Quotes about process
page 12

Bill Nye photo

“The invention process is a great exercise for kids. It compels them to define an actual problem, formulate an original solution, develop a product, and share the results or products with their friends and peers.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NewsBank, Nurturing the inventor in your child, Southwest Times Record, Fort Smith, Arkansas, August 25, 2000, Pam Cloud Smith]

Yoweri Museveni photo

“I shall not be deterred by people who don't see where the future of Africa lies. It is the short-sighted people who put their opinions in writing. They don't understand that the future of all countries lies in processing.”

Yoweri Museveni (1944) President of Uganda

Defending the allocation of forest land to a sugar company (13 April 2007), as quoted in "Uganda leader defends forest plan" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6551905.stm (13 April 2007), BBC News, United Kingdom: British Broadcasting Corporation
2000s

“We were not going to understand gender inequality or [other inequalities] unless we understood the interpersonal processes that mediated and enacted institutional structures and larger patterns of inequality.”

Cecilia L. Ridgeway (1947) American sociologist

Ridgeway (2013) Meet the 2013 ASA President: Cecilia Ridgeway http://www.asanet.org/cecilia-ridgeway. 2013

Halldór Laxness photo
Jacques Ellul photo
Murray N. Rothbard photo

“Senior executive teams create mechanisms to govern the management and use of each of these assets both independently and together…. Governance of the key assets occurs via a large number of organizational mechanisms, for example structures, processes, procedures and audits.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Source: IT governance, 2004, p. 7 as cited in: Wim Van Grembergen, Steven De Haes (2009) Enterprise Governance of Information Technology. p. 5

Stephen Crane photo
Leonid Kantorovich photo
Mark Hertling photo
Joseph Kosuth photo
Amir Taheri photo
Vladimir Lenin photo

“The reflection of nature in man’s thought must be understood not lifelessly but in the eternal process of movement, the arising of contradictions and their solution.”

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

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Jane Roberts photo
John C. Wright photo
William Burges photo

“Nothing is more perishable than worn-out apparel, yet, thanks to documentary evidence, to the custom of burying people of high rank in their robes, and to the practice of wrapping up relics of saints in pieces of precious stuffs, we are enabled to form a veiy good idea of what these stuffs were like and where they came from. In the first instance they appear to have come from Byzantium, and from the East generally; but the manufacture afterwards extended to Sicily, and received great impetus at the Norman conquest of that island; Roger I. even transplanting Greek workmen from the towns sacked by his army, and settling them in Sicily. Of course many of the workers would be Mohammedans, and the old patterns, perhaps with the addition of sundry animals, would still continue in use; hence the frequency of Arabic inscriptions in the borders, the Cufic character being one of the most ornamental ever used. In the Hotel de Clu^ny at Paris are preserved the remains of the vestments of a bishop of Bayonne, found when his sepulchre was opened in 1853, the date of the entombment being the twelfth century. Some of these remains are cloth of gold, but the most remarkable is a very deep border ornamented with blue Cufic letters on a gold ground; the letters are fimbriated with white, and from them issue delicate red scrolls, which end in Arabic sort of flowers: this tissue probably is pure Eastern work. On the contrary, the coronation robes of the German emperors, although of an Eastern pattern, bear inscriptions which tell us very clearly where they were manufactured: thus the Cufic characters on the cope inform us that it was made in the city of Palermo in the year 1133, while the tunic has the date of 1181, but then the inscription is in the Latin language. The practice of putting Cufic inscriptions on precious stuffs was not confined to the Eastern and Sicilian manufactures; in process of time other Italian cities took up the art, and, either because it was the fashion, or because they wished to pass off" their own work as Sicilian or Eastern manufacture, imitations of Arabic characters are continually met with, both on the few examples that have come down to us of the stuffs themselves, or on painted statues or sculptured effigies. These are the inscriptions which used to be the despair of antiquaries, who vainly searched out their meaning until it was discovered that they had no meaning at all, and that they were mere ornaments. Sometimes the inscriptions appear to be imitations of the Greek, and sometimes even of the Hebrew. The celebrated ciborium of Limoges work in the Louvre, known as the work of Magister G. Alpais, bears an ornament around its rim which a French antiquary has discovered to be nothing more than the upper part of a Cufic word repeated and made into a decoration.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Quote was introduced with the phrase:
In the lecture on the weaver's art, we are reminded of the superiority of Indian muslins and Chinese and Persian carpets, and the gorgeous costumes of the middle ages are contrasted with our own dark ungraceful garments. The Cufic inscriptions that have so perplexed antiquaries, were introduced with the rich Eastern stuffs so much sought after by the wealthy class, and though, as Mr. Burges observes
Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 85; Cited in: " Belles Lettres http://books.google.com/books?id=0EegAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA143" in: The Westminster Review, Vol. 84-85. Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1865. p. 143

Dawn Richard photo

“Animals don’t have the ability to say how much pain they’re in or tell you not to rip their skin off for your ability to wear something. … Really get into the process of seeing what you’re putting not only inside your body, but outside, too.”

Dawn Richard (1983) American musician

“D△WN Poses Naked in Graphic Anti-Leather Ad,” video interview with PETA (27 September 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RILtC1gVN58.

Kurt Lewin photo
Ba Jin photo
Sania Mirza photo
John Gray photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Mark Kingwell photo

“We don't know what the future will bring, but that's because we are ever in the process of creating it, not because it is an alien force to which we have to submit.”

Mark Kingwell (1963) Canadian philosopher

Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 5, The World We Want, p. 222.

Richard von Mises photo

“In games of chance, in the problems of insurance, and in the molecular processes we find events repeating themselves again and again. They are mass phenomena or repetitive events.”

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

First Lecture, The Definition of Probability, p. 10
Probability, Statistics And Truth - Second Revised English Edition - (1957)

Donald J. Trump photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Henry John Stephen Smith photo

“If we except the great name of Newton (and the exception is one that the great Gauss himself would have been delighted to make) it is probable that no mathematician of any age or country has ever surpassed Gauss in the combination of an abundant fertility of invention with an absolute vigorousness in demonstration, which the ancient Greeks themselves might have envied. It may be admitted, without any disparagement to the eminence of such great mathematicians as Euler and Cauchy that they were so overwhelmed with the exuberant wealth of their own creations, and so fascinated by the interest attaching to the results at which they arrived, that they did not greatly care to expend their time in arranging their ideas in a strictly logical order, or even in establishing by irrefragable proof propositions which they instinctively felt, and could almost see to be true. With Gauss the case was otherwise. It may seem paradoxical, but it is probably nevertheless true that it is precisely the effort after a logical perfection of form which has rendered the writings of Gauss open to the charge of obscurity and unnecessary difficulty. The fact is that there is neither obscurity nor difficulty in his writings, as long as we read them in the submissive spirit in which an intelligent schoolboy is made to read his Euclid. Every assertion that is made is fully proved, and the assertions succeed one another in a perfectly just analogical order… But when we have finished the perusal, we soon begin to feel that our work is but begun, that we are still standing on the threshold of the temple, and that there is a secret which lies behind the veil and is as yet concealed from us. No vestige appears of the process by which the result itself was obtained, perhaps not even a trace of the considerations which suggested the successive steps of the demonstration. Gauss says more than once that for brevity, he gives only the synthesis, and suppresses the analysis of his propositions. Pauca sed matura—few but well matured… If, on the other hand, we turn to a memoir of Euler's, there is a sort of free and luxuriant gracefulness about the whole performance, which tells of the quiet pleasure which Euler must have taken in each step of his work; but we are conscious nevertheless that we are at an immense distance from the severe grandeur of design which is characteristic of all Gauss's greater efforts.”

Henry John Stephen Smith (1826–1883) mathematician

As quoted by Alexander Macfarlane, Lectures on Ten British Physicists of the Nineteenth Century (1916) p. 95, https://books.google.com/books?id=43SBAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA95 "Henry John Stephen Smith (1826-1883) A Lecture delivered March 15, 1902"

Gino Severini photo

“The spiraling shapes, and the beautiful contrasts of yellow and blue, that are intuitively felt one evening while living the movements of a girl dancing may be found again later, through a process of plastic preferences or aversions, or through combination of both, in the concentric circling of an aeroplane or in the onrush of an express train”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

In his manifesto 'The Plastic Analogies of Dynamism', c. 1914; as quoted in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 218

“The process of formulating and structuring a system are important and creative, since they provide and organize the information, which each system. "establishes the number of objectives and the balance between them which will be optimized". Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts. Furthermore, they help identify and define the system parts which make up its "diverse, specialized structures and subfunctions.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70; First sentences of Ch. 3. Formulating and Structuring the System
In this text Harold Chestnut is here citing:
C. West Churchman, Russell L. Ackoff, and E. Leonard Arnoff (1957) Introduction to Operations Research. Wiley. New York, and
J. Morley English (1964) "Understanding the Engineering Design Process." The Journal of Industrial Engineering, Nov-Dec. 1964 Vol 15 (6). p. 291-296

Paul DiMaggio photo
Andrew Ure photo
Samuel P. Huntington photo

“All civilizations go though similar processes of emergence, rise, and decline. The West differs from other civilizations not in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity, expand throughout the world, and become the envy of other societies. In their ensemble these characteristics are peculiar to the West. Europe, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has said, is “the source — the unique source” of the “ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom. . . . These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.” They make Western civilization unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique. The principal responsibility of Western leaders, consequently, is not to attempt to reshape other civilizations in the image of the West, which is beyond their declining power, but to preserve, protect, and renew the unique qualities of Western civilization. Because it is the most powerful Western country, that responsibility falls overwhelmingly on the United States of America.
To preserve Western civilization in the face of declining Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and European countries … to recognize that Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Ch. 12 : The West, Civilizations, and Civilization, § 2 : The West In The World, p. 311

Jalal Talabani photo

“We have developed contacts with five groups of insurgents. We are making these contacts in an attempt to bring them into the political process.”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

Agence France-Presse staff (April 11, 2007) "Iraqi president says in contact with five rebel groups", Agence France-Presse.

Serzh Sargsyan photo

“Turkey is not ready to continue the process that was started and to move forward without preconditions in line with the letter of the Protocols… We consider unacceptable the pointless efforts of making the dialogue between Armenia and Turkey an end in itself; from this moment on, we consider the current phase of normalization exhausted.”

Serzh Sargsyan (1954) Armenian politician, 3rd President of Armenia

Televised Address of the President of the Republic of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan on the Process of Normalization of Relations between Armenia and Turkey http://www.president.am/events/news/eng/?day=22&month=04&year=2010&id=983 (April 22, 2010)

Humberto Maturana photo
Herbert Marcuse photo
William John Macquorn Rankine photo
Garry Kasparov photo
Gustavo Gutiérrez photo
Edward R. Murrow photo
Tony Benn photo
Alastair Reynolds photo
Ward Cunningham photo

“The decisions I made designing wiki were very much inspired by my desire to create a model for the collaborative process I thought should happen in large code bases. I wanted wiki to mimic that.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Collective Ownership of Code and Text

Dexter S. Kimball photo
Rudolf Höss photo
James Braid photo
Clayton M. Christensen photo
Marc Andreessen photo

“The process of planning is very valuable, for forcing you to think hard about what you are doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless”

Marc Andreessen (1971) American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer

Source: "Book Review: TEMPO Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative Driven Decision Making by Venkatesh Rao" http://www.lesc.net/blog/book-review-tempo-timing-tactics-and-strategy-narrative-driven-decision-making-venkatesh-rao

Reinhard Selten photo
Bell Hooks photo

“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist,.”

Bell Hooks (1952) American author, feminist, and social activist

Ain't I a Woman (1981)

“Lysenkoism is held up by bourgeois commentators as the supreme demonstration that conscious ideology cannot inform scientific practice and that "ideology has no place in science." On the other hand, some writers are even now maintaining a Lysenkoist position because they believe that the principles of dialectical materialism contradict the claims of genetics. Both of these claims stem from a vulgarisation of Marxist philosophy through deliberate hostility, in the first case, or ignorance, in the second. Nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao contradicts the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of natural phenomena in the objective world, because what they wrote about nature was at a high level of abstraction. The error of the Lysenkoist claim arises from attempting to apply a dialectical analysis of physical problems from the wrong end. Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and not lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated."”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent."
"The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, in Hilary and Steven Rose (eds.), The Radicalisation of Science, Macmillan, 1976, p. 58.

Nicholas Murray Butler photo

“There is, I venture to think, no ground for the ordinarily accepted statement of the relation of philosophy to theology and religion. It is usually said that while^hilosophy is the creation of an individual mind, theology or religion is, like folk-lore and language, the product of the collective mind of a people or a race. This is to confuse philosophy with philosophies, a conmion and, it must be admitted, a not unnatural confusion. But while a philosophy is the creation of a Plato, an Aristotle, a Spinoza, a Kant, or a Hegel, ^hilosophy itself is, like religion, folk-lore and language, a product of the collective mind of humanity. It is advanced, as these are, by individual additions, interpretations and syntheses, but it is none the less quite istinct from such individual contributions. philosophy is humanity's hold on Totality, and it becomes richer and more helpful as man's intellectual horizon widens, as his intellectual vision grows clearer, and as his insights become more numerous and more sure. Theology is philosophy of a particular type. It is an interpretation of Totality in terms of God and His activities. In the impressive words of Principal Caird, that philosophy which is theology seeks "to bind together objects and events in the links of necessary thought, and to find their last ground and reason in that which comprehends and transcends all— the nature of God Himself." Religion is the apprehension and the adoration of the Grod Whom theology postulates.
If the whole history of philosophy be searched for material with which to instruct the beginner in what philosophy really is and in its relation to theology and religion, the two periods or epochs that stand out above all others as useful for this purpose are Greek thought from Thales to Socrates, and that interpretation of the teachings of Christ by philosophy which gave rise, at the hands of the Church Fathers, to Christian theology. In the first period we see the simple, clear-cut steps by which the mind of Europe was led from explanations that were fairy-tales to a natural, well-analyzed, and increasingly profound interpretation of the observed phenomena of Nature. The process is so orderly and so easily grasped that it is an invaluable introduction to the study of philosophic thinking. In the second period we see philosophy, now enriched by the literally huge contributions of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, intertwining itself about the simple Christian tenets and building the great system of creeds and thought which has immortalized the names of Athanasius and Hilary, Basil and Gregory, Jerome and Augustine, and which has given color and form to the intellectual life of Europe for nearly two thousand years. For the student of today both these developments have great practical value, and the astonishing neglect and ignorance of them both are most discreditable.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

" Philosophy" (a lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series on science, philosophy and art, March 4, 1908) https://archive.org/details/philosophyalect00butlgoog"

Carl Bernstein photo
Anna Sui photo

“We do all the first samples here and all the production in the garment center, within these few blocks… I love the process.”

Anna Sui (1964) American fashion designer

New York Times Interview (November 11, 2010)

Margaret Thatcher photo
Mahinda Rajapaksa photo
Johann Gottlieb Fichte photo
Barry Eichengreen photo
Morris Raphael Cohen photo
Seth Lloyd photo

“Learning is most often considered a process of getting rather than giving. This is most evident in conceptions of student/teacher roles: Teachers give and students get. Yet, in adult learning both giving and getting are critical.”

David A. Kolb (1939) American psychologist

[Kolb, DA, Osland JS, Rubin IM, Organizational Behavior: an experiential approach, 1971, 7, 2001, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, English, 42]

Margaret MacMillan photo
Peter M. Senge photo
Orson Scott Card photo
Nayef Al-Rodhan photo

“There is a physical neurobiological substrate to all human knowledge, including thoughts, memories, perceptions and emotions. To this end, mental states and thought processes are physical.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.109

Roy Spencer photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo
Alan Sugar photo
Victor Frederick Weisskopf photo

“It is possible to apply statistical methods to the calculation of nuclear processes provided that the energies involved are large in comparison with the lowest excitation energies of nuclei.”

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (1908–2002) Austrian-born American theoretical physicist

[V. Weisskopf, Statistics and nuclear reactions, Physical Review, 52, 4, 1937, 295–303, https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.52.295]

Tony Buzan photo
Vanna Bonta photo

“How do we define consciousness, or what has been called the human soul or the spirit, if it can't be quantified as matter or a particle? … it can be quantified or observed just by a process of elimination.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

Kancha Ilaiah photo

“A careful reading of the Gita would show anyone that it fully supports the enslavement of Shudras and OBCs, a process initiated by the Rig Veda itself. Rig Veda formulated the caste structure in Purusha Suktha and the Gita upheld it.”

Kancha Ilaiah (1952) Indian scholar, activist and writer

"The Gita and OBCs" in Deccan Chronicle (20 December 2014) http://www.deccanchronicle.com/141220/commentary-op-ed/article/gita-and-obcs.

J. C. R. Licklider photo

“Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures. The course of the computation may be conditional upon results obtained during the computation, but all the alternatives must be foreseen in advance. … The requirement for preformulation or predetermination is sometimes no great disadvantage. It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. … One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
The other main aim is closely related. It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in its planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.”

Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960

John Marshall photo
Alfred Horsley Hinton photo
Lama Ole Nydahl photo
Neil Gaiman photo
Colin Wilson photo
Lauren Duca photo
Eric R. Kandel photo

“What biological processes enable me to review my own history with such emotional vividness?”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

David Wood photo

“Philosophy in its very act is a process of translation!”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Source: Philosophy At The Limit (1990), Chapter 4, Philosophy As Writing: The Case Of Hegel, p. 81

Antoni Tàpies photo
Alan Rusbridger photo

“It would be difficult to devise a process more inclined to throw up errors than the production of a newspaper.”

Alan Rusbridger (1953) British newspaper editor

Rusbridger (2000) as cited in Jarman, Ruth, ‎McClune, Billy (2007) Developing scientific literacy. p. 35.
2000s

“The basic point-of-view is that science is a social process.”

Jay Lemke (1946) American academic

Source: Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. 1990, p. xi

“The mixture of highly differentiated populations is a recurrent process in our history.”

David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2018, p.10

“Complex human learning is a concept involving communication between the participant in the learning process, who commonly occupy the roles of learner and teacher.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Pask (1976) "Conversational techniques in the study and practice of education", In: British Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol 46, p. 24.