Quotes about operation
page 10

“Through it all, I've learned to trust that God does indeed have a plan and purpose for me. Trust doesn't come into play when you can figure everything out; that's mere reason. Trust operates when you can't understand why circumstances or events happen. That's where it takes faith to believe that God knows what is best for our lives.”

John Ashcroft (1942) American politician

Source: Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice (2006), p. 32

God, Faith, Understanding, Learning

“Subdivision of labour requires that international agents should devote themselves first to languages,—their means of operation,—and next to the study of man, as an individual and in communities.”

Thomas Taylor Meadows (1815–1868) British sinologist and diplomatic interpreter from Chinese

T. T. Meadows quoted in The Chinese Speaker (1916), p. 1 by Evan Morgan

Communication, Study

“As the great words of freedom and fulfillment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens and radios and stages, they turn into meaningless sounds which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. This assimilation of the ideal with reality testifies to the extent to which the ideal has been surpassed. It is brought down from the sublimated realm of the soul or the spirit or the inner man, and translated into operational terms and problems. Here are the progressive elements of mass culture. The perversion is indicative of the fact that advanced industrial society is confronted with the possibility of a materialization of ideals. The capabilities of this society are progressively reducing the sublimated realm in which the condition of man was represented, idealized, and indicted. Higher culture becomes part of the material culture. In this transformation, it loses the greater part of its truth.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 57-58

Truth, Soul, Business, Problem

Willa Cather (1873–1947) American writer and novelist

"The Novel Démeublé"
Not Under Forty (1936)

Parting

“What we demand from the Soviet architect is that, as an artist and because of his perceptive intellect, he will fully comprehend and amplify the faintest ripple of developing energies much sooner than the masses — who tend to be shortsighted as far as their own growth is concerned — and that he will transform this energy into tangible architectural form... The club's role is to become a University of Culture. If one accepts the premise that private dwellings should strive to operate on the basis of the greatest possible austerity, then by contrast, public dwellings should provide the maximum of available luxury accessible to all. The term 'reconstruction' is therefore not applicable to this case, since there is no building precedent in the past.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

Quote from: 'The Club as a social force'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Universe, Past

“The management science approach to organizational decision making is the analog to the rational approach by individual managers. Management science came into being during World War II. At that time, mathematical and statistical techniques were applied to urgent, large-scale military problems that were beyond the ability of individual decision makers. Mathematicians, physicists, and operations researchers used systems analysis to develop artillery trajectories, antisubmarine strategies, and bombing strategies such as salvoing (discharging multiple shells simultaneously). Consider the problem of a battleship trying to sink an enemy ship several miles away. The calculation for aiming the battleship's guns should consider distance, wind speed, shell size, speed and direction of both ships, pitch and roll of the firing ship, and curvature of the earth. Methods for performing such calculations using trial and error and intuition are not accurate, take far too long, and may never achieve success.
This is where management science came in. Analysts were able to identify the relevant variables involved in aiming a ship's guns and could model them with the use of mathematical equations. Distance, speed, pitch, roll, shell size, and so on could be calculated and entered into the equations. The answer was immediate, and the guns could begin firing. Factors such as pitch and roll were soon measured mechanically and fed directly into the targeting mechanism. Today, the human element is completely removed from the targeting process. Radar picks up the target, and the entire sequence is computed automatically.”

Richard L. Daft (1964) American sociologist

Source: Organization Theory and Design, 2007-2010, p. 500

War, World, Error, Mathematics

“Every sentence in order to have definite scientific meaning must be practically or at least theoretically verifiable as either true or false upon the basis of experimental measurements either practically or theoretically obtainable by carrying out a definite and previously specified operation in the future. The meaning of such a sentence is the method of its verification.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

Source: Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, 1939, p. 94

Future, Falseness

“In the same manner therefore as we have laid it down that the Sun holds the supremacy in the Intelligible world, having round about his own being, in one species, a vast multitude of gods (supposing him to have the same in the Sensible world), all of which move along their everlasting and most felicitous course in a circle, so do we prove him to be Leader and Lord, imparting to and filling the whole heaven, as he does, with his own splendour, likewise with infinite other blessings that be invisible to us: whilst the benefits commenced by the other deities are brought to perfection by him; nay, more, before this, these gods themselves were rendered perfect through his spontaneous and divine operation.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

God, World, Intelligence, Sun

“The climate stubbornly refuses to co-operate with computer models and the writers of alarmist popular articles and books.”

Ian Plimer book Heaven and Earth

Heaven and Earth (2009)

Books

“The idea behind digital computers may be explained by saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations which could be done by a human computer.”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 436.

Idea

“In the early days of the crash it was widely believed that Jesse L. Livermore, a Bostonian with a large and unquestionably exaggerated reputation for bear operations, leading asyndicate that was driving the market down.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Great Crash, 1929

Source: The Great Crash, 1929 (1954 and 1997 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL25728842M/The_Great_Crash_1929), Chapter VIII, Aftermath I, Section III, p. 141

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

Theodore Dalrymple (1949) English doctor and writer

Frontpage Magazine interview http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19293 (August 31, 2005).

People, Way, Thinking, Reality

“It is the Patrol System that makes the Troop, and all Scouting for that matter, a real co-operative matter.”

Robert Baden-Powell book Aids to Scoutmastership

Aids to Scoutmastership (1920)

Scouting

“In speaking of agricultural management, the French say, I'economie rurale, and the English, rural economy; and yet neither the one nor the other intend thereby to signify the absolute execution of agricultural operations, but only the division and circumstances or appurtenances of agriculture. In Germany, where a Latin or Greek name has lately been thought to give dignity to a science, and has, consequently, been introduced into the title of most of the scientific works, some authors have begun to term, not only the science of agriculture, but agriculture itself, the oekonomie; and the word is used exclusively in this sense by many persons. It is for this reason that those who are supposed to practise the art with the greatest skill and science, are termed oekonomen (economists); and that some of those who are employed in superintending the labourers, even though they frequently have not the least idea of the actual principles of agriculture, chose to be designated by this title.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section II. The Economy, Organization and Direction of an Agricultural Enterprise, p. 55.

Art, Idea, Sense, Science

“No anti-porn feminist I know has suggested that there is one image, or even a few, that could lead a non-rapist to rape; the argument, rather, is that taken together, pornographic images create a world that is at best inhospitable to women, and at worst dangerous to their physical and emotional well-being. In an unfair and inaccurate article that is emblematic of how anti-porn feminist work is misrepresented, Daniel Bernardi claims that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon believed that “watching pornography leads men to rape women.” Neither Dworkin nor MacKinnon “pioneers in developing a radical feminist critique of pornography, saw porn in such simplistic terms. Rather, both argued that porn has a complicated and multilayered effect on male sexuality, and that rape, rather than simply being caused by porn, is a cultural practice that has been woven into the fabric of a male-dominated society. Pornography, they argued, is one important agent of such a society since it so perfectly encodes woman-hating ideology, but to see it as simplistically and unquestionably leading to rape is to ignore how porn operates within the wider context of a society that is brimming with sexist imagery and ideology. If, then, we replace the “Does porn cause rape?” question with more nuanced questions that ask how porn messages shape our reality and our culture, we avoid falling into the images-lead-to-rape discussion. What this reformulation does is highlight the ways that the stories in pornography, by virtue of their consistency and coherence, create a worldview that the user integrates into his reservoir of beliefs that form his ways of understanding, seeing, and interpreting what goes on around him.”

Gail Dines (1958) anti-pornography campaigner

Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality, Ch 5, Page 85, Gail Dines

Women, Men, Hate, World

“I regard the whole of arithmetic as a necessary, or at least natural, consequence of the simplest arithmetic act, that of counting, and counting itself as nothing else than the successive creation of the infinite series of positive integers in which each individual is defined by the one immediately preceding; the simplest act is the passing from an already-formed individual to the consecutive new one to be formed. The chain of these numbers forms in itself an exceedingly useful instrument for the human mind; it presents an inexhaustible wealth of remarkable laws obtained by the introduction of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic.”

Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) German mathematician

p, 125
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872)

Law, Nature, Success, Wealth

“Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Fashion

“We now know that linguistic change does not operate in such an across-the-board manner. Some speakers introduce the change into their speech before others; some use it more frequently and consistently than others; and some words are affected before others. A more accurate view is to think of a change gradually spreading through the words of a language – a view that is known as a lexical diffusion. At first just a few people use a change sporadically in a few words (commonly occurring words are influenced very quickly); then a large number of words are affected, with the sound gradually being used more consistently; then the majority of the words take up the change.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 359

People, Thinking, Change

“I had taken up the question of interdivisional relations with Mr. Durant [president of GM at the time] before I entered General Motors and my views on it were well enough known for me to be appointed chairman of a committee "to formulate rules and regulations pertaining to interdivisional business" on December 31, 1918. I completed the report by the following summer and presented it to the Executive Committee on December 6, 1919. I select here a few of its first principles which, though they are an accepted part of management doctrine today, were not so well known then. I think they are still worth attention.
I stated the basic argument as follows:
The profit resulting from any business considered abstractly, is no real measure of the merits of that particular business. An operation making $100,000.00 per year may be a very profitable business justifying expansion and the use of all the additional capital that it can profitably employ. On the other hand, a business making $10,000,000 a year may be a very unprofitable one, not only not justifying further expansion but even justifying liquidation unless more profitable returns can be obtained. It is not, therefore, a matter of the amount of profit but of the relation of that profit to the real worth of invested capital within the business. Unless that principle is fully recognized in any plan that may be adopted, illogical and unsound results and statistics are unavoidable …”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 49

Question, Business, Thinking, Time

“The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited times." By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

May the Source Be With You (2001)

Life, Time

“We have Mr. Wright's allegation that a surveillance operation was mounted against Lord Wilson of Rievaulx when he was Prime Minister in the mid-1970s…Many criticisms can be made of Lord Wilson's stewardship—I have made some in the past and I have no doubt that I may make some more in future—but the view that he, with his too persistent record of maintaining Britain's imperial commitments across the world, with his over-loyal lieutenancy to Lyndon Johnson, with his fervent royalism, and with his light ideological luggage, was a likely candidate to be a Russian or Communist agent is one that can be entertained only by someone with a mind diseased by partisanship or unhinged by living for too long in an Alice-Through-the-Looking-glass world in which falsehood becomes truth, fact becomes fiction and fantasy becomes reality. The result of the allegation has been substantially to fortify the view that I expressed in a letter to The Times 18 months ago, which is that MI5 should now be pulled totally out of its political surveillance role.”

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

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1986/dec/03/security-services-commission in the House of Commons (3 December 1986) 1980s

Truth, World, Disease, Reality

“The war between freedom and slavery is not just a fight to be waged by Congressmen, the President, soldiers and diplomats. Fighting Communism, Socialism and the subversion of constitutional government is everybody's job. And working for the expansion of freedom is everybody's job. It is a basic American principle that each individual knows better than anyone else what he can do to help once he has become informed. No citizen will have to go far from his own home to find a faltering battle line which needs his aid. Communist influences are gnawing away everywhere and thousands of confused citizens often aid and abet them by operating in a vacuum of their own ignorance. The task is therefore to become informed and then move out for action!”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

War, Home, Communication, Freedom

“The values that Scientology states are universal values. Values that any good mother or father or friend couldn't possibly disagree with. They're the values of health and improvement. It's not a belief system where you have to sign up and believe something particularly. People of all religions study Hubbard, and Hubbard himself encouraged religions to flourish because in our day and age, in our mechanized society, what is lacking is the humanities and people with faith and beliefs. So that's one of our operations. We encourage that. I require a certain amount of ethics from anybody I work with.”

Chick Corea (1941) American jazz and fusion pianist, keyboardist, and composer

Interview at All About Jazz (30 October 2004) http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=15351

People, Health, Age, Faith

“They say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time
Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!”

T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Macavity: The Mystery Cat
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Cats, Time

“Icons, windows, mice, big operating systems, huge programs, integrated packages…. I would like to remind the world that just because two things are on the same menu doesn't mean they taste good together.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

Programmers At Work (1986)

World

“At the point at which the concept of différance, and the chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity; etc.)- to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of something present (for example, in the form of the identity of the subject who is present for all his operations, present beneath every accident or event, self-present in its "living speech," in its enunciations, in the present objects and acts of its language, etc.)- become non pertinent. They all amount, at one moment or another, to a subordination of the movement of différance in favor of the presence of a value or a meaning supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and governing it in the last analysis. This is still the presence of what we called above the "transcendental signified.”

Jacques Derrida book Positions

Source: Positions (1982), p. 29

Intelligence

“I believe natural beauty stimulates the creative mind and it’s no wonder the residents have always had an affinity to the arts. Growing up I was surrounded by music, dance, theater, literature and given my father owned and operated the only two cinema halls in town, I was a very popular kid on Saturdays when traditionally the two would flock to see the latest “flick” that was playing at either the Capitol Cinema or The Rink”

Erick Avari (1952) Indian actor

formerly a roller skating rink

Beauty, Art, Music, Literature

“When sexuality is operating in the service of intimacy, it is the fact that it is the particular other who is responding to the vulnerability inherent in sustaining desire that generates intensity and meaning. It is precisely the physiological intensity of the sexual response that lends the sexual encounter its dramatic interpersonal significance. This suggests that it is a mistake to regard the role of sexuality in relation to needs for relatedness and attachment as a "sexualization," which implies that sex is carrying something that can and somehow should be attended to in other ways. (Although this is sometimes the case.) The distinction between preoedipal and oedipal developmental levels often implies such an artificial and misleading separation between sexual experience and issues of attachment and connection. There is perhaps nothing better suited for experiencing and deepening the drama of search and discovery than the mutual arousal, sustaining, and quenching of sexual desire.”

Stephen Mitchell (1946–2000) American psychologist

Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 107-108

Sex, Way, Search

“In order to try to remove what we are going to say from what risks happening, if we judge by the many signs, to Marx's work today, which is to say also to his injunction. What risks happening is that one will try to play Marx off against Marxism so as to neutralize, or at any rate muffle the political imperative in the untroubled exegesis of a classified work. One can sense a coming fashion or stylishness in this regard in the culture and more precisely in the university. And what is there to worry about here? Why fear what may also become a cushioning operation? This recent stereotype would be destined, whether one wishes it or not, to depoliticize profoundly the Marxist reference, to do its best, by putting on a tolerant face, to neutralize a potential force, first of all by enervating a corpus, by silencing in it the revolt [the return is acceptable provided that the revolt, which initially inspired uprising, indignation, insurrection, revolutionary momentum, does not come back]. People would be ready to accept the return of Marx or the return to Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx's injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that "changes the world. In the name of an old concept of reading, such an ongoing neutralization would attempt to conjure away a danger: now that Marx is dead, and especially now that Marxism seems to be in rapid decomposition, some people seem to say, we are going to be able to concern ourselves with Marx without being bothered-by the Marxists and, why not, by Marx himself, that is, by a ghost that goes on speaking. We'll treat him calmly, objectively, without bias: according to the academic rules, in the University, in the library, in colloquia! We'll do it systematically, by respecting the norms of hermeneutical, philological, philosophical exegesis. If one listens closely, one already hears whispered: "Marx, you see, was despite everything a philosopher like any other; what is more [and one can say this now that so many Marxists have fallen silent], he was a great-philosopher who deserves to figure on the list of those works we assign for study and from which he has been banned for too long.29 He doesn't belong to the communists, to the Marxists, to the parties-, he ought to figure within our great canon of Western political philosophy. Return to Marx, let's finally read him as a great philosopher."”

Jacques Derrida book Specters of Marx

We have heard this and we will hear it again.
Injunctions of Marx
Specters of Marx (1993)

People, World, Fear, Fashion

“He said, for example: "Many people working with the Ouija board or automatic writing receive messages that seem, or purport, to come from historic personages. Often, however, the material is vastly inferior to that which could have been produced by the person in question during his or her earthly existence. Any comparison with the material received to the written books or accounts already existing would immediately show glaring discrepancies. Yet in many instances, the Ouija board operator or the automatic writer is to some extent or other tuning in to a world view, struggling to open roads of perception free enough to perceive an altered version of reality, but not equipped enough through training and temperament, perhaps to express it....”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 85

People, Books, World, Question

“The ownership of MRT 3 must be settled immediately as the contract, I think, has been ANOMALOUS and GROSSLY DISADVANTAGEOUS to the government from the beginning. The government must already now have the rightful control of the MRT 3 operations. Unless we resolve this issue, we prolong the agony of the public waiting for an EFFECTIVE and EFFICIENT mass transport system. The Department of Transportation and Communication, by any possible means, should immediately act on this if it is really sincere in easing the daily plight of the riding public.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2014, February 18). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10152256768810610/ 2014, Facebook

Communication, Thinking, Waiting, Sincerity

“…good American poets are surprisingly individual and independent; they have little of the member-of-the-Academy, official man-of-letters feel that English or continental poets often have. When American poets join literary political parties, doctrinaire groups with immutable principles, whose poems themselves are manifestoes, the poets are ruined by it. We see this in the beatniks, with their official theory that you write a poem by putting down anything that happens to come into your head; this iron spontaneity of theirs makes it impossible for even a talented beatnik to write a good poem except by accident, since it eliminates the selection, exclusion, and concentration that are an essential part of writing a poem. Besides, their poems are as direct as true works of art are indirect: ironically, these conscious social manifestoes of theirs, these bohemian public speeches, make it impossible for the artist’s unconscious to operate as it normally does in the process of producing a work of art.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 327–328
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Art, Feeling, Parting

“When my mind is operating at its peak, it should depress me to think that this is the best I can do, because it's not very good at all. When my mind is operating normally, I should be even more depressed.”

John S. Hall (1960) Poet, author, singer, lawyer

January 14
Quotes from Daily Negations (2007)

Thinking

“I spent last evening with Governor Reed. I took occasion to hint that General Sullivan was to command the western expedition. lie took the alarm at once, and insisted he had no hopes of success, if he was to direct the operations. So deep are the prejudices of human nature. I had several hours conversation with him; and, I believe, satisfied him, as far as is possible, that the appointment was the result of the maturest deliberation. We were in private.”

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

Letter to George Washington (26 April 1779)

Lie, Hope, Nature, Success

“My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous. Into the Honeywell programs, which formed a little system for an extremely complex payroll, I wrote some assertions, with run-time tests that halted program execution during production runs. Time constraints didn't allow restarting a run from the beginning of the tape. So for the first few weeks I had the frightening task on several payroll runs of repairing an erroneous program at the operator’s keyboard ¾ correcting an error in the suspended program text, adjusting the local state of the program, and sometimes modifying the current and previous tape records before resuming execution. On the Honeywell 400, all this could be done directly from the console typewriter. After several weeks without halts, there seemed to be no more errors. Before leaving the organisation, I replaced the run-time halts by brief diagnostic messages: not because I was sure all the errors had been found, but simply because there would be no-one to handle a halt if one occurred. An uncorrected error might be repaired by clerical adjustments; a halt in a production run would certainly be disastrous.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson (2000), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection", in: IEEE Annals of Software Engineering, Volume 22 Number 2, pages 61-63, 66, April-June 2000.

Error, Time, Drawing

“How can reason possibly grasp that immensity beyond all being where the precious food of the Eucharist is, in some marvellous way, made one with us, drawing us wholly to itself and changing us into itself? It is a union more intimate than any that the human mind can conceive, totally unlike any other change, a union more compatible than a tiny drop of water losing itself in the wine-vat and becoming one with the wine, or that of the rays of the sun made one with the sun's splendour; or the soul with the body, the two together making one person, one being. In this union the soul is lifted above the infirmity of its natural state, its own insufficiency, and there it is purified, transfigured and raised above its own powers, its human operations, its very self. Both being and activities are penetrated through and through by God, formed and transformed in a divine manner, the soul's new birth is accomplished in truth, and the spirit, losing all its native incompatibility, flows into divine union.”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Sermons, From Our Daily Bread

God, Truth, Food, Way

“A group of Israeli rabbis has issued a call for the Sharon government to cease its policy of cavalierly allowing the killing innocent civilians in the [Palestinian] Occupied Territories in the course of its military operations against radical groups. They say such actions are inconsistent with the essence of the Jewish religion. Too right! Judaism has given us so much that is noble in ethical religion, and what the Likud is doing is an insult to that long and glorious tradition. Likud's real roots lie not in the Bible but in Zionist Revisionism of the Jabotinsky sort, which is frankly a kind of fascism.”

Juan Cole (1952) American scholar

Israel Source: US 3rd Infantry Division has Enter Iraq http://www.juancole.com/2003/03/us-3rd-infantry-division-has-entered.html, Juan Cole, Informed Comment Blog http://www.juancole.com/, March 21, 2003

Lie, Religion

“Allah says [in the Koran]: "If they repent before you overcome them, you should know that Allah is forgiving and merciful."… we are opening the door of forgiveness[…] and acceptance of Islamic law, to all who have strayed and committed a crime in the name of religion… Everyone who belongs to this group that has wronged itself who has not yet been apprehended in terrorist operations – we offer them a chance to return to Allah… Anyone who accepts this and surrenders of his own free will… will be treated according to the law of Allah.”

Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (1924–2015) former King of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah Bin Abd Al-Aziz Gives Saudi Terrorists One Last Chance http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/121.htm June 2004.

Religion, Law, Forgiveness, Chance

“The new arguments for rules take an entirely different tack. They are based neither on the ignorance nor the knavery of public officials and, in fact, assume that everyone knows how the economy operates—even the government! Moreover, the government's objectives are assumed to coincide with the people's objectives, and everyone has rational expectations. Despite these seemingly ideal circumstances, modern critics argue that a central bank left with discretion will err systematically in the direction of excessive inflation. To remedy this distortion, they advocate a fixed rule.”

Alan Blinder (1945) economist

Source: Central Banking in Theory and Practice. 1998, p. 47

People

“Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous, we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make.
I cannot emphasize it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community, because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on, will vanish.”

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948) Founder and 1st Governor General of Pakistan

Address to the Constituent Assembly (1947)

People, Communication, Change, Time

“Even though it is the ultimate in Type I Deterrence, the Doomsday Machine is an unsatisfactory basis for a weapon system. It is most improbable that either the Soviet or U. S. governments would ever authorize procuring such a machine. The project is expensive enough so it would be subject to a searching budgetary and operational scrutiny—a scrutiny which would raise questions it could never survive.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Search, Question

“If we turn to the differences separating Communist, Fascist, and National Socialist regimes, we find that they can be accounted for by contrasting social, economic, and cultural condition in which the three had to operate. In other words, they resulted from tactical adaptation of the same philosophy of government to local circumstances, not from different philosophies.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime (1994), p. 278

“We want friendship and co-operation with the people of Spain. But the people of Gibraltar said no to Joint Sovereignty in our referendum of 2002. By 98% we rejected Joint Sovereignty then. But that was obviously not loud and clear enough. So let me be unequivocal so that there is no mistake or any further foolish repetition of this warped notion for the transfer of our sovereignty: Gibraltarian is not for sale. The Gibraltarians will not be bribed. The Gibraltarians will never surrender!”

Fabian Picardo (1972) Gibraltarian politician and barrister

[14 June 2016, Chief Minister's Address To United Nations Committee Of 24, http://www.yourgibraltartv.com/politics/11901-jun-14-chief-minister-s-address-to-united-nations-committee-of-24, Your Gibraltar, 19 September 2016]
Address to the Special Committee on Decolonisation in New York
2016

Friendship, People

“Do we really believe in a culture of death? Absolutely not. We believe in the culture of martyrdom. Martyrdom is valuable, sacred, respectable, and great, not something that can be used as an accusation. It is an honor for us to be accused of believing in the culture of martyrdom. What is martyrdom? It is death for the sake of Allah, and in defense of what is just…. Hizbullah, when it comes to matters of jurisprudence pertaining to its general direction, as well as to its Jihad direction, based itself on the decisions of the Jurisprudent. It is the Jurisprudent who permits, and it is the Jurisprudent who forbids. When the resistance of Hizbullah was launched in 1982, it was based on the jurisprudent position and decision of Imam Khomeini, who deemed fighting Israel to be an obligation, and therefore, we adhered to this opinion…. Even with regard to martyrdom operation – a person cannot kill himself unless he has jurisprudent permission.”

Naim Qassem (1953) deputy general secretary of Hezbollah

Deputy Secretary-General of Hizbullah, Sheik Naim Qassem: We Received Jurisprudent Permission to Carry Out "Martyrdom" Operations and to Fire Misilles at Israeli Civilians from Iran, MEMRI, April 2007 http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/1425.htm,

Death, Decision, Fight, Personality

“More than the topography and cartography of organization would be necessary to understand the executive functions; a knowledge of the kinds and qualities of the forces at work and the manner of their operation would also be needed.”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p. viii

Understanding, Knowledge

“The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.”

M. King Hubbert (1903–1989) American geoscientist

"Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture." Summary, by M. King Hubbert, of a seminar he taught at MIT Energy Laboratory, 30 September 1981, recovered from http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/monetary.htm

World, Exercises, Knowledge, Universe

“The notion that not only the biopolymer but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

The Big Bang in Astronomy, New Scientist, Vol. 92, No. 1280 (November 19, 1981), p. 527

Chance

“Film is such an extraordinary rich medium which can handle so many different modes of operation, combining together in the same place all these extraordinary disciplines which may be executed in their own right -- music, writing, picture making of all kinds, and I often feel that some filmmakers make films with one eye closed and two hands tied behind their backs.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From an interview in Art and Design, no. 49
Interviews

Music, Feeling

“Walter Hollenweger states that “intercultural theology is that scientific, theological discipline that operates in the context of a given culture without absolutizing it.” This programmatic statement provides us with a rule for demarcating between missionary and nonmissionary theologies. A nonmissionary theology—that is, one that does not think interculturally—absolutizes its given cultural context. Such a theology engages in what we can call constantinianism. Theologies that engage in this form of God-talk we can then identify as exercises in Volkstheologie. The negative task of a missionary or intercultural theology is therefore to articulate an understanding of the kerygma that precludes, or at least resists, the absolutizing of one’s given culture.”

Constantinianism Policies

David Congdon, The Mission of Demythologizing (2015), pp. 523-524

God, Exercises, Understanding, Thinking

“To operate an intelligence network against the Islamist terror is terribly difficult because they don't have a central command and control center such as we would understand. Therefore you cannot penetrate at the top and find out what will happen on the ground.”

John le Carré (1931) British novelist and spy

Radio interview (November 2008)

Intelligence, Understanding

“Mooney's unpublished paper “The Science of Industrial Organization” (1929) portrays GM's multidivisional organization's use of the line-staff concept in organizing overseas assembly plants. Here I compare General Motors with Ford Motor Company, which had first-mover advantages overseas, and examine how each company organized and managed their international operations. “Linking pins,” a social-science concept, illustrates how GM's organizational hierarchy achieved vertical coordination of effort.”

Daniel A. Wren (1932) American business theorist

Daniel A. Wren, "James D. Mooney and General Motors' Multinational Operations, 1922–1940." Business History Review 87.03 (2013): 515-543 : Article abstract

Effort, Science

“We are drawn on to the supposition, that the first step in the creation of life upon this planet was a chemico-electric operation, by which simple germinal vesicles were produced.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 204-205

Life

“"Of all Your work, not a thing You have forgotten; You did not add, and You did not subtract." It is a mandatory law that perfect operations stem from the perfect Operator.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Creation

Law, Perfection

“Remember that algebra, with all its deep and intricate problems, is nothing but a development of the four fundamental operations of arithmetic. Everyone who understands the meaning of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division holds the key to all algebraic problems.”

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) Austrian physicist and mathematician

Second Lecture, The Elements of the Theory of Probability, p. 38
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Understanding, Problem

“The physical lot of surviving workers had notably improved, with unemployment insurance, social security, and the new health services, while their children's school education was assured by the government-operated schools: in addition, they had, for intellectual or emotional stimulus and diversion, the radio and the television. But the work itself was no longer as various, as interesting, or as sustaining to the personality…”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

Technical Liberation
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Children, Health, Education, School

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

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

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

People, Age, Knowledge, Time

“The analogy between management and engineering has the unwholesome effect of taking management one further step away from governance. Engineering, like science, music, and theology, knows no national boundaries, and this is why scientists, artists, and theologians— often to their credit— make statesmen uneasy. Such men and women operate from a different normative base from those who govern. Despite the salience of the NAFTAs, the WTOs, and the EUs of this world, governing remains overwhelmingly the business of nation-states.”

John Rohr (1934–2011) American political scientist

Source: Civil servants and their constitutions, 2002, p. ix

Women, Men, World, Music

“Operations research has many precursors and allied fields, including Taylorism (after Frederick W. Taylor), scientific management and management science, industrial engineering and systems analysis. As one early textbook explained, the roots of OR "are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940" (Churchman et al. 1957: 3). Certainly its practitioners have expended much energy and ink in search of an acceptable definition of OR. Morse tried unsuccessfully to halt the debate by declaring OR to be 'the activity carried on by members of the Operations Research Society' (Morse 1953: 159) But his colleagues were not so easily dissuaded from debate. Much of the concern with definition focused on the sometimes elusive distinctions between OR and neighbouring fields; the attempt to define, or redefine, OR was also born of the desire to allow the subject to evolve beyond the orthodoxy of wartime experience. Crucial considerations included the balance between model and application, and the complexity of the mathematics involved.”

Ivor Grattan-Guinness (1941–2014) Historian of mathematics and logic

Source: Companion encyclopedia of the history and philosophy of the mathematical sciences (2003), p. 841.

Search, Mathematics, Science

“Meditation is a state of mind in which the operation and exercise of will is not.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

3rd Public Talk, Bangalore, India (13 January 1973)
1970s

Exercises

“All kinds of music are not suited to praise God and to be heard in the sanctuary; all methods of philosophy are not fit for discoursing worthily of God, His power, the principles of His operations, and His mysteries.”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of Freethinkers (23)
Les Caractères (1688)

God, Music

“We believe it is imperative that farm laborers, among the most abused and neglected of all American workers, be included at last among those who benefit from the Fair Labor Standards Act. We want coverage extended to include those millions in retail trades, laundries, hospitals and nursing homes, restaurants, hotels, small logging operations and cotton gins who still work for starvation wages.”

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

Statement on minimum wage legislation (18 March 1966)], as quoted in Now Is the Time. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Labor in the South: The Case for a Coalition (January 1986)
1960s

Home

“This is a report of an actual industrial experiment designed to determine why workers resisted job changes and what could be done about the problem. The research arose out of the need to change industrial operations to meet competitive conditions and was instituted after earlier incentives and propaganda procedures had proved ineffectual.”

John R. P. French (1913–1995) American psychologist

Abstract, lead sentences
"Overcoming resistance to change." 1948

Problem, Change

“Norbit operates on the principle that vulgarity is automatically funny. Crassness doesn't need a joke attached because it is (in and of itself) the height of hilarity.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=601 of Norbit (2007). One-star reviews

“My hon. Friend is right in saying that the Bank of England has often operated against the interests of Labour Governments. That is due to the mandarins who run it. If the hon. Gentleman has such doubts about the running of a bank which theoretically is state-owned and state-controlled, what influence does he think will be possible in the case of an independent central bank dedicated to a course of Euro-monetarism?”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Question http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1993/jan/14/treaty-on-european-union in the House of Commons (14 January 1993). 1990s

Thinking

“Some think that we are approaching a critical moment in the history of Liberalism…We hear of a divergence of old Liberalism and new…The terrible new school, we hear, are for beginning operations by dethroning Gladstonian finance. They are for laying hands on the sacred ark. But did any one suppose that the fiscal structure which was reared in 1853 was to last for ever, incapable of improvement, and guaranteed to need no repair? We can all of us recall, at any rate, one very memorable admission that the great system of Gladstonian finance had not reached perfection. That admission was made by no other person than Mr. Gladstone himself in his famous manifesto of 1874, when he promised the most extraordinary reduction of which our taxation is capable. Surely there is as much room for improvement in taxation as in every other work of fallible man, provided that we always cherish the just and sacred principle of taxation that it is equality of private sacrifice for public good. Another heresy is imputed to this new school which fixes a deep gulf between the wicked new Liberals and the virtuous old. We are adjured to try freedom first before we try interference of the State. That is a captivating formula, but it puzzles me to find that the eminent statesman who urges us to lay this lesson to heart is strongly in favour of maintaining the control of the State over the Church? But is State interference an innovation? I thought that for 30 years past Liberals had been as much in favour as other people of this protective legislation. Are to we assume that it has all been wrong? Is my right hon. friend going to propose its repeal or the repeal of any of it; or has all past interference been wise, and we have now come to the exact point where not another step can be taken without mischief? …other countries have tried freedom and it is just because we have decided that freedom in such a case is only a fine name for neglect, and have tried State supervision, that we have saved our industrial population from the waste, destruction, destitution, and degradation that would otherwise have overtaken them…In short, gentlemen, I am not prepared to allow that the Liberty and the Property Defence League are the only people with a real grasp of Liberal principles, that Lord Bramwell and the Earl of Wemyss are the only Abdiels of the Liberal Party.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Annual presidential address to the Junior Liberal Association of Glasgow (10 February 1885), quoted in 'Mr. John Morley At Glasgow', The Times (11 February 1885), p. 10.

People, School, History, Thinking

“Reality isn’t the most pleasant of atmospheres, Lieutenant. But we like to think we’re engineered for it. It’s a pretty fine piece of engineering, the kind an engineer can respect. Drag in an obsession and reality can’t tolerate it. Something has to give; if reality goes, your fine piece of engineering is left with nothing to operate on. So it operates badly. So kick the obsession out; start functioning the way you were designed to function.”

Theodore Sturgeon book More Than Human

Source: More Than Human (1953), Chapter 3 “Morality”, p. 146

Way, Thinking, Reality

“The Object of this Treatise is—(1) To point out to the student of Mathematics, who has not the advantage of a tutor, the course of study which it is most advisable that he should follow, the extent to which he should pursue one part of the science before he commences another, and to direct him as to the sort of applications which he should make. (2) To treat fully of the various points which involve difficulties and which are apt to be misunderstood by beginners, and to describe at length the nature without going into the routine of the operations.”

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

Source: On the Study and Difficulties of Mathematics (1831), Chapter I. Introductory Remarks on the Nature and Objects of Mathematics.

Mathematics, Nature, Study, Science

“In other words, there are in administration things analogous to, if not identical with, the mechanical tracts or deterministic sequence, of physics. If, for example, it is decided by government to accomplish the purpose of providing compensation at given rates for men and women employed in industry who sustain injuries in connection with their occupations, the administrator can, like the engineer, estimate in advance the probable cost of such a design, indicate the types of officers and employees necessary to administer the design, and the administrative procedures appropriate to the whole process from beginning to end. And, as in the case of the hydro-electric engineer, the administrator, later sees the results of his operations and can compare them with his advance estimates. There are more variables and incalculables in human affairs than in hydroelectric affairs, but even so administration achieves pre-determined results with an approximation which is often amazing for its exactness. If administrative designs and estimates were not realized in practice with a high degree of exactness, both industry and government would collapse.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 661

Women, Men

“We need to put out of action the key extremist influencers who are careful to operate just inside the law, but who clearly detest British society and everything we stand for. These people aren’t just extremists. There are despicable far right groups too. And what links them all is their aim to groom young people and brainwash their minds.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)

People, Law

“The record shows, that for nearly thirty years, elements of the U. S. Department of Justice have been engaged in world-wide political targeting of me and my associates. This includes early 1970s operations run in conjunction with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's U. S. State Department. During the last ten years or so of that period, some U. S. officials, and others, have challenged the relevant agencies with some of the evidence which shows, that those prosecutions and correlated harassment of me and my associates, had been clearly fraudulent, politically motivated targeting.”

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement

"Lyndon LaRouche: 'He's a Bad Guy, But We Can't Say Why'" http://www.schillerinstitute.org/exon/lar_bad_guy.html (15 February 2000).

World, Justice, Motivation

““They (i. e., the Olympian gods) operate on moral principles. You have to break a promise to them, or break a rule, for them to get power over you.”
Victor commented darkly, “That explains why religions have rules no one can follow. If everyone is a sinner, by definition, everyone is under their power.””

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Fugitives of Chaos (2006), Chapter 9, “Wings” (p. 142)

God, Religion

“In addition to the poll-tax and public degradation in dress and demeanour imposed on them, the non-Muslims were subjected to various hopes and fears. Rewards in the form of money and public employment were offered to apostates from Hinduism. The leaders of Hindu religion and society were systematically repressed, to deprive the sect of spiritual instruction, and their religious gatherings and processions were forbidden in order to prevent the growth of solidity and a sense of communal strength among them. No new temple was allowed to be built nor any old one to be repaired, so that the total disappearance of all places of Hindu worship was to be merely a question of time. But even this delay, this slow operation of Time, was intolerable to many of the more fiery spirits of Islam, who tried to hasten the abolition of ‘infidelity’ by anticipating the destructive hand of Time and forcibly pulling down temples.”

Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) Indian historian

Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Volume III, Calcutta, 1928, pp. 164-67. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1999) ISBN 9788185990583

Money, Fear, Religion, Hope

“The first task of administrative theory is to develop a set of concepts that will permit the description, in terms relevant to the theory, of administrative situations. These concepts, to be scientifically useful, must be operational; that is, their meanings must correspond to empirically observable facts or situations.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 43.

“I'd like to say something about this last, about this last point of this terrible, terrible business. I mean Treblinka. I was given orders. I went to see Globocnik in Treblinka. That was the second time. The installations were now in operation, and I had to report to Müller. I expected to see a wooden house on the right side of the road and a few more wooden houses on the left; that's what I remembered. Instead, again with the same Sturmbannführer Höfle, I came to a railroad station with a sign saying Treblinka, looking exactly like a German railroad station — anywhere in Germany — a replica, with signboards, etc. There I hung back as far as I could. I didn't push closer to see it all. I saw a footbridge enclosed in barbed wire and over that footbridge a file of naked Jews was being driven into a house, a big… no, not a house, a big, one-room structure, to be gassed. As I was told, they were gassed with …what's it called? … Potassium cyanide… or cyanic acid. In acid form it's called cyanic acid. I didn't look to see what happened. I reported to Müller and as usual he listened in silence, without a word of comment. Just his facial expression said: "There's nothing I can do about it."”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

I am convinced, Herr Hauptmann, [Eichmann is referring to his interrogator, Avner Less] I know it sounds odd coming from me, but I'm convinced that if it had been up to Müller it wouldn't have happened.
Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 84.

Business, Silence, Time, Housing

“From the enemy's motions, I should be apt to suspect they were retreating from your army, or at least altering their operations. Mr. Lovell, who is at last enlarged from his confinement, reports that Colonel Allen, his fellow prisoner, was informed that transports were getting in readiness to sail, at a moment's warning, sufficient to transport fifteen thousand men.”

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

Letter to George Washington (7 October 1776)

Men

“Of course, one of the main legitimate functions of thought has always been to help provide security, guaranteeing shelter and food for instance. However, this function went wrong when the principal source of insecurity came to be the operation of thought itself.”

David Bohm (1917–1992) American theoretical physicist

Changing Consciousness (1991)

Food, Help

“In my opinion a system of operations, to be efficient and successful, should be such as to give to the principal and responsible head of the running department a complete daily history of details in all their minutiae. Without such supervision, the procurement of a satisfactory annual statement must be regarded as extremely problematical. The fact that dividends are earned without such control, does not disprove the position, as in many cases the extraordinarily remunerative nature of an enterprise may ensure satisfactory returns under the most loose and inefficient management.
It may be proper here to remark, that in consequence of that want of adaptation before alluded to, we cannot avail ourselves to any great extent of the plan of organization of shorter lines in framing one for this, nor have we any precedent or experience upon which we can fully rely in doing so. Under these circumstances, it will scarcely be expected that we can at once adopt any plan of operations which will not require amendment and a reasonable time to prove its worth. A few general principles, however, may be regarded as settled and necessary in its formation, amongst which are:”

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

Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856)

History, Nature, Time, Success

“In general terms institutions have lost their credibility, not because they don't operate but rather because they operate behind closed doors; they have not been opened to the Chilean people. The national congress has been a closed space for many years, the binomial system has contained it within two political forces and it does not represent ideas calling for transformations, which have been present in our country for many years.”

Karol Cariola (1987) Chilean politician

Cariola, Mujer, Matrona, Dirigente Social y Política: Abrir el Congreso Nacional a la Ciudadanía, DiarioDigital, 2013-08-25 http://www.diarioreddigital.cl/index.php/politica/36-politica/443-karol-cariola-mujer-matrona-dirigente-social-y-politica-abrir-el-congreso-nacional-a-la-ciudadania-, Original: "Las instituciones en general han perdido credibilidad, no porque no funcionen sino porque funcionan a puertas cerradas, porque no se han abierto a que el pueblo chileno pueda entrar a ellas. El congreso nacional ha sido un espacio cerrado durante muchos años, el binominal lo ha mantenido contenido en dos fuerzas políticas y no representa otras ideas que son de transformación y que han estado presentes durante muchos años en nuestro país".

People, Idea, Country

“I continue to believe that we can fight this overreach from within the existing system and framework. If I have to, I will use one challenge after another to dismantle governmental operations that I consider violations of the Constitution. During my time as a judge, as a justice, and as attorney general, I’ve had one overarching goal, and that is a strict interpretation and application of the laws and the Constitution. I would be Madisonian.”

Greg Abbott (1957) 48th Governor of Texas

Greg Abbott’s War https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/greg-abbotts-war/ (September 2012)

Justice, Law, Time, Fight

“I well remember receiving from one of the most earnest of my seniors the friendly warning that it was waste of time to study variation, for "Darwin had swept the field." Parenthetically we may notice that though scientific opinion in general became rapidly converted to the doctrine of pure selection, there was one remarkable exception. Systematists for the most part kept aloof. Everyone was convinced that natural selection operating in a continuously varying population was a sufficient account of the origin of species except the one class of scientific workers whose labours familiarised them with the phenomenon of specific difference. From that time the systematists became, as they still in great measure remain, a class apart.”

William Bateson (1861–1926) British geneticist and biologist

Introductory Chapter, p. 3
Mendel's Principles of Heredity (1913)

Nature, Study, Time, Parting

“Sex cannot be understood because nature cannot be understood. Science is a method of logical analysis of nature’s operations. It has lessened human anxiety about the cosmos by demonstrating the materiality of nature’s forces, and their frequent predictability. But science is always playing catch-up ball. Nature breaks its own rules whenever it wants. Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt. Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 5

Hope, Sex, Nature, Light

“The nation has been, and is still being, eroded and hollowed out from within by the implantation of large unassimilated and unassimiliable populations—what Lord Radcliffe once in a memorable phrase called "alien wedges"—in the heartland of the state…The disruption of the homogeneous "we", which forms the essential basis of parliamentary democracy and therefore of our liberties, is now approaching the point at which the political mechanics of a "divided community"…take charge and begin to operate autonomously. Let me illustrate this pathology of a society that is being eaten alive…The two active ingredients are grievance and violence. Where a community is divided, grievance is for practical purposes inexhaustible. When violence is injected—and quite a little will suffice for a start—there begins an escalating competition to discover grievance and to remove it. The materials lie ready to hand in a multiplicity of agencies with a vested interest, more or less benevolent, in the process of discovering grievances and demanding their removal. The spiral is easily maintained in upward movement by the repetitions and escalation of violence. At each stage alienation between the various elements of society is increased, and the constant disappointment that the imagined remedies yield a reverse result leads to growing bitterness and despair. Hand in hand with the exploitation of grievance goes the equally counterproductive process which will no doubt, as usual, be called the "search for a political solution"…Indeed, attention has already been drawn publicly to the potentially critical factor of the so-called immigrant vote in an increasing number of worthwhile constituencies. The result is that the political parties of the indigenous population vie with one another for votes by promising remedy of the grievances which are being uncovered and exploited in the context of actual or threatened violence. Thus the legislature finds itself in effect manipulated by minorities instead of responding to majorities, and is watched by the public at large with a bewildering and frustration, not to say cynicism, of which the experience of legislation hitherto in the field of immigration and race relations afford some pale idea…I need not follow the analysis further in order to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy disintegrates when the national homogeneity of the electorate is broken by a large and sharp alteration in the composition of the population. While the institutions and liberties on which British liberty depends are being progressively surrendered to the European superstate, the forces which will sap and destroy them from within are allowed to accumulate unchecked. And all the time we are invited to direct towards Angola or Siberia the anxious attention that the real danger within our power and our borders imperatively demand.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech the Hampshire Monday Club in Southampton (9 April 1976), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), pp. 165-166
1970s

Lie, Disappointment, Democracy, Imagination

“The idea that art copies nature is a fatal misconception. Art has always operated against nature and for reason.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

Art, Idea, Nature

“The supreme crime of the church to-day is that everywhere and in all its operations and influences it is on the side of sloth of mind; that it banishes brains, it sanctifies stupidity, it canonizes incompetence.”

Upton Sinclair book The Profits of Religion

Book Two : The Church of Good Society, "The Canonization of Incompetence"
The Profits of Religion (1918)

Stupidity

“If we are to project our power against the vital areas of any enemy across the ocean before beachheads on enemy territory are captured, it must be by air-sea power; by aircraft launched from carriers; and by heavy surface ships and submarines projecting guided missiles and rockets. If present promise is developed by research, test and production, these three types of air-sea power operating in concert will be able within the next ten years critically to damage enemy vital areas many hundreds of miles inland.
Naval task forces including these types are capable of remaining at sea for months. This capability has raised to a high point the art of concentrating air power within effective range of enemy objectives.”

Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966) United States Navy fleet admiral

Employment of Naval Forces (1948)

Art, Sea

“[A]ll the non-Stalinist versions concur in the following: the generals did indeed plan a coup d'état… The main part of the coup was to be a palace revolt in the Kremlin, culminating in the assassination of Stalin. A decisive military operation outside the Kremlin, an assault on the headquarters of the G. P. U., was also prepared. Tukhachevsky was the moving spirit of the conspiracy… He was, indeed, the only man among all the military and civilian leaders of that time who showed in many respects a resemblance to the original Bonaparte and could have played the Russian First Consul. The chief political commissar of the army, Gamarnik, who later committed suicide, was initiated into the plot. General Yakir, the commander of Leningrad, was to secure the co-operation of his garrison. Generals Uberovich, commander of the western military district, Kork, commander of the Military Academy in Moscow, Primakow, Budienny's deputy in the command of the cavalry, and a few other generals were also in the plot.”

Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967) British historian

Isaac Deutscher in his Stalin: A Political Biography, second edition (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 360-361. Quote from Ludo Martens's Another view of Stalin, pp. 176.

Decision, Suicide, Time, Parting

“The method of successive approximations is often applied to proving existence of solutions to various classes of functional equations; moreover, the proof of convergence of these approximations leans on the fact that the equation under study may be majorised by another equation of a simple kind. Similar proofs may be encountered in the theory of infinitely many simultaneous linear equations and in the theory of integral and differential equations. Consideration ofjkbni semiordered spaces and operations between them enables us to easily develop a complete theory of such functional equations in abstract form.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

"On one class of functional equations" (1936), as cited in: O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., " Leonid Kantorovich http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kantorovich.html", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews

Study, Success

“The differentiation of the political state from civil society was made historically possible, Marx believed, by the introduction of commodity exchange into the productive life of society, and the resulting opposition between the form of common property corresponding to the tribal Gemeinwesen and the form of private property corresponding to the exchange of commodities. This opposition, present already in the oriental and ancient productive modes, made possible in Marx's view the alienation of the state from civil society which characterized feudal production, and which reaches its extreme form in the fragmented life of capitalist civil society. Here the state, which began in immediate unity with the process of social production, has become a distinct institution operating within this process, which nevertheless still claims to represent society in its totality.”

Allen W. Wood (1942) academic

"The Marxian Critique of Justice," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 244-282

Life

“A democratic country has zero tolerance for all illegal monitoring operations.”

Jiang Yi-huah (1960) Taiwanese politician

Jiang Yi-huah (2013) cited in " Jiang defends Cabinet ahead of poll http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/2013/10/15/391346/Jiang-defends.htm" on The China Post, 15 October 2013

Country

“UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum book Modern Operating Systems

Modern Operating Systems, 3rd ed., p. 40.

Dependency

“We could try freedom for a while. We had it for a long time. That's where you sell something and I agree to buy it because I like it. That is how we operate in most of rest of the marketplace other than health care. Now the president has said you can only buy certain types of health care that I approve of, and anything I don't approve of, you are not allowed to purchase. We could try freedom. I think it might work. It works everywhere else.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

2015-01-05
Sen. Rand Paul's remedy for ObamaCare: 'We could try freedom for awhile. We had it for a long time'
Greta
Susteren
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2015/01/06/sen-rand-pauls-remedy-obamacare-we-could-try-freedom-awhile-we-had-it-long-time
2015-03-01
2010s

Health, Thinking, Freedom, Time

“It is essentially to the very idea and concept of organization that we there must be a process, formal in character, through which the supreme co-ordinating authority operates throughout the whole structure of the organized body. This process is not an abstraction; it is a tangible reality observable in every organization. It appears in a form so distinct and characteristic that it practically names itself, — hence the term Scalar Process.”

James D. Mooney (1884–1957) American businessman

Source: Onward Industry!, 1931, p. 31

Idea, Reality, Appearance

“Even if it were clear what was meant, this sort of treatment would seem closer to describing what is taking place than to explaining it. I do not want to deny the value of describing a phenomenon; rich descriptions facilitate theorizing, and there is no more astute observer than Piaget. But in my view explanations of cognitive phenomena should specify the ways in which functional capacities operate. Piaget and Inhelder’s account is more on the level of intentionality, and hence is open to multiple interpretations at the level of the function of the brain. The do not specify how interiorized imitation operates, nor have they specified the format or content of the image. This level of discourse will never produce process adequacy, and hence seems of limited value.”

Stephen Kosslyn (1948) American psychologist

Source: Image and Mind. 1980, p. 411

Way

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

Steve Killelea (1949) Australian businessman

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

Peace, History, Problem, Water

“I think the basic misconception is to speak of the so-called “best” allocation of resources. What is the best? In common economics it is defined as what would be if we knew everything. Economists operate with the fictitious assumption that all the relevant data is known, but this is totally unrealistic. Nobody knows all the data. What we have is widely dispersed knowledge, which cannot be concentrated in one mind. To call the situation—which would use all the knowledge available—“optimal” is nonsense because it is by definition a non-achievable solution. Our problem is not the full utilization of all knowledge but the best use we can achieve with any known institutional structure. In that sense, some oligopolistic (and even monopolistic situations), represent the best possible utilization of knowledge that we can achieve. Even the action of a monopolist can be extremely beneficial.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1960s–1970s, A Conversation with Professor Friedrich A. Hayek (1979)

Optimism, Knowledge, Problem, Thinking

“The peculiarity of six fingers on the hand and six toes on the feet… is then sometimes seen to descend through several generations. It was Mr. Lawrence's opinion that, a pair, in which both parties were so distinguished, might be the progenitors of a new variety of the race who would be thus marked in all future time. It is not easy to surmise the causes which operate in producing such varieties. Perhaps they are simply types in nature, possible to be realized under certain appropriate conditions, but which conditions are such as altogether to elude notice.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Chambers and his brother William were both born with this condition. Robert was made lame by the operation to remove the sixth digits from his feet.
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 282-283

Nature, Time, Future