architecture of integrated information systems: foundations of enterprise modelling. Abstract.

People , Books , Optimism , Business

“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 now saw, that a science is either deductive or experimental, according as, in the province it deals with, the effects of causes when conjoined, are or are not the sums of the effects which the same causes produce when separate. It followed that politics must be a deductive science. It thus appeared, that both Macaulay and my father were wrong; the one in assimilating the method of philosophising in politics to the purely experimental method of chemistry; while the other, though right in adopting a deductive method, had made a wrong selection of one, having taken as the type of deduction, not the appropriate process, that of the deductive branches of natural philosophy, but the inappropriate one of pure geometry, which, not being a science of causation at all, does not require or admit of any summing-up of effects.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/160/mode/1up pp. 160-161

Nature , Appearance , Science

“The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience… Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Religion , Idea , Science

“Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don't think there's anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual – the Orientals did that.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Source: 1950's, Interview by William Wright, Summer 1950, pp. 142-143

World , Way , Nature , Thinking

“Motion study is the science of eliminating wastefulness resulting from using unnecessary, ill-directed, and inefficient motions. The aim of motion study is to find and perpetuate the scheme of least waste methods of labor.
By its use we have revolutionized several of the trades. There is probably no art or trade that cannot have its output doubled by the application of the principles of motion study.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: Primer of scientific management, 1912, p. 8

Art , Study , Science

“Slander was about liberals’ methods, Treason was about the political consequences of liberalism, and Godless is about the underlying mental disease that creates liberalism.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2006, Human Events interview (2006)

Disease

“If the chance of error alone were the sole basis for evaluating methods of inference, we would never reach a decision, but would merely keep increasing the sample size indefinitely.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Theory of Experimental Inference (1948), p. 255; cited in The Journal of the American Forensic Association. Vol 20-22 (1984), p. 180

Error , Decision , Chance

“The concepts of purposive behavior and teleology have long been associated with a mysterious, self-perfecting or goal-seeking capacity or final cause, usually of superhuman or super-natural origin. To move forward to the study of events, scientific thinking had to reject these beliefs in purpose and these concepts of teleological operations for a strictly mechanistic and deterministic view of nature. This mechanistic conception became firmly established with the demonstration that the universe was based on the operation of anonymous particles moving at random, in a disorderly fashion, giving rise, by their multiplicity, to order and regularity of a statistical nature, as in classical physics and gas laws. The unchallenged success of these concepts and methods in physics and astronomy, and later in chemistry, gave biology and physiology their major orientation. This approach to problems of organisms was reinforced by the analytical preoccupation of the Western European culture and languages. The basic assumptions of our traditions and the persistent implications of the language we use almost compel us to approach everything we study as composed of separate, discrete parts or factors which we must try to isolate and identify as potential causes. Hence, we derive our preoccupation with the study of the relation of two variables. We are witnessing today a search for new approaches, for new and more comprehensive concepts and for methods capable of dealing with the large wholes of organisms and personalities.”

Lawrence K. Frank (1890–1968) American cyberneticist

L.K. Frank (1948) "Foreword". In L. K. Frank, G. E. Hutchinson, W. K. Livingston, W. S. McCulloch, & N. Wiener, Teleological mechanisms. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sc., 1948, 50, 189-96; As cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) "General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications". p. 16-17

Law , Behavior , Search , Fashion

“Whether or not our position fairly can be charged as “apolitical” depends entirely upon how one defines “political.” If “political” be taken in the narrow sense, as signifying those means and methods the world regularly accepts as normative for its doing of politics, then the position of me and mine clearly and is that of apoliticism. If, however, “political” be understood in the broad, etymological sense, as identifying whatever actions have public effect upon the life of the “city” (polis), then there are no grounds for accusing either “me” or any of “mine” of advocating apoliticism.”

Vernard Eller (1927–2007) Church of the Brethren pastor and academic, coiner of the term "Christian anarchy"

Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy Over the Powers (1987)

Life , World , Sense , Dependency

“Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Source: Against Method (1975), p. 46.

Knowledge

“There are two prime requisites in efficient staff service, coordination and infiltration. The tertn "co-ordination" describes the necessary method of sound staff procedure, but "infiltration of knowledge" is the ultimate purpose of all staff activities. Staff service is not alone for the top leader. It comes to him first, for he needs it in the making of his initial decisions, but the subordinates in the scalar chain, down to the very rank and file, likewise need it in the intelligent execution of all plans.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 73

Intelligence , Knowledge , Decision

“[Theophile] Gautier's article is very good. I begin to feel a little more contented. His remarks about my thick colours are also very just. The critics who see and judge my pictures are not forced to know that in painting them I am not guided by a definite intention, although I do my utmost to try and attain the aim which I have in sight, independently of methods. People are not even obliged to know why it is that I work in this way, with all its faults.”

Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) French painter

Quote of Millet in his letter of 23 March 1851; as quoted by Julia Cartwright in Jean Francois Millet, his Life and Letters, Swan Sonnenschein en Co, Lim. London / The Macmillian Company, New York; second edition, September 1902, p. 112
the most famous painting of Millet 'The Sower', reviewed in an article then by Gautier, was exhibited for the first time in 'The Salon' of Paris, at the End of 1850
1851 - 1870

People , Way , Feeling , Painting

“(on The Hamburg Cell): "It shows them as weak, alienated individuals being recruited by the classic methods of any campus cult. Young men without a strong sense of self are a Microsoft for mind viruses, and these were no exception."”

Ken MacLeod (1954) Scottish science fiction writer

weblog post http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_kenmacleod_archive.html, 3 September 2004
Other sources

Men , Sense , Strong

“Even if the constants which economists wish to determine were less numerous, and the method of experiment more accessible, we should still be faced with the fact that the constants themselves are different at different times. The gravitation constant is the same always. But the economic constants — these elasticities of demand and supply — depending, as they do, upon human consciousness, are liable to vary. The constitution of the atom, as it were, and not merely its position, changes under the influence of environment.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 4

Change , Time , Dependency

“If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be also so quantified, then some computational method may be evolved for choosing the best schedule of actions among alternatives. Such use of mathematical models is termed mathematical programming.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Source: Linear programming and extensions (1963), p. 2

Mathematics

“Hegel’s lack of charity toward the instrument metaphor is not arbitrary. It represents his disenchantment with the assumption that knowledge is power and that method is the means to this end. … Descartes’ conception of method, like Bacon’s, is linked to this idea of knowledge as an instrument of power. … The same could be said of Locke. Hegel can rightly claim that the instrument metaphor pervades the epistemological tradition he is seeking to transcend.”

Merold Westphal (1940)

Source: History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (1979), pp. 3-4

Idea , Knowledge

“Home influences alone never saved the New England boy from ruin, though sometimes they may have helped to ruin him; and the influences outside of home were negative. If school helped, it was only by reaction. The dislike of school was so strong as to be a positive gain. The passionate hatred of school methods was almost a method in itself. Yet the day-school of that time was respectable, and the boy had nothing to complain of. In fact, he never complained. He hated it because he was here with a crowd of other boys and compelled to learn by memory a quantity of things that did not amuse him. His memory was slow, and the effort painful. For him to conceive that his memory could compete for school prizes with machines of two or three times its power, was to prove himself wanting not only in memory, but flagrantly in mind. He thought his mind a good enough machine, if it were given time to act, but it acted wrong if hurried. Schoolmasters never gave time.

In any and all its forms, the boy detested school, and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days, from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Pain , Hate , School , Home

“Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress… to roll back the whole current of human thought, and again return to the mere brute force which prevails between beasts of prey, as the only method of settling questions between men?”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Speech https://web.archive.org/web/20070621205516/http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jala/24.1/belz.html (1861)
1860s

Men , Age , Question

“The function of logical analysis is to analyse all knowledge, all assertions of science and of everyday life, in order to make clear the sense of each such assertion and the connections between them. One of the principal tasks of the logical analysis of a given proposition is to find out the method of verification for that proposition.”

Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) German philosopher

Rudolf Carnap (1935) Philosophy and Logical Syntax. p. 9-10

Life , Knowledge , Sense , Science

“An economic system is not a linear system, and… this fact stands in the way of the determination of the parameters of the system by methods that presume linearity, and… it introduces great difficulties in the extrapolation from past behaviour for purposes of prediction.”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. ix

Way , Past

“Art seeks ever to conceal the means by which its effects are produced and the method in which the work is wrought.”

Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863–1908) British photographer

Source: Practical Pictorial Photography, 1898, Printing the picture and controlling its formation, p. 90

Art

“The logical thing to do, when the next war comes, is to recruit an army from all those of whatever age or sex who are unable to pass certain basic intelligence tests. This would be a good way of getting rid of a lot of the stupid people who cumber the earth; probably there would be a high percentage of scientists, Civil Servants, uplifters and minor prophets in an armed force collected in such a way. But if every country adopted this method the country with the biggest population of boobs, yahoos and ninnies would win, and I am not entirely sure that we have overall superiority in this respect, though we seem bound in that direction.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

War , People , Age , Stupidity

“We alone can be wracked with doubt, and we alone have been provoked by that epistemic itch to seek a remedy: better truth-seeking methods. Wanting to keep better track of our food supplies, our territories, our families, our enemies, we discovered the benefits of talking it over with others, asking questions, passing on lore. We invented culture. Then we invented measuring, and arithmetic, and maps, and writing. These communicative and recording innovations come with a built-in ideal: truth. The point of asking questions is to find true answers; the point of measuring is to measure accurately; the point of making maps is to find your way to your destination. … In short, the goal of truth goes without saying, in every human culture.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Postmodernism and truth (1998)

Truth , Family , Food , Way

“It is a favourite maxim of mine that history, while it should be scientific in its method, should pursue a practical object. That is, it should not merely gratify the reader's curiosity about the past, but modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future”

John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) British historian

p. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=Zsm3TLe1cAUC&pg=PA1
The Expansion of England (1883)

History , Past , Future

“A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of ‘general systems theory’ which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.
It may not be entirely vain, however, to search for common properties among diverse kinds of complex systems… The ideas of feedback and information provide a frame of reference for viewing a wide range of situations, just as do the ideas of evolution, of relativism, of axiomatic method, and of operationalism… hierarchic systems have some common properties that are independent of their specific content…”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

H.A. Simon (1962) "The Architecture of complexity." in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Vol 106, pp. 467-468. as cited in: "James Grier Miller (1916-)" at isss.org retrieved Nov 16, 2012.
1960s-1970s

Feeling , Search , Idea , Help