Quotes about percentage (101 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am to talk to you about energy in the future. I will start by telling you why I believe that the energy resources of the past must be supplemented. First of all, these energy resources will run short as we use more and more of the fossil fuels. But I would […] like to mention another reason why we probably have to look for additional fuel supplies. And this, strangely, is the question of contaminating the atmosphere. […. ] Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide. […. ] The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect […. ] It has been calculated that a temperature rise corresponding to a 10 per cent increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”

Edward Teller (1908–2003) Hungarian-American nuclear physicist

As quoted in Benjamin Franta, "On its 100th birthday in 1959, Edward Teller warned the oil industry about global warming" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2018/jan/01/on-its-hundredth-birthday-in-1959-edward-teller-warned-the-oil-industry-about-global-warming, The Guardian, 1 January 2018.

People , Health , Question , Thinking

“Don't solicit for your sister, that's not nice,
Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

Tom Lehrer (1928) American singer-songwriter and mathematician

"Be Prepared"
Songs by Tom Lehrer (1953)

Sister

“There is no logical way that you can say let's spend X billion dollars less. You can only say, which part of our defense measures do we believe we can do without and still have security against all contingencies? Anyone in the Congress who advocates a percentage or specific dollar cut in defense spending should be made to say what part of our defenses he would eliminate, and he should be candid enough to acknowledge that his cuts mean cutting our commitments to allies or inviting greater risk or both.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

1980s, First term of office (1981–1985), Address on the Strategic Defense Initiative (1983)

Way , Parting

“No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races. As a matter of fact, it is freely conceded that the Mediterranean race turns out a higher percentage of the aesthetically sensitive and that the Semitic groups excel in sharp, precise intellectation. It may be, too, that the Mongolian excels in aesthetick capacity and normality of philosophical adjustment. What, then, is the secret of pro-Nordicism among those who hold these views? Simply this—that ours is a Nordic culture, and that the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the national standards, perspectives, traditions, memories, instincts, peculiarities, and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other influences are fitted to mingle in our fabric. We don't despise the French in France or Quebec, but we don't want them grabbing our territory and creating foreign islands like Woonsocket and Fall River. The fact of this uniqueness of every separate culture-stream—this dependence of instinctive likes and dislikes, natural methods, unconscious appraisals, etc., etc., on the physical and historical attributes of a single race—is to obvious to be ignored except by empty theorists.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to James F. Morton (18 January 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 587
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

Secret , Nature , Memory , Dependency

“We’ve also been laughed at, argued with, booed, and threatened with hellfire—or gunfire. But Jarret’s kind of religion and Jarret himself are getting less and less popular these days. Both, it seems, are bad for business, bad for the U. S. Constitution, and bad for a large percentage of the population. They always have been, but now more and more people are willing to say so in public. The Crusaders have terrorized some people into silence, but they’ve just made others very angry.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents (1998), Chapter 21 (p. 430)

People , Religion , Business , Silence

“No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society (1859)
Context: The old general rule was that educated people did not perform manual labor. They managed to eat their bread, leaving the toil of producing it to the uneducated. This was not an insupportable evil to the working bees, so long as the class of drones remained very small. But now, especially in these free States, nearly all are educated — quite too nearly all, to leave the labor of the uneducated, in any wise adequate to the support of the whole. It follows from this that henceforth educated people must labor. Otherwise, education itself would become a positive and intolerable evil. No country can sustain, in idleness, more than a small percentage of its numbers. The great majority must labor at something productive.

Country

“Who, pray, are benefiting by all this waste and confusion? The dew, a mere small percentage of the population of the world. All the remainder submit, because they think "it always has been so and it must always be so."”

Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) American communist anarchist labor organizer

The work of those who have a conception of a true society of the future, must devote all their efforts towards disabusing the people's minds of the ancient false hoods. It can be done. Many other hoary lies have passed away, so will this one, too.

"Property Rights vs. Human Rights" (Nov. 1905)

World , Thinking

“A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it.”

Kelley Armstrong book Dime Store Magic

Source: Dime Store Magic

Appearance

“I could instance a load of fuckers whose throats I'd cut and push over the nearest cliffs, but there's no percentage in that!”

Charles Haughey (1925–2006) Irish politician

The Flawed Chieftain http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/niall_stanage/2006/06/the_flawed_chieftain.html (The Guardian 'Comment is Free')
In an interview with Hot Press magazine

“I will pick up a large percentage of votes on both sides (Republican and Democrat) and those in the middle.”

Scott Ashjian (1963) American businessman

[Vogel, Ed, Party announces appeal over Ashjian's candidacy, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2B, May 14, 2010]

“We point out that not every reactant is completely consumed in a chemical reaction, and that the limiting reactant determines the maximum theoretical yield; the percentage yield may be somewhat less.”

David W. Oxtoby (1951) President of Pomona college

Principles of Modern Chemistry (7th ed., 2012), Ch. 2 : Chemical Formulas, Equations, and Reaction Yields

“The Christian right wing in America is a polarizing force when it comes to gay rights, abortion, and patriotism. To me, these aren't "issues," they are matters of individual freedom of choice. But the militant Christians … especially don't like anything beyond their idea of the "normal"—like the percentage of our population who happen to be gay.
To me, gay rights is simple: it's about equality. We're all supposed to be equal under the Constitution, which doesn't say anything about the "Hetero States of America."”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 10 (p. 180)

Idea , Freedom

“I started freerunning when I was 16. It just felt like an evolution of what I always wanted to do as a child: be creative, climb on things. It let me apply an adult mentality to that playfulness. Then I was introduced to veganism. And from there, I found out that the biggest percentage of pollution on the planet comes from animal agriculture. Once I discovered that, it became my calling. I think we all have something to contribute; we just have to look at the bigger picture and ask, “With what we’ve been given, what message can we promote that helps the greater good?””

Tim Shieff (1988) American freerunner

"Go veggie to save the planet, says world champion freerunner Tim Shieff" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/16/go-veggie-to-save-the-planet-says-world-champion-freerunner-tim-shieff, interview with The Guardian (16 June 2015).

Thinking , Help , Animals

“As soon as the national government can afford, a larger percentage of the Internal Revenue allotment should be given to local government units. It is presently 20%. By devolving added responsibilities, this could eventually go to 60%. This would speed up the development of the countryside.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2009, Speech: The Socio-Economic Peace Program of Senator Francis Escudero

Speed

“Christian America, religious America I should say — the same thing is true of Orthodox Jews and conservative Jews, although that is a very small percentage of the population — religious America is reproducing well above replacement rate, it’s liberals who are aborting and going gay and anyone with a flair for color, so I think we will have a leg-up in the demographic war, that’s what the left was facing, that they weren’t reproducing enough so they had to bring in the ringers from the Third World to vote for them.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2015-06-09
Ann Coulter: Liberals Are ‘Going Gay’ So They Need Immigrants To Outbreed ‘Christian America’
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ann-coulter-liberals-are-going-gay-so-they-need-immigrants-to-outbreed-christian-america/
2015

War , World , Color , Thinking

“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

“The majority of students studying for the master's degree in business are enrolled in makeshift programs which are generally unsatisfactory… Business administration gets a much larger portion of poor students and a smaller percentage of the best students than do the traditional professional fields.”

Robert Aaron Gordon (1908–1978) American economist

Robert A. Gordon and James E. Howell. Higher education for business. 1959

Business , Study

“By any honest assessment of where we are as a party, without a major course correction, we are simply on the way out. The demographic picture of America is rapidly changing, and we have to change with it. George W. Bush got 56 percent of the white vote, and won. Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote, and lost. Every four years in this country, the electorate gets about two percentage points less white; as an increasingly old and increasingly white party, we are skidding with each passing election toward irrelevance in terms of appealing to a broad electorate. We hold out our hand, expecting our share of nonwhite votes, and yet we give these Americans too few reasons to come our way. Instead, we demonize them, marginalize them, and blame them for our country's problems. We all knew of this before the last election, but we quickly set it aside for the sugar high of populism, nativism, and demagoguery. The crash from this sugar high will be particularly unpleasant.”

Jeff Flake (1962) American politician

Source: Conscience of a Conservative (2017), p. 8

Way , Problem , Change , Country

“Fay: Have you given a thought to the priest?
Truscott: We can't have him in on it, miss. Our percentage wouldn't be worth having.
Fay: Mr McLeavy threatened to expose us.
Truscott: I've been exposed before.
Fay: What happened?
Truscott: I arrested the man. He's doing twelve years.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Loot (1965), Act II

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

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

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

People , Age , Knowledge , Time

“As Jews presently enjoy a disproportionate share of the wholesale and retail trade, such a balanced distribution can be achieved only by refusing them further trading licenses, until such a time as the other main population groups, such as English- and Afrikaans-speakers, have gained a proportion which (as far as practicable) corresponds to their percentage of the white population. … Of course, the discrimination must disappear as soon as the correct balance (ewewigtige toestand) has been achieved.”

Hendrik Verwoerd (1901–1966) Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966

As editor of Die Transvaler on 1 October 1937, 10 quotes by Hendrik Verwoerd (Politics Web) https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/hendrik-verwoerd-10-quotes-hendrik-verwoerd-politics-web-20-september-2016, sahistory.org.za (20 September 2016)

Time

“The slavery debate has been really a death-struggle from that moment. Mr. Clay thought not. Mr. Clay was a shrewd politician, but the difference between him and Calhoun was the difference between principle and expediency. Calhoun's sharp, incisive genius has engraved his name, narrow but deep, upon our annals. The fluent and facile talents of Clay in a bold, large hand wrote his name in honey upon many pages. But time is already licking it away. Henry Clay was our great compromiser. That was known, and that was the reason why Mr. Buchanan's story of a bargain with J. Q. Adams always clung to Mr. Clay. He had compromised political policies so long that he had forgotten there is such a thing as political principle, which is simply a name for the moral instincts applied to government. He did not see that when Mr. Calhoun said he should return to the Constitution he took the question with him, and shifted the battle-ground from the low, poisonous marsh of compromise, where the soldiers never know whether they are standing on land or water, to the clear, hard height of principle. Mr. Clay had his omnibus at the door to roll us out of the mire. The Whig party was all right and ready to jump in. The Democratic party was all right. The great slavery question was going to be settled forever. The bushel-basket of national peace and plenty and prosperity was to be heaped up and run over. Mr. Pierce came all the way from the granite hills of New Hampshire, where people are supposed to tell the truth, to an- nounce to a happy country that it was at peace — that its bushel-basket was never so overflowingly full before. And then what? Then the bottom fell out. Then the gentlemen in the national rope -walk at Washington found they had been busily twining a rope of sand to hold the country together. They had been trying to compromise the principles of human justice, not the percentage of a tariff; the instincts of human nature and consequently of all permanent government, and the conscience of the country saw it. Compromises are the sheet-anchor of the Union — are they? As the English said of the battle of Bunker Hill, that two such victories would ruin their army, so two such sheet- anchors as the Compromise of 1850 would drag the Union down out of sight forever.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Death , People , Truth , Peace

“We not only worked hard—but we had a lot of fun doing it. We never saw the dynamics of work and fun as incompatible. If you’re going to spend a large percentage of your waking hours at work, why not enjoy it?”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ Live Learn Lead to Make a Difference https://books.google.com/books?id=s0q7mZf9oDkC&lpg=pg=PP1&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2006 p. xix.
On working hard

“The computer field is intoxicated with change. We have seen galloping growth over a period of four decades and it still does not seem to be slowing down. The field is not mature yet and already it accounts for a significant percentage of the Gross National Product.”

Fernando J. Corbató (1926–2019) American computer scientist

Source: On Building Systems That Will Fail (1991), p. 75

Change

“I make… a cursory survey of certain pyro-electric properties of the alloys of platinum. Curiously… the data… led to a striking result.. it appears that the zero resistance f(0), if the resistance at t^O be r = f(t), and the zero coefficient f^{\prime}(0)/f(0), are related to each other by a law which during the stages of low percentage alloying is independent of the ingredients of the alloy, except in so far as they modify its electrical conductivity.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

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

Law , Appearance

“If something have demonstrated the elections and the percentage she got (4,41%) is that nobody wanted her here.”

Jorge Vargas González (1967) Chilean politician

About Paulina Nin, in La Cuarta (4 November 2004)

“Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again.”

Grover Norquist (1956) Conservative Lobbyist

interview with NPR's Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air, October 2, 2003.
2003

Death , Money , Hate , People

“It's scary in this country, it's probably because of our bad educational system, but the percentage of people that believe in Creationalism is really scary for a country that's going to have to compete in the world where science and medicine require a better understanding.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_6170951
Faith Based Science

People , World , Education , Understanding

“A very large percentage of the founding Fathers, men who signed the Declaration of Independence and others after them, lost everything. They paid a price. But nobody wants to pay a price now; they want it handed to them. That has to change.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Dangers Inherent in Public Education (March 24, 1986)

Men , Change

“But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera.”

Franz von Papen (1879–1969) German chancellor

To Leon Goldensohn (30 March 1946). Quoted in "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.
1940s

Life , People

“The reality of the situation is obscured when population is expressed as a percentage proportion taken over the whole of the United Kingdom. The ethnic minority is geographically concentrated, so that areas in which it forms a majority already exists, and these areas are destined inevitably to grow. It is here that the compatibility of such an ethnic minority with the functioning of parliamentary democracy comes into question. Parliamentary democracy depends at all levels upon the valid acceptance of majority decision, by which the nation as a whole is content to be bound because of the continually available prospect that what one majority has decided another majority can subsequently alter. From this point of view, the political homogeneity of the electorate is crucial. What we do not, as yet, know is whether the voting behaviour of our altered population will be able to use the majority vote as a political instrument and not as a means of self-identification, self-assertion and self-enumeration. It may be that the United Kingdom will escape the political consequences of communalism; but communalism and democracy, as the experience of India demonstrates, are incompatible. That is the spectre which the Conservative party's policy of assisted repatriation in the 1960s aimed to banish; but time and events have swept over and passed the already outdated remedies of the 1960s. We are entering unknown territory where the only certainty for the future is the relative increase of the ethnic minority due to the age structure of that population which has been established.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Article on the 25th anniversary of his 'Rivers of Blood speech', The Times (20 April 1993), p. 18
1990s

Age , Democracy , Communication , Question

“The borders will be based on 1967, with the required security modifications. If we take a certain percentage of the Palestinian land, we will compensate them with land. We will not rob their land. Sovereignty yes, but no one would threaten this Palestinian state, and therefore the Palestinians also agree that it can be demilitarized. When the threats on Israel would also cease, I hope that Israel could be demilitarized too.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

ArabYnet online chat (6 February 2006)

Hope

“By any yardstick, a higher percentage of New York City high school students are graduating now than at any time in decades. The rate has risen every year during this administration and is an important validation of our reforms, w:Chancellor Klein’s leadership, and the hard work of our students, principals, and teachers. The rate obviously remains far too low, but the gains demonstrate that our hard work to raise student achievement is paying off, and we are beginning to turn around a failing system.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/education/mayor_bloomberg_announces_that_high_school_graduaton_rate_reaches_historic_high_of_60
Education

School , Teachers , Time

“Let us not deceive ourselves: our talent profile is nowhere near that of, say, the Jews or the Japanese in America. The exceptional number of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews is no accident. It is also no accident that a high percentage, sometimes 50%, of faculty members in the top American universities on both the east and west coasts are Jews. And the number of high calibre Japanese academics, professionals, and business executives is out of all proportion to the percentage of Japanese in the total American population”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

The Search for Talent, 12 August 1982 http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/speeches/record-details/73eb9163-115d-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad
1980s

Business , Universe

“No Mr Huckabee, history –and criminal statistics- have both shown that tragedies will only increase, the more religious any society becomes. The more influence religion has over law, the lower our quality of life, and the more human rights are violated. It is true that any population of hundreds of millions will produce a proportionate percentage of sociopaths. But what we need there is more efficient provisions of mental health care –so that those suffering dementia and other disorders will be identified, treated, or isolated as need be –BEFORE they go berserk. Religion doesn’t want that either –as a matter of self-preservation. Because a fair amount of divine revelation can be cured with the same medications that treats schizophrenia. Where would the churches be if that many of their clergymen were clothed in straight-jackets?”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

Life , Health , Religion , Law

“A few months after Khieu Samphan’s now famous “admission” that his regime was responsible for the deaths of about one-sixth of the population of Cambodia, Indonesian Prime Minister Adam Malik admitted that 50-80,000 people, close to the same percentage of the population, had been killed in East Timor in the course of what the Indonesia propaganda ministry and the New York Times called the “civil war” – that is, the U. S. backed Indonesian invasion and massacre – though one would not have discovered that fact from the U. S. media. While Khieu Samphan’s “admission” was concocted by the media and scholarship on the basis of remarks that quite possibly were never made, Malik’s admission, by contrast, was clear and explicit. A comparison of media reaction to the actual admission by Malik and the concocted “admission” by Samphan gives some insight into what lies behind the machinations of the Free Press.”

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

Source: After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 177.

Death , War , People , Time

“When [Nigel Farage] was treated in the way he was in Edinburgh Alex Salmond had the opportunity to be statesman like. To deplore what had happened. To say everyone was welcome in Scotland, everyone with an elected position, everyone who had following in Scotland had a right to speak and be heard. But he didn't. It's not just people with a percentage of the vote who have the right to speak. All of us have the right to speak. What happened to Farage looked ugly in the rest of the country and the rest of the world. And the SNP I fear will take you down a road where grudge is everything.”

George Galloway (1954) British politician, broadcaster, and writer

The Express http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/407371/Question-Time-Nigel-Farage-blasts-Alex-Salmond-for-not-condeming-hostile-Edinburgh-scenes During an interview on Question time with Nigel Farage condemning the hostility shown by the Scottish people June 14, 2013

People , World , Fear , Way

“I'll tell you what harms the vast majority of Muslims that love freedom and hate terror: Muslim theocracy does. Muslim intolerance does. Wahabism does. Salafism does. Islamism does. Jihadism does. Sharia law does. The mere conservatism of traditional Islam does. We're not talking about only jihadists hating homosexuals and thinking they should die, we're talking about conservative Muslims. The percentage of British Muslims polled who said that homosexuality was morally acceptable was zero. Do you realize what it takes to say something so controversial in a poll that not even 1% of those polled would agree with it? There's almost no question that extreme that you will ever see in a poll that gets a zero, but ask British Muslims whether homosexuality is morally acceptable, and that's what you get. And the result is more or less the same in dozens of other countries. It's zero in Cameroon, zero in Ethiopia. 1% in Nigeria, 1% in Tanzania, 1% in Mali, 2% in Kenya, 2% in Chad. 1% in Lebanon, 1% in Egypt, 1% in the Palestinian territories, 1% in Iraq, 2% in Jordan, 2% in Tunisia, 1% in Pakistan. But 10% in Bangladesh. Bangladesh: that bright spot in the Muslim world where they are regularly hunting down and butchering secular writers with machetes. The people who suffer under this belief system are Muslims themselves. The next generation of human beings born into a Muslim community who could otherwise have been liberal, tolerant, well-educated, cosmopolitan productive people are to one or another degree being taught to aspire to live in the Middle Ages, or to ruin this world on route to some fictional paradise after death. That's the thing we have to get our heads around. And yes, some of what I just said applies with varying modifications to other religions and other cults. But there is nothing like Islam at this moment for generating this kind of intolerance and chaos. And if only a right wing demagogue will speak honestly about it, then we will elect right wing demagogues in the West more and more in response to it. And that will be the price of political correctness: that's when this check will finally get cashed. That will be the consequence of this persistent failure we see among liberals to speak and think and act with real moral clarity and courage on this issue. The root of this problem is that liberals consistently fail to defend liberal values as universal human values. Their political correctness, their multiculturalism, their moral relativism has led them to rush to the defense of theocrats and to abandon the victims of theocracy and to vilify anyone who calls out this hypocrisy for what it is as a bigot. And to be clear, and this is what liberals can't seem to get, is that speaking honestly about the ideas that inspire Islamism and jihadism, beliefs about martyrdom, and apostasy and blasphemy and paradise and honour and women, is not an expression of hatred for Muslims. It is in fact the only way to support the embattled people in the Muslim community: The reformers and the liberals and the seculars and the free thinkers and the gays and the Shiia in Sunni-majority context and Sufis and Ahmadiyyas, and as Maajid Nawaz said, the minorities within the minority, who are living under the shadow, and sword rather often, under theocracy. […] If you think that speaking honestly about the need for reform within Islam will alienate your allies in the Muslim community, then you don't know who your allies are.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "Waking Up with Sam Harris Podcast #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2" (15 June 2016) https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-faith-sessions-2
2010s

Love , Death , Women , Hate

“Dimock makes the generalization that 90 percent of the characteristics of public government executive management are identical with those of private executive management. In spite of large areas of similarity, I strongly dissent. I would place the percentage very much lower - whether 30 per cent or SO per cent lower, I shall not attempt to say.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "Governmental and Business Executives", 1946, p. 176; cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 194-5

“In the Seventies, women runners, developing amenorrhea and calcium-related shin splints, were the first to realize that nature is hovering over us, ready to shut down our systems if our fetus-feeding fat reserve drops below a certain percentage of body weight. In other words, in nature's eyes we are nothing but milk sacs and fat deposits.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 41

Women , Nature

“Protocols: What also indeed is, in substance, a loan, especially a foreign loan? A loan is an issue of government bills of exchange containing a percentage obligation commensurate to the sum of the loan capital. If the loan bears a charge of 5 percent, then in twenty years the State vainly pays away in interest a sum equal to the loan borrowed, in forty years it is paying a double sum, in sixty treble and all the while the debt remains an unpaid debt.
from this calculation it is obvious that with any form of taxation per head the State is bailing out the last coppers of the poor taxpayers in order to settle accounts…; instead of collecting
Graves: These two books were written 40 years apart from each other…why is the same interest rate employed by the “Protocols?””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Surely they must have changed during all that time.
Raslovlev: Very revealing…eh?
Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.85

Books , Change , Time

“100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

The Weight of Glory (1949)

“In the Church, priests also are sinners. But I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign, as the percentage of these offenses among priests is not higher than in other categories, and perhaps it is even lower.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2002

Personality

“Treat the Jews (express it politely: Jewish petty bourgeoisie) and urban inhabitants in the Ukraine with an iron rod, transferring them to the front, not letting them into the government agencies (except in an insignificant percentage, in particularly exceptional circumstances, under class control).”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), p. 77.
Attributions

“We are obviously all hurt by inflation. Everybody is hurt by inflation. If you really wanted to examine who percentage-wise is hurt the most in their incomes, it is the Wall Street brokers. I mean their incomes have gone down the most.”

Alan Greenspan (1926) 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the United States

At a conference on inflation, Washington, D.C. (September 19, 1974). In Report of the Health, Education, and Welfare, Income Security, Social Services Conference on Inflation (1974), pp. 804–5.
1970s

Hurt

“However convergent it be, evolution cannot attain to fulfilment on earth except through a point of dissociation. With this we are introduced to a fantastic and inevitable event which now begins to take shape in our perspective, the event which comes nearer with every day that passes: the end of all life on our globe, the death of the planet, the ultimate phase of the phenomenon of man. …
Now when sufficient elements have sufficiently agglomerated, this essentially convergent movement will attain such intensity and such quality that mankind, taken as a whole, will be obliged—as happened to the individual forces of instinct—to reflect upon itself at a single point; that is to say, in this case, to abandon its organo-planetary foothold so as to shift its centre on to the transcendent centre of its increasing concentration. This will be the end and the fulfilment of the spirit of the earth.
The end of the world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the uttermost limit of its complexity and its centrality.
The end of the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching the mind, fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will henceforth rest with all its weight on God-Omega. …
Are we to foresee man seeking to fulfil himself collectively upon himself, or personally on a greater than himself? Refusal or acceptance of Omega? … Universal love would only vivify and detach finally a fraction of the noosphere so as to consummate it—the part which decided to "cross the threshold", to get outside itself into the other. …
The death of the materially exhausted planet; the split of the noosphere, divided on the form to be given to its unity; and simultaneously (endowing the event with all its significance and with all its value) the liberation of that percentage of the universe which, across time, space and evil, will have succeeded in laboriously synthesising itself to the very end. Not an indefinite progress, which is an hypothesis contradicted by the convergent nature of noogenesis, but an ecstasy transcending the dimensions and the framework of the visible universe.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin book The Phenomenon of Man

pp. 273, 287–289 https://archive.org/stream/ThePhenomenonOfMan/phenomenon-of-man-pierre-teilhard-de-chardin#page/n137/mode/1up/,
The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

Love , Life , Death , God

“Starting in 1918 at General Motors I found to my surprise] that if I followed the prevailing practice of intercorporate relations I would no longer be able to determine the rate of return on investment for these accessory divisions individually or as a group. This would necessarily mean that I would lose some degree of managerial control over my area of operations. At that time, material within General Motors was passing from one operating division to another at cost, or at cost plus some predetermined percentage. My divisions in the United Motors Corporation had sold both to outside customers and to their allied divisions at the market price. I knew that I operated a profit-making group, and I wished to continue to be able to demonstrate this performance to the general management, rather than to have my operating results on interdivisional business swallowed up in the extra bookkeeping profits of some other division. It was a case of keeping the information clear.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 48

Business , Time

“And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.”

Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) Welsh journalist and explorer

Colin Wilson in The Essential Colin Wilson, p. 216
The Essential Colin Wilson (1985)

Men , War , People , Problem

“In academic philosophy, people tend to use the term ‘libertarian’ in a restrictive way, to refer to people who 1) hold that property rights and other rights are absolute or nearly absolute, 2) who ground their theories of rights and justice on the concept of self-ownership, 3) who reject social justice, and 4) who reject the idea that positive liberty really is liberty, and is a valuable form of liberty which society should project and promote. Libertarians hold that justice requires that we respect property rights, period, even if that means a large percentage of people will starve, lead poor and desperate lives, or have no stake in their society. If that’s libertarianism, count me out.”

Jason Brennan (1979) philosopher

Neoclassical Liberalism: How I’m Not a Libertarian (2011)

People , Justice , Way , Idea

“In 1990, East Asia, South Asia, and Africa all had the same percentage of people living in extreme poverty: 55 percent. Now, East Asia is at ten percent, and South Asia has gone down to 30 percent. In Africa, it’s still 55 percent. Why did we succeed in East Asia, and why are we falling behind in Africa? This year, we’re going to be lending over $60 billion. That seems like a lot of money, but every year, sub-Saharan Africa requires about $100 billion in new investment in infrastructure.”

Jim Yong Kim (1959) Korean-American physician and anthropologist, 12th President of the World Bank

Banker to the Poor, A Conversation With Jim Yong Kim, October, 14

Money , People

“Both in England and on the Continent a graduated property tax (l'impôt progressif) has been advocated, on the avowed ground that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth. I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent.To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours. It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

Principles of Political Economy http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP64.html (1848), Book V, Chapter II

People , Penalty , Wealth

“(1) Every year, in this nation of more than a quarter billion individuals, a few thousand (three quarters of them suicides) are killed with firearms, while millions of Americans successfully use personal weapons to save themselves and others from injury or death. Guns save many, many times more lives than they take.
(2) In every jurisdiction that has made it even microscopically easier for individuals to carry weapons, violent crime rates have plummeted by double-digit percentages. Vermont, where no permission of any kind is required to carry a gun, is named in many respectable surveys as the safest state to live in.
(3) More telling and urgent, every episode of genocidal mass murder in history has been preceded by a period of intense disarming of the civil population, usually with 'public safety' or 'national security' as an excuse. According to Amnesty International — hardly a gang of right wing crazies — in the 20th century alone (in events entirely separate from war), governments have slaughtered more than a hundred million people, usually their own citizens.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Murder by Gun Control" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2000/libe68-20000331-07.html 31 March 2000.

Death , War , People , History

“The truth is that what really needs fixing is something only a few, like President Obama, are willing to speak about, perhaps because it is so daunting a task. Through the “My Brother’s Keeper” initiative, the President is addressing the disproportionate challenges faced by young men of color. For instance, data shows that the percentage of young men not working or not enrolled in school is nearly twice as high for blacks as it is for whites. This initiative, and others like it, is about doing the hard work to grow drug-resistant and violence-resistant kids, especially in communities of color, so they never become part of that officer’s life experience.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Life , Men , Truth , School

“There not only should be far higher percentages of women in power, but they should be well represented at every level: crucial cabinet posts, ambassadorships, and the highest military ranks. I believe that countries then might not be so confrontational.”

Arnold M. Ludwig

King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (2002)

Women , Country

“It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations.”

David Gilmour (1946) guitarist, singer, best known as a member of Pink Floyd

Comment regarding the Pink Floyd reunion concert to protest G8 policies, as quoted in The Scotsman (June 2005) http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=4681299

“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

“We had some problems with the Howard newspaper strip, which led to problems with the Howard book, which ultimately led to the lawsuit. Marvel wouldn't pay the artist to draw it. Gene Colan and I were supposed to get a percentage of the syndicate's take for the strip. The problem was, the money came in 90 days, 120 days, six months — I don't remember how long exactly — after the strips were published. So, essentially, the artist was working for nothing up until that time, and no artist can afford to do that. [In comparison with Stan Lee and 's Spider-Man comic strip, ] Stan, as publisher of Marvel, had a regular salary coming in, and John Romita, I believe, was also on staff at the time. They didn't have quite the same problem.”

Steve Gerber (1947–2008) Comic writer

Comic Book Artist #7 (reprinted in Comic Book Artist Collection Volume 3 (TwoMorrows Publishing, 2005)): "Steve Gerber's Crazy Days", p. 66

Money , Books , Problem , Time

“[In 1956], Prohibition we have to make it successful. To whatever extent we go forward it must be attained effectively. We are told that only a very small percentage drink in India. That should be an added reason for carrying out prohibition because it should be easier to make it successful. When large numbers drink there is a no strong opinion against it. But if ninety percent do not, it is reservoir of public opinion which if utilized properly is a guarantee of success of prohibition.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In p. 41
Prohibition was made an integral part of the Second Fiver Plan in March 1956.
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

Drink , Strong , Success

“A large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful—what else could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they've experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives?—and that they can and will make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central presence to it…”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

"Mister Squishy", Oblivion: Stories
Short stories

Women , Men , Way

“Good morning. This coming week I will be making the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to address a joint session of Congress. We have some business to attend to called the budget of the United States. The federal budget is a document about the size of a big city phone book, and about as hard to read from cover to cover. The blueprint I submit this week contains many numbers, but there is one that probably counts more than any other – $5.6 trillion. That is the surplus the federal government expects to collect over the next 10 years; money left over after we have met our obligations to Social Security, Medicare, health care, education, defense and other priorities. The plan I submit will fund our highest national priorities. Education gets the biggest percentage increase of any department in our federal government. We won't just spend more money on schools and education, we will spend it responsibly. We'll give states more freedom to decide what works. And as we give more to our schools we're going to expect more in return by requiring states and local jurisdictions to test every year. How else can we know whether schools are teaching and children are learning? Social Security and Medicare will get every dollar they need to meet their commitments. And every dollar of Social Security and Medicare tax revenue will be reserved for Social Security and Medicare.”

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

2000s, 2001, Radio Address to the Nation (February 2001)

Money , Children , Health , Books

“I never burned down synagogues. It was a revolution, and Russians burned churches during their revolution. If there are many different nationalities in a country, the leadership should be divided among people by percentages. In finance, press, radio - the Jews had taken over positions. That feeling existed before Hitler.”

Fritz Sauckel (1894–1946) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, February 9, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

People , Feeling , Country

“It is therefore not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves- socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2000s, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. xii

Future , Help , Christ

“In San Diego there is a highly popular course called How to Marry Money. Note that the marriage is to money--not to a person. I inquired about the percentage of men attending… 'The course is really for women,' [the instructor replied, ] 'it's not relevant to men.”

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

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 43.

Women , Men , Money , Marriage

“The solution, as all thoughtful people recognize, must lie in properly melding the themes of inborn predisposition and shaping through life's experiences. This fruitful joining cannot take the false form of percentages adding to 100—as in “intelligence is 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture,” or “homosexuality is 50 percent inborn and 50 percent learned,” and a hundred other harmful statements in this foolish format. When two ends of such a spectrum are commingled, the result is not a separable amalgam (like shuffling two decks of cards with different backs), but an entirely new and higher entity that cannot be decomposed”

Stephen Jay Gould book Dinosaur in a Haystack

just as adults cannot be separated into maternal and paternal contributions to their totality
"The Monster's Human Nature", p. 60
Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995)

Life , People , Lie , Intelligence

“I was born on 23 November 1890 in a village in the province of Smolensk. Grew up in Smolensk, in the home of my grandfather, a cap-maker. Completed secondary school there. At the age of 15 I started earning money by giving drawing lessons. Passed the entrance examination of the art academy in Leningrad but, being a Jew, was not admitted due to the restricted percentage.”

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

1926 - 1941, Autobiography of the artist' (1941)

Money , Age , School , Art

“General Public Services will acquire the next highest share at 16.2%, followed by Debt Burden which will obtain 15.3% of the total budget. Although the Defense Sector will get the lowest share at 4.4%, it will reflect the highest percentage increase at 29% inclusive of an additional P25.988 billion for the General Headquarters, AFP, AFW-Wide Service Support units for its modernization program and an additional P9.497 billion to be sourced from the Miscellaneous Personnel Benefits Fund (MPBF). Let me now proceed Mr. President to the House-approved Budget or the General Appropriations Bill.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

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

Support , Housing

“On the Indian front, [the Hindutva movement] should spearhead the revival, rejuvenation and resurgence of Hinduism, which includes not only religious, spiritual and cultural practices springing from Vedic or Sanskritic sources, but from all other Indian sources independently of these: the practices of the Andaman islanders and the (pre-Christian) Nagas are as Hindu in the territorial sense, and Sanâtana in the spiritual sense, as classical Sanskritic Hinduism. (…) A true Hindutvavadi should feel a pang of pain, and a desire to take positive action, not only when he hears that the percentage of Hindus in the Indian population is falling due to a coordination of various factors, or that Hindus are being discriminated against in almost every respect, but also when he hears that the Andamanese races and languages are becoming extinct; that vast tracts of forests, millions of years old, are being wiped out forever; that ancient and mediaeval Hindu architectural monuments are being vandalised, looted or fatally neglected; that priceless ancient documents are being destroyed or left to rot and decay; that innumerable forms of arts and handicrafts, architectural styles, plant and animal species, musical forms and musical instruments, etc. are becoming extinct; that our sacred rivers and environment are being irreversibly polluted and destroyed…”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Talageri in S.R. Goel (ed.): Time for Stock-Taking, p.227-228.

Pain , Art , Music , Feeling

“The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.)”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
I Have Landed (2002)

Age , Evil

“Likewise, police officers on patrol in our nation’s cities often work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color. Something happens to people of good will working in that environment. After years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Men , People , Color , Feeling

“He created a spirit in this country that caused people to feel, at least for a little while, that there was some hope that things could be better. Needless to say, there was a percentage of the population that did not agree and thought things would be better if he were not around.”

Yolanda King (1955–2007) American actress

1980s

People , Hope , Feeling , Country

“I was the first, and to date, the only woman veteran ever elected, and there is a surprisingly low percentage of veterans in Parliament.”

Judy LaMarsh (1924–1980) Canadian politician, writer, broadcaster and barrister.

Source: Memoirs Of A Bird In A Gilded Cage (1969), CHAPTER 2, N.A.T.O., p. 13

“In daily life, which sex is usually more disruptive or problem-causing? Percentage-wise, it is usually women. What contributes to that? It is mainly because they lack perseverance.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

Perseverance and Contemplation http://www.unification.net/1978/780827.html (1978-08-27)

Life , Women , Sex , Problem

“Santo Domingo is fertile, and upon its soil may be grown just those tropical products of which the United States use so much, and which are produced or prepared for market now by slave labor almost exclusively, namely, sugar, coffee, dyewoods, mahogany, tropical fruits, tobacco, etc. About 75 per cent of the exports of Cuba are consumed in the United States. A large percentage of the exports of Brazil also find the same market. These are paid for almost exclusively in coin, legislation, particularly in Cuba, being unfavorable to a mutual exchange of the products of each country.”

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

1870s, Eighth State of the Union Address (1876)

Coffee , Country

“McLeavy: Has no one considered my feelings in all this?
Truscott: What percentage do you want?
McLeavy: I don't want money. I'm an honest man.
Truscott: You'll have to mend your ways then.”

Joe Orton (1933–1967) English playwright and author

Loot (1965), Act II

Money , Way , Feeling

“One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

1980s–1990s, Barbarians inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays (1999)

Parting

“This is the essential importance of the Alliance for Better Campaigns' efforts backed by Common Cause. It is our campaign to give free time to all legitimate candidates. … What our campaign asks is that the television industry yield just a tiny percentage of that windfall, less than 1 percent, to fund free airtime.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Free the Airwaves! (2002)

Effort , Time

“We’re going to refinance everyone’s existing student debt, 40 million Americans have student debt. … Under my plan, you will be able to also lower your debt, move into a program to pay it back as a percentage of your income and more than that, my plan for debt-free tuition at public colleges and universities will eventually eliminate any student debt. But for people who have it, I’m going to put a date certain that after a certain number of years, you no longer have to pay anything. The government has to quit making money off of lending money to young people to get their education.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

Presidential campaign (April 12, 2015 – 2016), Democratic Presidential Debate in Miami (March 9, 2016)

Money , People , Education , Universe

“In becoming a vegetarian, you will eat a greater percentage of your calories from cereal grains, dried beans and peas, potatoes and pasta—the very foods most dieters avoid with zeal. And you will lose weight.”

Jean Mayer (1920–1993) French-American scientist, university administrator

Quoted in "Why People Get Fat" by Keith Akers, Vegetarian Times (May 1983), p. 29 https://books.google.it/books?id=SQgAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA29.

Food

“About the percentage of Muslims in the total population no precise information can be obtained from the contemporary records. Babur’s statement that most of the inhabitants were Hindus, conveys only a general impression. Two facts are, however, certain. First, it is widely recognised that the majority of Muslims were converts from Hinduism. Secondly, the largest number of conversions took place under the Turks and Afghans who ruled between C. 1300 and 1556.”

K. S. Lal book Indian Muslims: Who Are They

Indian Muslims: Who Are They (1990)

“An invariable accompaniment of growth in developed countries is the shift away from agriculture, a process usually referred to as industrialization and urbanization. The income distribution of the total population, in the simplest model, may therefore be viewed as a combination of the income distributions of the rural and of the urban populations. What little we know of the structures of these two component income distributions reveals that: (a) the average per capita income of the rural population is usually lower than that of the urban;' (b) inequality in the percentage shares within the distribution for the rural population is somewhat narrower than in that for the urban population… Operating with this simple model, what conclusions do we reach? First, all other conditions being equal, the increasing weight of urban population means an increasing share for the more unequal of the two component distributions. Second, the relative difference in per capita income between the rural and urban populations does not necessarily drift downward in the process of economic growth: indeed, there is some evidence to suggest that it is stable at best, and tends to widen because per capita productivity in urban pursuits increases more rapidly than in agriculture. If this is so, inequality in the total income distribution should increase”

Simon Kuznets (1901–1985) economist

Source: "Economic growth and income inequality," 1955, p. 7 as cited in: Anthony Barnes Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Handbook of Income Distribution, Vol. 1. Elsevier, 2000 p. 799

Country

“The most unacknowledged spending expectation among women is the amount of time spent by single mothers caring for children, not only physically, but psychologically. It is my feeling that only a small percentage of a mother’s time is normally compensated for by child support, given what a woman could make adding these hours to workforce hours… It is why women who have never been married and never had children earn so much more in the workplace than women who have had children.”

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

Source: Why Men Earn More (2005), p. 222.

Women , Children , Feeling , Support

“Today the percentage of female judges, college professors and detectives seen on television is a pretty good reflection of the actual world. (In the case of judges, I wouldn't be shocked to find out the number on television exceeds the number in real life — what is it about those black robes that makes us think ovaries?)
But merely thrusting more women into more prestigious on-screen jobs doesn't necessarily make the working world a better place for women. If you were to show people images of two real-life professionals, one a man, one a woman, and ask them to rate their competence knowing nothing but job and gender — I bet people still give the guys the edge.
It's not television's fault, exactly. But television can help fix the problem. Not by writing women into better professions, but by more accurately showing them as complex people contending with the sort of snide, generous, ambitious, incompetent, sad and hilarious co-workers who populate real workplaces.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

How to Succeed at Vampire Slaying and Keep Your Soul (2005)

Life , Women , People , World

“The individual effort method of increasing the reward of the wage-earner includes all that is best in other methods, and attempts to exclude all that is objectionable. Its good points are summed up as follows:
# The standard time set is reasonable and one that can be reached without extraordinary effort, is in fact such time as a good foreman would demand.
# An extra reward of one-fifth of the regular wages for the operation is given to whoever makes standard time.
# Extra compensation above the hourly rate is paid even if standard time is not reached, although this extra compensation diminishes in percentage above standard time-and-a-half.
# If longer than time-and-a-half is taken, the regulai day rate is paid. Of this, the wage-earner is also sure.
# Standard time is carefully determined by observation and experiment, and is only changed when conditions change.
# The arrangement is one of mutual benefit to both parties — of increased earning to the worker, of increased saving to the employer.
# The employer loses more than the wage-earner if schedules do not encourage co-operation.
# The wage-earner, working on a schedule, becomes in a large degree his own foreman.
# The wage-earner determines his own earning power, and by co-operating to cut out wastes increases his own value.”

Harrington Emerson (1853–1931) American efficiency engineer and business theorist

Harrison Emerson, " Shop betterment and the individual effort method of profit-sharing http://archive.org/stream/americanengineer80newy#page/64/mode/1up" in: International Railway Journal Vol. 13. p. 61. 1905; Partly cited in Drury (1918, p. 141)

Effort , Change , Time

“There were a large number of Jews who held more favorable positions than they should have, according to their percentage of the population. Germans should have held those positions.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, March 1, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

“And this in turn makes it plain that the Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous importance to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. Bernard Shaw once asked the explorer H. M. Stanley how many other men could take over leadership of the expedition if Stanley himself fell ill; Stanley replied promptly: "One in twenty." "Is that exact or approximate?" asked Shaw. "Exact." And biological studies have confirmed this as a fact. For some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities. During the Korean War, the Chinese made the interesting discovery that if they separated out the dominant five per cent of American prisoners of war, and kept them in separate compound, the remaining ninety-five per cent made no attempt to escape.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: About, p. 216

Men , War , People , Problem

“In 1960, whites were 90 percent of the country. The Census Bureau recently estimated that whites already account for less than two-thirds of the population and will be a minority by 2050. Other estimates put that day much sooner. One may assume the new majority will not be such compassionate overlords as the white majority has been. If this sort of drastic change were legally imposed on any group other than white Americans, it would be called genocide. Yet whites are called racists merely for mentioning the fact that current immigration law is intentionally designed to reduce their percentage in the population.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Bush's America : Roach Motel" (6 June 2007) http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21029.
2007

Law , Change , Country

“As with respect to viewers, I must say that gallery-viewing is increasingly becoming more of a fashion than a love. Many of the openings have turned into exhibitions of pompousness. Also, there are groups of viewers that enter galleries with their already formed judgments. Amidst all these there are also groups that show absolutely no reaction towards the works, these are the worst. They are neither approving nor disapproving. A smaller percentage constitutes honest art-lovers who ask questions, and their views are worthwhile and they inspire real energy in an artist.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Tamasha (1973), No 114. Third year, Thursday June 14th, 1973.

Love , Art , Lovers , Fashion

“Most students of nature sooner or later pass through a process of writing off a large percentage of their supposed capital of knowledge as a merely illusory asset. As we trace more accurately certain familiar sequences of phenomena we begin to realize how closely these sequences, or laws, as we call them, are hemmed round by still other laws of which we can form no notion.”

William Crookes (1832–1919) British chemist and physicist

Address to the Society for Psychical Research (1897)
Context: The most helpful quality which has aided me in psychical problems and has made me lucky in physical discoveries (sometimes of rather unexpected kinds) has simply been my knowledge — my vital knowledge, if I may so term it — of my own ignorance.
Most students of nature sooner or later pass through a process of writing off a large percentage of their supposed capital of knowledge as a merely illusory asset. As we trace more accurately certain familiar sequences of phenomena we begin to realize how closely these sequences, or laws, as we call them, are hemmed round by still other laws of which we can form no notion. With myself this writing off of illusory assets has gone rather far and the cobweb of supposed knowledge has been pinched (as some one has phrased) into a particularly small pill.

Law , Nature , Knowledge

“The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs.”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
"The Good People of Halifax", p. 390 (originally appeared in The Globe and Mail, 2001-09-20)
I Have Landed (2002)

Evil , Age

“More than two million people in the United States are behind bars, a higher rate of incarceration than any other country in the world, constituting a new Jim Crow. The total population in prison is nearly equal to the number of people in Houston, Texas, the fourth largest U. S. city. African Americans and Latinos make up 56 percent of those incarcerated, while constituting only about 32 percent of the U. S. population. Nearly 50 percent of American adults, and a much higher percentage among African Americans and Native Americans, have an immediate family member who has spent or is currently spending time behind bars. Both black men and Native American men in the United States are nearly three times, Hispanic men nearly two times, more likely to die of police shootings than white men. Racial divides are now widening across the entire planet.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?, 2019

Family , Time , Country , People

“These are no random reminiscences. … The Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people. … Then there are the browns, intermediates, who cannot by any stretch of imagination pass as white, but who will not go one inch towards mixing with people darker than themselves.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 51

Imagination , People

“Shri Dharampal has documented from old British archives, particularly those in Madras, that the indigenous system of education compared more than favourably with the system obtaining in England at about the same time. The Indian system was admittedly in a state of decay when it was surveyed by the British Collectors in Bengal, Bombay and Madras. Yet, as the data brought up by them proved conclusively, the Indian system was better than the English in terms of (1) the number of schools and colleges proportionately to the population, (2) the number of students attending these institutions, (3) the duration of time spent in school by the students, (4) the quality of teachers, (5) the diligence as well as intelligence of the students, (6) the financial support needed to see the students through school and college, (7) the high percentage of lower class (Sudra and other castes) students attending these schools as compared to the upper class (Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaisya) students, and (8) in terms of subjects taught.”

Dharampal (1922–2006) Indian historian

Goel, S. R. (2015). Hindu society under siege. (Ch. 3. The Residue of Christianism)

School , Time , Support , Intelligence

“We’re still humans after all. Some percentage of us are always going to be assholes.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 1 (p. 20)

“For, while the heart is full of thoughts for a little group of selves, near and dear to us, how shall the rest of mankind fare in our souls? What percentage of love and care will there remain to bestow on the “great orphan?””

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891) occult writer

And how shall the “still small voice” make itself heard in a soul entirely occupied with its own privileged tenants? What room is there left for the needs of Humanity en bloc...? He who would profit by the wisdom of the universal mind, has to reach it through the whole of Humanity without distinction of race, complexion, religion, or social status. It is altruism, not ego-ism even in its most legal and noble conception, that can lead the unit to merge its little Self in the Universal Selves. It is... to this work that the true disciple of true Occultism has to devote himself if he would obtain... divine Wisdom and Knowledge. p. 62
Practical Occultism (1888)

Heart , Soul , Making love , Love

“The image of the enterprise as a place where employees can achieve personal fulfilment is therefore an essentially ideological invention. It conceals the real transformations that have taken place, namely that enterprises are replacing labour by machines, producing more and better with a decreasing percentage of the workforce previously employed, and offering privileges to a chosen elite of workers, which are accompanied by unemployment, precarious employment, de-skilling and lack of job security for the majority. The advance of technology has thus resulted in the segmentation and disintegration of the working class. An elite has been won over to collaboration with capital in the name of work ethic; the great mass of workers have become marginalized or lost their job security and serve as a reserve army for industry which wishes to be able to adjust its workforce rapidly according to fluctuations in demand.”

André Gorz (1923–2007) austrian philosopher

p. 66 https://books.google.com/books?id=WbpvDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA66
Critique of Economic Reason, 1988

Personality

“Distribution of reaction to change What Mr. Koenigsaecker’s diagram suggests is that only a small percentage of people in the organization (the right tail of the curve) will welcome a change effort and actively participate.”

Mike Rother (1958) American business academic

Change , People , Effort

“There is almost no difference in the percentage of men versus women experiencing depression.”

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

Source: The Boy Crisis (2018), pp. 278

Women , Men

“See? Interstellar colonization is easy! You just need to devote a visible percentage of the resource of an entire interplanetary civilization to it for several hundred years, placing it in the tireless and efficient hands of robots ordered to strive for the goal for as long as it takes.”

Charles Stross Saturn's Children

Source: Saturn's Children (2008), Chapter 17, “Interview with the Domina” (p. 304)

“The Muslim percentage has not only increased, but the rate of increase itself has increased.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Source: 1990s, The Demographic Siege (1997)

“African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”

Mitch McConnell (1942) US Senator from Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader

Source: "Virginia congressman blasts McConnell for comment on voters of color" https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/20/politics/mcconnell-voters-of-color-criticism-mceachin/index.html, CNN, January 21 2022