Quotes about productivity (2792 quotes, page 24)

“Luther understands monasticism as a product of an egoistic lovelessness that withdraws from one's duties in the world. By contrast, this-worldly work in a vocation appears to him to be a visible expression of brotherly love, a notion he anchors in a highly unrealistic manner indeed and in contrast—almost grotesquely—to the well-known passages of Adam Smith.”

Max Weber book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; 1920), Ch. 3 : Luther's Conception of the Calling

Love , World , Understanding , Appearance

“The geographical movement of money and commodities as capital is not the same as the movements of products and of precious metals. Capital is, after all, money used in a certain way, and is by no means identical with all money uses.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 12, Production Of Spatial Configurations, p. 376

Money , Way

“Keep in mind that when the first A-bomb was developed as a defense against Nazism, moral objections and conscience of scientists and many others involved were lulled by assurances that everything would be over after production of a few bombs.”

Yevgeniy Chazov (1929) Russian physician

Tragedy and Triumph of Reason (1985)

“Cultured people are merely the glittering scum which floats upon the deep river of production.”

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

Quoted in Randolph Churchill's diary entry (24 August 1929), quoted in Martin Gilbert, The Churchill Documents, Volume 12: The Wilderness Years, 1929–1935 (Michigan: Hillsdale Press, 2012), p. 55
Early career years (1898–1929)

People

“Is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed? You think Russia doesn't run on greed? You think China doesn't run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it's only the other fellow who's greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn't construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn't revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you're talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it's exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

from an interview with Phil Donahue (1979): partial transcript http://www.slobodaiprosperitet.tv/en/node/847 from SiP TV ; or find link to full interview in the External links Section

People , World , Way , History

“Eliminate all forms of monopolistic market power, to include the breakup of large oligopolistic corporations and application of anti-trust laws to labor unions. A Federal incorporation law could be used to limit corporation size and where technology required giant firms for reasons of low cost production the Federal government should own and operate them… Promote economic stability by reform of the monetary system and establishment of stable rules for monetary policy… Reform the tax system and promote equity through income tax… Abolish all tariffs… Limit waste by restricting advertising and other wasteful merchandising practices.”

Henry Calvert Simons (1899–1946) American economist

A Positive Program for Laissez Faire, (1934)

Law

“If I'm not at my desk by 4 AM, I feel like I'm missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hour glass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do pushups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood (and ideas) flowing.”

Dan Brown (1964) American author

Author FAQ at Brown's official site http://www.danbrown.com/meet_dan/faq.html

Feeling , Idea , Help

“The emergence of new media (and therefore artistic) formats is certainly interesting. But etching information into copper plates is just as exciting. We think that the perpetual return of 'the new', to cite Walter Benjamin, is nothing to write home about - except perhaps for the slave-drivers in the fashion industry. We've never been interested in the new just in itself, but in the accidental occurrence. In the moment where things don't tally, where productive confusion arises. That's why in the final analysis, although we've laughed a lot with Stewart Home, we even reject the meta-criticism of innovation-fixation articulated in 'neoism.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

The new sorts itself out when it lands in the museum. Finito.
Interview on Furtherfield http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/interview-johannes-grenzfurthner-monochrom-part-3

Home , Fashion , Thinking

“We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream.”

Steve Jobs (1955–2011) American entrepreneur and co-founder of Apple Inc.

Interview about the release of the Macintosh (24 January 1984) - (online video) http://pulsar.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/graphics/movies/sj84.mov
1980s

Dreams

“It had become clear that the itemized changes experimentally imposed, although they could perhaps be used to account for minor differences between one period and another, yet could not be used to explain the major change - the continually increasing production. This steady increase as represented by all the contemporary records seemed to ignore the experimental changes in its upward development.”

Elton Mayo (1880–1949) Australian academic

Source: The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilisation, (1933), p. 65, chapter 3: The Hawthorne experiment Western Electric Company

Change

“Employees cannot become more productive in every sense of the word unless they are provided with continuous on-the-job training.”

Gregory Balestrero (1947) American industrial engineer

NACE International (1990). Materials Performance. p. 104.
1990s

Sense , Training

“We shall here define the market as a set of social institutions in which a large number of commodity exchanges of a specific type regularly take place, and to some extent are facilitated and structured by those institutions. Exchange as defined above, involves contractual agreement and the exchange of property rights, and the market consists in part of mechanisms to structure, organize and legitimate these activities. Markets, in short, are organized and institutionalized exchange. Stress is placed on those market institutions, which help to both regulate and establish a consensus over prices and, more generally, to communicate information regarding products, prices, quantities, potential buyers and potential sellers.”

Geoffrey Hodgson (1946) British economist

Source: Economics and Institutions, 1988, p. 174

Communication , Help , Parting

“The history of man is a compendium of such evil. We are an evolutionary product, descendants of predators. A few synthetic foods aside, every morsel eaten by man is taken from another living thing. We are intended for murder; we kill to exist!”

Jack Vance book To Live Forever

Source: To Live Forever (1956), Chapter XII, section 4

Food , History , Evil

“There was a plea from honourable Members relating to the need for formal Gross National Product figures. Such figures are very inexact even in the most sophisticated countries I think they do not have a great deal of meaning, even as a basis of comparison between economies. That other countries make use of them is not, I think, necessarily a good reason to suppose that we need them. But, although I am not entirely clear what practical purpose they would serve in Hong Kong, I am sure they would be of interest. I suspect myself, however, that the need arises in other countries because high taxation and more or less detailed Government intervention in the economy have made it essential to be able to judge (or to hope to be able to judge) the effect of policies, and of changes in policies, on the economy. One of the honourable Members who spoke on this subject, said outright, as a confirmed planner, that he thought that they were desirable for the planning of our future economic policy. But we are in the happy position, happier at least for the Financial Secretary where the leverage exercised by Government on the economy is so small that it is not necessary, nor even of any particular value, to have these figures available for the formulation of policy. We might indeed be right to be apprehensive lest the availability of such figures might lead, by a reversal of cause and effect, to policies designed to have a direct effect on the economy. I would myself deplore this.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

March 25, 1970, page 495.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

Hope , Exercises , Thinking , Change

“As a rabbi I am often called upon to determine the kashrut of various food products and institutions. I am appalled by the number of chemicals that are added to our food, and long for the days when one did not need a degree in chemistry in order to understand what one was eating. From my perspective, I'm tempted to brand all food additives as treif, and hail as glatt kosher only those fruits and vegetables that are organically grown.”

Bonnie Koppell American rabbi

Source: Vegetarianism, p. 38

Food , Understanding

“North American banks and capitalists soon controlled the commercial exploitation of sugar and, furthermore, a good share of the industrial output of the land. In this way, a monopolistic control was established by U. S. interests in all aspects of a sugar production, which soon became the predominant factor in our foreign trade due to the rapidly developing monoproductive characteristics of the country.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

The Cuban Economy (1964)

Way , Country

“The circular-flow diagram offers a simple way of organizing the economic transactions that occur between households and firms in the economy. The two loops of the circular-flow diagram are distinct but related. The inner loop represents the flows of inputs and outputs. The households sell the use of their labor, land, and capital to the firms in the markets for the factors of production. The firms then use these factors to produce goods and services, which in turn are sold to households in the markets for goods…”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

N. Gregory Mankiw, Brief Principles of Macroeconomics. 2011, p. 24-25
2000s -

Way

“Well, the truth is, we can only make our pictures speak. But yet, my dear brother, there is this that I have always told you, and I repeat it once more, with all earnestness.... that I shall always consider that you are something other than a simple [art-]dealer in Corot, that through my mediation you have a part in the actual production of some canvases, which even in the deluge will retain their place.
Well, my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half-foundered in it - that is all right - but you are not among the dealers in men so far as I know, and you can still choose your side, I think, acting with humanity, but what's the use?”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

In a letter from Auvers, Summer of 1890, to Theo (found on him on 29 July, after Vincent had shot himself); as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 652 ) p. 7
1890s

Life , Men , Truth , Art

“It is no more than fair that England, now that she has attained the culminating point of her industrial growth and progress, should restore again to the nations of Continental Europe a portion of those productive forces which she originally derived from them.”

Friedrich List (1789–1846) German economist with dual American citizenship

Source: The National System of Political Economy (1841), p. 56

“In the recent past, wolves were labeled a flagship species or an umbrella, indicator, or keystone species, depending on what conservation market one was trying to penetrate… A flagship species is an attraction to nearly all society's strata, but wolves are not welcomed by all factions of society. With a few rare exceptions, the rural world opposes wolves, so the animal's flagship role is restricted primarily to urbanites or to local areas. Wolves are certainly a powerful flagship species for the conservation movement, particularly that of affluent societies with strong lobbies in large cities, but a true flagship species should be able to move an entire society toward a goal.
Neither are wolves a good umbrella species (i. e., a species, usually high in the ecological pyramid, whose conservation necessarily fosters that of the rest of the chain) in that they can live well on a variety of food resources and in areas with an impoverished prey base. Wolves are not a keystone species either, in that they are not essential for the presence of many other species (e. g., herbivores flourish in areas devoid of wolves). And wolves are not necessarily indicators of good habitat quality or integrity because they are too generalist to be good indicators of the presence of a pristine trophic chain.
The above labels have been very useful in many circumstance and have contributed significantly to wolf recovery. They may still be useful in the future, but we should be aware that they are shortcuts to "sell a product" rather than good scientific grounds on which to build conservation.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

World , Food , Strong , Wolf

“If valuation in the financial markets provides the bottom line for the performance of the company, it is labor that remains the source of productivity, innovation, and competitiveness.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, p. 90

“It has been long understood that “consumer sovereignty” is a myth. To make fundamental changes in the commodity economy it is necessary to have power over production.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice, 2017

Change

“The writer, who as an engineer has spent most of his life in factories, is inclined to look at the basis for investment from a technological point of view… Consider … the class of industrial investments only… The situation is one of entrepreneurs and boards of directors considering, from time to time, various ’possibilities of investment’, such as extra lathes or looms, an extension to a factory, a venture in some completely new product, and so on. It is helpful to think of these ’opportunities for investment’ as existing, in a given situation, in great number and variety, whether they are at that moment under active consideration or not. When any such possibility is considered it is assessed in respect of ’expected profitability’. One may conveniently think of all possibilities of investment as ’quanta’ that can be placed in a schedule of small ranges of expected profitability according to these assessments. The placement of a given ’opportunity for investment’ on this schedule has some ’margin of uncertainty”

Arnold Tustin (1899–1994) British engineer

a curious analogy with the case of the quanta of physics
Source: The Mechanism of Economic Systems (1953), p. 103; As cited in: Prices Revalued as Information: Circuit Elements, online document 2013

Life , Thinking , Time , Help

“History warns us, however, that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions; and, as matters now stand, it is hardly rash to anticipate that, in another twenty years, the new generation, educated under the influences of the present day, will be in danger of accepting the main doctrines of the 'Origin of Species' with as little reflection, and it may be with as little justification, as so many of our contemporaries, twenty years ago, rejected them. Against any such a consummation let us all devoutly pray; for the scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

"The Coming of Age of The Origin of Species" (1880) http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/CaOS.html; Collected Essays, vol. 2
1880s

Fate , Truth , Education , Error

“Research reveal that managers achieving better performance (i. e., greater productivity, higher earnings, lower costs, etc. ) differ in leadership principles and practices from those achieving poorer performance.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: New patterns of management, (1961), p. 3

““Nature has its own logic, or so brother Peter tells us.”
“The logic of chance—amoral and sometimes inaccurate.”
“Well, Foutlif, we Earthmen are products of the ‘natural’ process; consequently, you shouldn’t be surprised to find us both of those things at times—amoral and inaccurate.””

Michael Bishop (1945) American writer

Source: A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (1975), Chapter 4, “Enlightenment: Down on the Edgegleam Plains” (p. 83)

Nature , Chance , Time

“The self is not so much linked to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the same thing as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the self aged fifty is the continuation of the self aged forty.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Source: My View of the World (1951), p. 28

Age , Sense

“In America, despite the amazing rise in productivity we’ve had in the last 30 years, real wages have actually gone down. All of the increase in productivity has been taken by the finance, insurance, and real estate sector, called the FIRE sector, almost all of it by the financial sector. … So instead of having industrial capitalism a century ago, we have a finance capitalism that actually is stifling industrial capitalism here. So what Alan Greenspan and others call the postindustrial economy is really neo-feudalism. It’s a financialized economy where all of the surplus goes to the banks.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Deficit Hawks One Two Punch http://michael-hudson.com/2010/12/deficit-hawks-one-two-punch/ (December 16, 2010)
Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

“My belief in how plant-based nutrition could boost athletic performance while also reducing the strain on the environment was, at the time, considered fringe at best. … Ten years later, it's now common for people to speak of their “plant-based diet.” Even “vegan” is a familiar word, seen on the most conventional restaurants' menus. The importance of avoiding animal products in our diet, whether for heath, physical and mental performance, environmental, ethical, or a combination of these reasons, is now well understood and widely accepted.”

Brendan Brazier (1975) Canadian triathlete, publisher, writer, editor

Preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition
The Thrive Diet

People , Time , Animals

“.. as I met with Mr. (Dunning there. There is something exclusive of the clear and deep understanding of that gentleman most exceedingly pleasing to me. He seems the only man who talks as Giardini plays, if you know what I mean; he puts no more motion than what goes to the real performance, which constitutes that ease and gentility peculiar to damned clever fellows... He is an amazing compact man in every respect.... and besides this neatness in outward appearance, his storeroom seems cleared of all French ornaments and gingerbread work, everything is simplicity and elegance and in its proper place, no disorder or confusion in the furniture.... Sober sense and great acuteness are marked very strong in his face.... but there is genius (in our sense of the word). (It) shines in all he says. In short, Mr. Jackson of Exeter [his friend], I begin to think there is something in the air of Devonshire that grows clever fellows. I could name four or five of you, superior to the product of any other county in England.”

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English portrait and landscape painter

Quote from Gainsborough's letter to his friend William Jackson of Exeter, from Bath, 2 Sept. 1768; as cited in Thomas Gainsborough, by William T, Whitley https://ia800204.us.archive.org/6/items/thomasgainsborou00whitrich/thomasgainsborou00whitrich.pdf; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons – London, Smith, Elder & Co, Sept. 1915, p. 384 (Appendix A - Letter VII)
1755 - 1769

Understanding , Thinking , Sense , Strong

“Television tells us everyday that we live in a world we don't understand. And yet in the main it does little to explain that world. It tells us of new products that make the products we have either old-fashioned or obsolete. Above all, if today we are aware of how fast the world around us is changing, it's because television acts as a relentless reminder of that fact.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 9 - Countdown

World , Fashion , Understanding , Change

“All the plagues and evils of “the European mind” are products of the fallen man and the relics of barbarian cultures, not of Christ and His word. All that is good in “the European mind” is a result of Christian culture, not of race.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Writings, The New Racism (1980)

Evil , Christ

“A market is a group of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service. The buyers as a group determine the demand for the product, and the sellers as a group determine the supply of the product. Markets take many forms. Some markets are highly organized, such as the markets for many agricultural commodities. In these markets, buyers and sellers meet at a specific time and place, where an auctioneer helps set prices and arrange sales. More often, markets are less organized.”

N. Gregory Mankiw (1958) American economist

Source: Principles of Economics (1998-), Ch. 4. The Market Forces of Supply and Demand; p. 66

Time , Help

“We're not a competitive nation with other nations anymore. We have to make ourselves competitive. We're not competitive for a lot of reasons. That's becoming more and more of the reason. Because a lot of these countries that we do business with, they make deals with our president, or whoever, and then they don't adhere to the deals, you know that. And it's much less expensive for their companies to produce products. So I'm going to be studying that very hard, and I think I have a very big voice in it. And I think my voice is listened to, especially by people that don't believe in it. And we'll let you know.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, November, New York Times Interview (November 23, 2016)

People , Business , Thinking , Study

“As technology grows in power, its ability either to disrupt or to heal increases. We can destroy the planet more easily than we can heal the harm we have done so far. To heal, we have to move to new technologies, new social patterns, new types of consumer products, new ways of generating and spending wealth. Such changes will inevitably occur, whether they are brought by healing forethought or mindless destruction. The future will not be a repetition of the past.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

James Martin (1978) The wired society. p. 3

Way , Change , Past , Future

“I began to feel that it was time for me to retire at the end of production on GODZILLA VS. SPACE GODZILLA. I noticed that I was beginning to lack the three powers needed to play Godzilla. My physical power was diminishing because of my age, and my spiritual and performance powers were diminishing because of budgetary constraints and interpersonal problems. It was difficult for me to approach my work with enthusiasm and energy. It didn't matter how much kendo I did.”

Kenpachiro Satsuma (1947) Japanese actor

As quoted by David Milner, "Kenpachiro Satsuma Interview III" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/satsum3.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1995)

Age , Feeling , Problem , Time

“The tension between making it better and getting it done appears wherever people have work to finish or a product to get out: a computer, a dinner, a term paper, an automobile, a book. We want to get it done and out to the people who will use it, eat it, read it. But no object ever fully embodies its maker's conception of what it could have been. Human frailty, your own and that of others, makes flaws and mistakes inevitable.”

Howard S. Becker (1928) American sociologist

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 122.

People , Books , Appearance , Reading

“Let us not expect Russia to do what she is incapable of, to restrict herself within certain limits, to concentrate her attention upon one point, or bring her conception of life down to one doctrine. Her literary productions must reflect the moral chaos which she is passing through.”

Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé (1848–1910) French diplomat, orientalist, travel writer, archaeologist, philanthropist and literary critic

Russian Novelists (1887), page 214 (translated by Jane Loring Edmands)

Life

“If all money capital invests in appropriation and none in actual production, than capitalism is not long for this world.”

David Harvey (1935) British anthropologist

Source: The Limits To Capital (2006 VERSO Edition), Chapter 9, Money, Credit And Finance, p. 269

Money , World

“The preceding analysis shows that a manager who has high performance goals and excellent job organization but who relies solely on economic needs and direct pressure to motivate his men is very likely to be to be disappointed by their achievements. The noneconomic motives must be used fully, along with the economic needs, to create high performance goals and establish the level of motivational forces which yield high productivity. Since the principle of supportive relationships and group methods of supervision enable a manager to make effective use of the noneconomic motives, some valuable insights can be obtained by examining how these managerial principles appear to affect the motivations, satisfactions, and behavior of the members of an enterprise. A substantial body of research findings demonstrates that the greater the loyalty of the members of a group toward the group, the greater is the motivation among the members to achieve the goals of the group, and the greater is the probability that the group will achieve its goals.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: The Human Organization, 1967, p. 64: About "Building Peer-group Loyalty"

Men , Disappointment , Behavior , Motivation

“It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

"Will, Freedom”
Elements of Physiology (1875)

“Although dialogue, by itself, will not be sufficient to address these issues – because concrete action is needed – initiating a broad, frank, and inclusive conversation is a necessary and productive first step. In all of the Civil Rights Division’s activities in Ferguson – as in every pattern-or-practice investigation the Division has launched over the last six years – our aim is to help facilitate and inform this conversation; to make certain it leads to concrete action; and to ensure that law enforcement officers in every part of the United States live up to the same high standards of professionalism. It is clear from our work throughout the country—particularly the work of our Civil Rights Division—that the prospect of police accountability and criminal justice reform is an achievable goal; one that we can reach with law enforcement and community members at the table as full partners.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Justice , Law , Communication , Help

“If a product has an advertisement, it means you don't need it. No-one ever has to say 'go to sleep', 'breathe', 'love people.”

Russell Brand (1975) British comedian, actor, and author

Messiah Complex (2013)

Love , People , Sleep

“When a movie is this bad, it's hard to adequately describe its awfulness in words. The temptation exists to write something along the lines of: "Something this horrible has to be seen to be believed." Of course, that kind of advice would lead to e-mail death threats and other assorted nasty comments from those who spend money on The Devil's Rejects. … Aside from its poor production values, horrendous acting, and ignoble morality, The Devil's Rejects isn't engaging cinema. Even if the simple act of sitting in a movie theater watching people get hacked up for 90 minutes doesn't bother you, the dullness and repetition is likely to.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=934 of The Devil's Rejects (2005).
Half-star reviews

Death , Money , People

“The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases, invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that in him which delights in calling up new forms — which is the nearest, perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in either case, Law has been diligently at work.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Love , Truth , World , Law

“…a medium best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has its product pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and has its dramatic teeth yanked out one by one.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

"About Writing for Television", his foreword to a collection of teleplays ("Patterns").
Other

Time , Painting

“You probably know that this week Britain has been terrorized by an underclass of welfare-dependent, drug-addled criminal scum who have been allowed to run riot in the streets because the police haven't been allowed to do their job and protect the public. The media is full of speculation about why it happened and what is the root cause. Well, that's easy. The root cause is stupidity. A complete lack of imagination. A stunted, feral view of the world that amounts to self-inflicted moral and mental disablement. And it's the direct product of an entitlement culture that rewards idleness, encourages victimhood, and compensates criminals.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Britain is a riot" (11 August 2011) http://youtube.com/watch?v=9pAC0YSmK0g
2011

Stupidity , World , Imagination , Dependency

“If from the wilderness the righteous and honest John were actually to come who, clothed in skins and living on locusts and untouched by all the terrible mischief, were meanwhile to apply himself with a pure heart and in all seriousness to the investigation of truth and to offer the fruits thereof, what kind of reception would he have to expect from those businessmen of the chair, who are hired for State purposes and with wife and family have to live on philosophy, and whose watchword is, therefore, Primum vivere, deinde philosophari [first live and then philosophize]? These men have accordingly taken possession of the market and have already seen to it that here nothing is of value except what they allow; consequently merit exists only in so far as they and their mediocrity are pleased to acknowledge it. They thus have on a leading rein the attention of that small public, such as it is, that is concerned with philosophy. For on matters that do not promise, like the productions of poetry, amusement and entertainment but only instruction, and financially unprofitable instruction at that, that public will certainly not waste its time, effort, and energy, without first being thoroughly assured that such efforts will be richly rewarded. Now by virtue of its inherited belief that whoever lives by a business knows all about it, this public expects an assurance from the professional men who from professor’s chairs and in compendiums, journals, and literary periodicals, confidently behave as if they were the real masters of the subject. Accordingly, the public allows them to sample and select whatever is worth noting and what can be ignored. My poor John from the wilderness, how will you fare if, as is to be expected, what you bring is not drafted in accordance with the tacit convention of the gentlemen of the lucrative philosophy? They will regard you as one who has not entered in the spirit of the game and thus threatens to spoil the fun for all of them; consequently, they will regard you as their common enemy and antagonist. Now even if what you bring were the greatest masterpiece of the human mind, it could never find favor in their eyes. For it would not be drawn up ad normam conventionis [according to the current pattern]; and so it would not be such as to enable them to make it the subject of their lectures from the chair in order to make a living from it. It never occurs to a professor of philosophy to examine a new system that appears to see whether it is true; but he at once tests it merely to see whether it can be brought into harmony with the doctrines of the established religion, with government plans, and with the prevailing views of the times.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, pp. 160-161, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, pp. 148-149
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Men , Truth , Family , Religion

“Today, I would like to provide the American people with an update on the White House transition and our policy plans for the first 100 days. Our transition team is working very smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. Truly great and talented men and women, patriots indeed are being brought in and many will soon be a part of our government, helping us to Make America Great Again. My agenda will be based on a simple core principle: putting America First. Whether it's producing steel, building cars, or curing disease, I want the next generation of production and innovation to happen right here, in our great homeland: America – creating wealth and jobs for American workers. As part of this plan, I've asked my transition team to develop a list of executive actions we can take on day one to restore our laws and bring back our jobs. It's about time. These include the following: On trade, I am going to issue our notification of intent to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a potential disaster for our country. Instead, we will negotiate fair, bilateral trade deals that bring jobs and industry back onto American shores. On energy, I will cancel job-killing restrictions on the production of American energy – including shale energy and clean coal – creating many millions of high-paying jobs. That's what we want, that's what we've been waiting for. On regulation, I will formulate a rule which says that for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated, it's so important. On national security, I will ask the Department of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America's vital infrastructure from cyber-attacks, and all other form of attacks. On immigration, I will direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker. On ethics reform, as part of our plan to Drain the Swamp, we will impose a five-year ban on executive officials becoming lobbyists after they leave the Administration – and a lifetime ban on executive officials lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. These are just a few of the steps we will take to reform Washington and rebuild our middle class. I will provide more updates in the coming days, as we work together to Make America Great Again for everyone.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

A Message from President-Elect Donald J. Trump https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xX_KaStFT8 (21 November 2016)
2010s, 2016, November

Women , Men , People , Disease

“Liberals disagree about the scope, nature, and weight of the liberties they consider basic. High liberals have a thin conception of economic liberty. They think that freedom of occupation and freedom to own personal property are among the basic liberties. In contrast, classical liberals, libertarians, and neoclassical liberals think that the basic liberties also include strong rights to freedom of contract, freedom to own and use productive property, freedom to buy and sell on voluntary terms, and so on. They regard these rights as on par with civil liberties, while high liberals regard them as lesser rights, or in some cases, not rights at all. High liberals tend to interpret the civil liberties broadly. They assume that the civil liberties have a wide scope and are quite weighty. Neoclassical liberals hold that economic liberties have the same weight and wide scope as the civil liberties.”

Jason Brennan (1979) philosopher

High liberals will want to ask: Why?
Neoclassical Liberalism: How I’m Not a Libertarian (2011)

Nature , Thinking , Freedom , Strong

“I had trouble at first, in the early 1900s, in selling Mr. Leland our roller bearings. He then taught me the need for greater accuracy in our products to meet the exacting standards of interchangeable parts. Mr. Leland came to the industry with a mature experience in general engineering and in gasoline engines, which he had long made for boats. One of his specialties was precision metalwork, which went back to his experience in toolmaking for a federal arsenal during the Civil War, and which he afterward developed in the Brown and Sharpe Company, machine-tool makers of Providence, Rhode Island. It has been called to my attention It has been called to my attention that Eli Whitney, long before, had started the development of interchangeable parts, a fact which suggests a line of descent from Whitney to Leland to the automobile industry.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 20 (in 1964 edition)

War , Parting

“In this world, as in our own, nearly all the chief means of production, nearly all the land, mines, factories, railways, ships, were controlled for private profit by a small minority of the population. These privileged individuals were able to force the masses to work for them on pain of starvation. The tragic farce inherent in such a system was already approaching. The owners directed the energy of the workers increasingly toward the production of more means of production rather than to the fulfilment of the needs of individual life. For machinery might bring profit to the owners; bread would not. With the increasing competition of machine with machine, profits declined, and therefore wages, and therefore effective demand for goods. Marketless products were destroyed, though bellies were unfed and backs unclad. Unemployment, disorder, and stern repression increased as the economic system disintegrated. A familiar story!”

Olaf Stapledon book Star Maker

Source: Star Maker (1937), Chapter III: The Other Earth; 2. A Busy World (pp. 30-31)

Life , Pain , World

“The better production of our generation has been mainly lyrical and it has been widely diffused.”

J. C. Squire (1884–1958) British poet, writer, historian, and literary editor

Selections from Modern Poets, Complete Edition (1927), p. vi.

“[The] enormous appetite for animal products has forced the conversion (at a very poor rate) of more and more grain, soybean and even fish meal into feed for cattle, hogs and poultry, thus decreasing the amounts of food directly available for direct consumption by the poor.”

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

"By Bread Alone", The New York Times Book Review (15 December 1974); quoted in The Diet Delusion by Gary Taubes (Random House, 2008), p. 42 https://books.google.it/books?id=GIdodweSSE4C&pg=PA42.

Food , Fish , Animals

“There are as many Scottish roads to Socialism as there are predictions of Britain's economic doom - but most of them demand three things: a coherent plan for an extension of democracy and control in society and industry which sees every reform as a means to creating a socialist society; a harnessing of the forces for industrial and community self-management within a political movement; and a massive programme of education by the Labour Movement as a whole.

Gramsci's relevance to Scotland today is in his emphasis that in a society which is both mature and complex, where the total social and economic processes are geared to maintaining the production of goods and services (and the reproduction of the conditions of production), then the transition to socialism must be made by the majority of the people themselves and a socialist society must be created within the womb of existing society and prefigured in the movements for democracy at the grass roots. Socialists must neither place their faith in an Armageddon or of capitalist collapse nor in nationalisation alone. For the Jacobin notion of a vanguard making revolution on behalf of working people relates to a backward society (and prefigures an authoritarian and bureaucratic state), then the complexity of modern society requires a far reaching movement of people and existing conditions and as a co-ordinator for the assertion of social priorities by people at a community level and control by producers at an industrial level. In such a way political power will become a synthesis of – not a substitute for – community and industrial life.

This requires from the Labour Movement in Scotland today a postive commitment to creating a socialist society, a coherant strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism and a programme of immediate aims which leads out of one social order into another. Such a social reorganisation - a phased extension of public control under workers' sustained and enlarged, would in EP Thompson's words lead to "a crisis not of despair and disintegration but a crisis in which the necessity for a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic became daily more evident."”

Gordon Brown (1951) British Labour Party politician

Introduction to "The Red Paper On Scotland", 1975.

Life , People , Education , Peace

“Relational processing entails treating whole relationships as operands. Its primary purpose is loop-avoidance, an absolute requirement for end users to be productive at all, and a clear productivity booster for application programmers.”

E. F. Codd (1923–2003) computer scientist

Relational Database: A Practical Foundation for Productivity (1982)

“Let us summarize these three points more concisely:
(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.
(b) 'Objective' work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.
(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.
Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation — a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel.”

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

Quotes from: 'Ideological Superstructure'
1926 - 1941, Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion' (1929)

Hope , Art

“Technological systems are socially produced. Social production is culturally informed. The Internet is no exception.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Internet Galaxy - Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (2001), Chapter 2, The Culture of the Internet, p. 36

“On symbolic use of equalities and proportions. Chapter II.
The analytical method accepts as proven the most famous [ as known from Euclid ] symbolic use of equalities and proportions that are found in items such as:
1. The whole is equal to the sum of its parts.
2. Quantities being equal to the same quantity have equality between themselves. [a = c & b = c => a = b]
3. If equal quantities are added to equal quantities the resulting sums are equal.
4. If equals are subtracted from equal quantities the remains are equal.
5. If equal equal amounts are multiplied by equal amounts the products are equal.
6. If equal amounts are divided by equal amounts, the quotients are equal.
7. If the quantities are in direct proportion so also are they are in inverse and alternate proportion. [a:b::c:d=>b:a::d:c & a:c::b:d]
8. If the quantities in the same proportion are added likewise to amounts in the same proportion, the sums are in proportion. [a:b::c:d => (a+c):(b+d)::c:d]
9. If the quantities in the same proportion are subtracted likewise from amounts in the same proportion, the differences are in proportion. [a:b::c:d => (a-c):(b-d)::c:d]
10. If proportional quantities are multiplied by proportional quantities the products are in proportion. [a:b::c:d & e:f::g:h => ae:bf::cg:dh]
11. If proportional quantities are divided by proportional quantities the quotients are in proportion. [a:b::c:d & e:f::g:h => a/e:b/f::c/g:d/h]
12. A common multiplier or divisor does not change an equality nor a proportion. [a:b::ka:kb & a:b::(a/k):(b/k)]
13. The product of different parts of the same number is equal to the product of the sum of these parts by the same number. [ka + kb = k(a+b)]
14. The result of successive multiplications or divisions of a magnitude by several others is the same regardless of the sequential order of quantities multiplied times or divided into that magnitude.
But the masterful symbolic use of equalities and proportions which the analyst may apply any time is the following:
15. If we have three or four magnitudes and the product of the extremes is equal to the product means, they are in proportion. [ad=bc => a:b::c:d OR ac=b2 => a:b::b:c]
And conversely
10. If we have three or four magnitudes and the first is to the second as the second or the third is to the last, the product of the extremes is equal to that of means. [a:b::c:d => ad=bc OR a:b::b:c => ac=b2]
We can call a proportion the establishment of an equality [equation] and an equality [equation] the resolution of a proportion.”

François Viète (1540–1603) French mathematician

From Frédéric Louis Ritter's French Tr. Introduction à l'art Analytique (1868) utilizing Google translate with reference to English translation in Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1968) Appendix
In artem analyticem Isagoge (1591)

Change , Time , Success , Parting

“The main key to the economics of the postwar world is a simple truism — that the rate of accumulation is equal to the rate of production less the rate of consumption. This is the "Bathtub Theorem." Production may be likened to the flow of water from the faucet, consumption to the flow down the drain. The difference between these two flows is the rate at which the water in the bathtub - the total stockpile of all goods - is accumulating.
War drains the economic bathtub in a great waste of consumption. The first problem of reconstruction is to rebuild the stockpile. It can be rebuilt only by widening the gap between production and consumption, or, in the case of a single country, by importing more than is exported. It is difficult for a ravaged country to increase either its production or its net imports. Unless it can obtain outside help, therefore, it must suffer a drastic restriction of consumption. Frequently the only way consumption can be restricted is by inflation. Here, therefore, is the key to the most fundamental problems of reconstruction.”

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

Preface
1940s, The Economics of Peace, 1945

War , World , Way , Problem

“The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.”

Vernor Vinge (1944) American mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction writer

The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)

“The continent of Europe, a continent separated from us indeed by a narrow strip of ocean, but joined to us by a hundred links of commerce and of humanity, indissolubly bound up with our fate, whether we like it or not. … until you have stability you can have no confidence, and until you have confidence you can never get that increased productive power which is one of the absolute necessities for the bettering of our own trade in England…It is that cursed and diabolic suspicion between man and man and nation and nation that robs Europe of that sense of security that is essential to the unity of spirit which we must have before the world can function aright.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Birmingham (5 March 1925), quoted in On England, and Other Addresses (1926), pp 25-27.
1925

Fate , World , Confidence , Sense

“Alas, producers of commercial dinosaur products continue to churn out low quality product that is either obsolete or improperly derivative. Dino documentaries and books have become so plentiful that they are no longer special and I do not try to keep up with them. There are also serious problems with quality and accuracy which often fail to meet the expectations of scientists. More about those problems here. I about kicked in the TV screen when one dino doc claimed that the brain of Tyrannosaurus was as large as that of a gorilla when its IQ was not all that much better than a croc’s. And why are the theropods shown pausing to challenge their prey before they charge, when the actual focus of predators is to hit and overwhelm the victim before it knows what is happening? The low standards are not surprising considering how the media and press frequently carry product that promotes belief in the paranormal. But these are quibbles. Dinosaur science has almost completely transformed over the half century that my neural network has been aware of it. The old stand-bys from Allosaurus to the always strange Stegosaurus are still fascinating, but we now know about armored sauropods, fat-bellied therizinosaurs and multi-winged, near avian, sickle claws. The reptile model is out and the avian-mammalian is dominant.”

Gregory Scott Paul (1954) U.S. researcher, author, paleontologist, and illustrator

Autobiography, part V http://gspauldino.com/part5.html, gspauldino.com

Books , Problem , Science

“There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 12

Life , Art

“It is usually assumed that, in speaking, in the 1844 Manuscripts, of man’s “being reduced to the level of the animals,” and of man’s alienation from his “species-being” under the conditions of capitalist production, Marx is thinking in terms of an abstract conception of “man” as being alienated from his biological characteristics as a species. So, it is presumed, at this initial stage in the evolution of his thought, Marx believed that man is essentially a creative being whose “natural” propensities are denied by the restrictive character of capitalism. Actually, Marx holds, on the contrary, that the enormous productive power of capitalism generates possibilities for the future development of man which could not have been possible under prior forms of productive system. The organization of social relationships within which capitalist production is carried on in fact leads to the failure to realize these historically generated possibilities. The character of alienated labor does not express a tension between “man in nature” (non-alienated) and “man in society” (alienated), but between the potential generated by a specific form of society—capitalism—and the frustrated realization of that potential. What separates man from the animals is not the mere existence of biological differences between mankind and other species, but the cultural achievements of men, which are the outcome of a very long process of social development.”

Anthony Giddens (1938) British sociologist

Source: Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), pp. 15-16.

Men , Failure , Nature , Thinking

“The ownership and the consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production—labour and capital—as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort.”

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

Buddhist Economics

Optimism , Effort , Study

“One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly.
At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. These men were not necessarily misogynists. This was an unsettling time, when the social order was threatened by wars, fierce economic competition, racial and industrial conflict, and the failure of society to ameliorate poverty, vice, crime, illnesses. Just when men needed the psychic lift an adoring dependent woman could give, she was demanding the vote, higher education, and the opportunity to become a wage earner!”

Cynthia Eagle Russett (1937–2013) American historian

Cynthia Eagle Russett. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood. Harvard University Press, 2009. Abstract

Women , Men , War , Books

“Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

Propositions, 2
1870 - 1903, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies' (1890)

Art

“The prestige of the Nobel Prize is due to many causes, but in particular to its twofold idealistic and international character: idealistic in that it has been designed for works of lofty inspiration; international in that it is awarded after the production of different countries has been minutely studied and the intellectual balance sheet of the whole world has been drawn up. Free from all other considerations and ignoring any but intellectual values, the judges have deliberately taken their place in what the philosophers have called a community of the mind.”

Henri Bergson (1859–1941) French philosopher

In a letter accepting the 1927 Nobel Prize in literature http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1927/bergson-speech.html, read by the French minister, Armand Bernard.

World , Communication , Study , Country

“In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Shape of The Book, p. 135.
A History of Reading (1996)

Books , Fashion

“No person can have been in Norfolk without quickly perceiving, that in this branch of rural economy the county has very little to boast. No where are meadows and pastures worse managed: in all parts of the county we see them over-run with all sorts of spontaneous rubbish, bushes, briars, rushes: the water stagnant: ant-hills numerous: in a word, left in a state of nature, by men who willingly make all sorts of exertions to render their arable land clean, rich and productive.”

Arthur Young (1741–1820) English writer

Arthur Young (1804/1813), General View of the Agriculture of the County of Norfolk http://books.google.com/books?id=4VVAAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA370, p. 370; cited in: Naomi Riches (1967), The Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk. p. 91

Men , Nature , Water , Parting

“Viewers have a way of remembering the celebrity while forgetting the product. I did not know this when I paid Eleanor Roosevelt $35,000 to make a commercial for margarine. She reported that her mail was equally divided. "One half was sad because I had damaged my reputation. The other half was happy because I had damaged my reputation."”

David Ogilvy (1911–1999) Advertising executive

Not one of my proudest memories.
Ogilvy on Advertising, p. 109

Sadness , Way , Memory , Forgetting

“To-day we can affirm that the capitalistic method of production is out of date. So is the doctrine of laissez-faire, the theoretical basis of capitalism… To-day we are taking a new and decisive step in the path of revolution. A revolution, in order to be great, must be a social revolution.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

Speech on November 14, 1933 as quoted in Under the Axe of Fascism, Gaetano Salvemini, London, UK, Victor Gollancz Ltd. (1936) p. 131
1930s

Decision

“Cultural change is the statistical product of the separate behavioral responses of large numbers of human beings who cope as best they can with social existence.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Behavior , Change

“I’m basically the idea person. I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the neces-sary abilities, so I go to the top people, whether I’m working with my foundry — Tallix — or in physics. I’m always trying to maintain the integrity of the work.”

Jeff Koons (1955) American artist

Constance Lewellen interview, 1986

People , Idea , Personality

“The Hero as Divinity, the Hero as Prophet, are productions of old ages; not to be repeated in the new. They presuppose a certain rudeness of conception, which the progress of mere scientific knowledge puts an end to. There needs to be, as it were, a world vacant, or almost vacant of scientific forms, if men in their loving wonder are to fancy their fellow-man either a god or one speaking with the voice of a god. Divinity and Prophet are past.”

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

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Love , Men , God , Age

“As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep, so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.”

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) austrian philosopher and theologist

Silence is a Commons (1982)

Silence

“Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the world of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system.”

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

Elements of Refusal (1988)

World , Nature

“The distinction between micro- and macro inventions matters because they appeared to be governed by different laws. Microinventions generally result from an intentional search for improvements, and are understandable -if not predictable- by economic forces. They are guided, at least to some extent, by the laws of supply and demand and by the intensity of search and the resources committed to them, and thus by signals emitted by the price mechanism. Furthermore, in so far as micro inventions are the by-products of experience through learning by doing or learning by using they are correlated with output or investment. Macroinventions are more difficult to understand, and seem to be governed by individual genius and luck as much as by economic forces. Often they are based on some fortunate event, in which an inventor stumbles on one thing while looking for another, arrives at the right conclusion for the wrong reason, or brings to bear a seemingly unrelated body of knowledge that just happen to hold the clue to the right solution. The timing of these inventions is consequently often hard to explain. Much of the economic literature dealing with the generation of technological progress through market mechanisms and incentive devices thus explain only part of the story. This does not mean that we have to give up the attempt to try to understand macroinventions. We must, however, look for explanations largely outside the trusted and familiar market mechanisms relied upon by economists.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 295; as cited by Pol, Eduardo, and Peter Carroll.

Law , Search , Literature , Understanding

“Most products are ugly. The harsh reality is that in many of these markets, form follows funding. And that products go where the market takes them.”

Bran Ferren (1953) American technologist

A Conversation About The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Staff, Wired, WIRED, en-US, 2017-01-18 https://www.wired.com/2001/01/forum/,

Reality

“In the first place, I own myself the friend to a very free system of commerce, and hold it as a truth, that commercial shackles are generally unjust, oppressive and impolitic — it is also a truth, that if industry and labor are left to their own course, they will generally be directed to those objects which are the most productive, and this in a more certain and direct manner than the wisdom of the most enlightened legislature could point out.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Debating on duties on imports (9 April 1789), published in The Debate and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1834), Vol. 1, Joseph Gales, editor, Washington DC, Gales and Seaton, publisher , pp. 115-116
1780s

Wisdom , Truth

“Product of complex interactions within and between the organization’s social structure, leadership groups and environment. … They are never static but subject to continual pressure and changes over time.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1960s, Authority, Goals and Prestige in a General Hospital, 1960, p. 2

Change , Time

“Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued…. America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.”

Samantha Power (1970) Irish-American academic, author and diplomat

"Samantha Power on U.S. Foreign Policy" http://web.archive.org/web/20120608140345/http://www.hks.harvard.edu/news-events/publications/insight/international/samantha-power, an interview with in Molly Lanzarotta, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government (14 March 2007)

War , Way , Decision , Summer

“Since the advent of modernism, artists have been seeking to loosen the entanglement of work and subject, because they saw themselves pushed into a role that they did not necessarily want to occupy: one which offered freedom and independence on the upside, but in combination with isolation and powerlessness on the downside. While the workers of the Fordist factory developed collectivist strategies to pursue their goals, the particularities of the artist's existence – cast as productive eccentricity and manic-depressive individualism – made it more difficult for artists to organize to achieve their demands and improve their precarious living and working conditions. It was only with great difficulty that this group, condemned to autonomy, could free itself from the prison of its freedom.”

Johannes Grenzfurthner (1975) Austrian artist, writer, curator, and theatre and film director

via Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2016/04/14/the-story-of-traceroute-about.html

Freedom

“Mr. Malthus says, " It has been justly observed by Adam Smith that no equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction as in agriculture. " If Adam Smith speaks of value, he is correct; but if he speaks of riches, which is the important point, he is mistaken; for he has himself defined riches to consist of the necessaries, conveniences, and enjoyments of human life. One set of necessaries and conveniences admits of no comparison with another set; value in use cannot be measured by any known standard; it is differently estimated by different persons.”

David Ricardo (1772–1823) British political economist, broker and politician

Source: The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821) (Third Edition), Chapter XXXII, Malthus on Rent, p. 292

Life , Personality

“The generally expressed desire of 'America first' can not be criticized. It is a perfectly correct aspiration for our people to cherish. But the problem which we have to solve is how to make America first. It can not be done by the cultivation of national bigotry, arrogance, or selfishness. Hatreds, jealousies, and suspicions will not be productive of any benefits in this direction. Here again we must apply the rule of toleration. Because there are other peoples whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, we are not warranted in drawing the conclusion that they are adding nothing to the sum of civilization. We can make little contribution to the welfare of humanity on the theory that we are a superior people and all others are an inferior people.”

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

1920s, Toleration and Liberalism (1925)
Context: The generally expressed desire of 'America first' can not be criticized. It is a perfectly correct aspiration for our people to cherish. But the problem which we have to solve is how to make America first. It can not be done by the cultivation of national bigotry, arrogance, or selfishness. Hatreds, jealousies, and suspicions will not be productive of any benefits in this direction. Here again we must apply the rule of toleration. Because there are other peoples whose ways are not our ways, and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, we are not warranted in drawing the conclusion that they are adding nothing to the sum of civilization. We can make little contribution to the welfare of humanity on the theory that we are a superior people and all others are an inferior people. We do not need to be too loud in the assertion of our own righteousness. It is true that we live under most favorable circumstances. But before we come to the final and irrevocable decision that we are better than everybody else we need to consider what we might do if we had their provocations and their difficulties. We are not likely to improve our own condition or help humanity very much until we come to the sympathetic understanding that human nature is about the same everywhere, that it is rather evenly distributed over the surface of the earth, and that we are all united in a common brotherhood. We can only make America first in the true sense which that means by cultivating a spirit of friendship and good will, by the exercise of the virtues of patience and forbearance, by being 'plenteous in mercy', and through progress at home and helpfulness abroad standing as an example of real service to humanity.

People , Jealousy , Way , Problem

“So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

"Art Under Plutocracy" (1883).
Context: So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.

Life , Art

“The analysis of the moral man through his actions, and of the intellectual man through his productions, seems”

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

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)
Context: The analysis of the moral man through his actions, and of the intellectual man through his productions, seems to me calculated to form one of the most interesting parts of the sciences of observation, applied to anthropology.

“What if that knowledge — and only that — should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed?”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899) http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/memoirs/memoirstoc.html Part IV, Sect. 3 http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/kropotkin/memoirs/memoirs4_3.html
Context: Belief in an ice-cap reaching Middle Europe was at that time rank heresy; but before my eyes a grand picture was rising, and I wanted to draw it, with the thousands of details I saw in it; to use it as a key to the present distribution of floras and faunas; to open new horizons for geology and physical geography.
But what right had I to these highest joys, when all around me was nothing but misery and struggle for a mouldy bit of bread; when whatsoever I should spend to enable me to live in that world of higher emotions must needs be taken from the very mouths of those who grew the wheat and had not bread enough for their children? From somebody's mouth it must be taken, because the aggregate production of mankind remains still so low.
Knowledge is an immense power. Man must know. But we already know much! What if that knowledge — and only that — should become the possession of all? Would not science itself progress in leaps, and cause mankind to make strides in production, invention, and social creation, of which we are hardly in a condition now to measure the speed?

Knowledge , Science , Speed

“The possibility of a short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion, occurs in the hook-up of political organization to the productive processes.”

Isabel Paterson (1886–1961) author and editor

Source: The God of the Machine (1943), p. 62
Context: These are not sentimental considerations; they constitute the mechanism of production and therefore of power. Personal liberty is the pre-condition of the release of energy. Private property is the inductor which initiates the flow. Real money is the transmission line; and the payment of debts comprises half the circuit. An empire is merely a long circuit energy-system. The possibility of a short circuit, ensuing leakage and breakdown or explosion, occurs in the hook-up of political organization to the productive processes. This is not a figure of speech or analogy, but a specific physical description of what happens.

“One thing is certain, that the well-developed, well-integrated personality is the highest product of evolution, the fullest realization we know of in the universe.”

Julian Huxley (1887–1975) English biologist, philosopher, author

Transhumanism (1957)
Context: The personality may grievously fail in attaining any real wholeness. One thing is certain, that the well-developed, well-integrated personality is the highest product of evolution, the fullest realization we know of in the universe.

Universe , Personality

“The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products — principally from America — are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

George Marshall (1880–1959) US military leader, Army Chief of Staff

The Marshall Plan Speech (1947)
Context: The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products — principally from America — are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.
The remedy lies in breaking the vicious circle and restoring the confidence of the European people in the economic future of their own countries and of Europe as a whole. The manufacturer and the farmer throughout wide areas must be able and willing to exchange their product for currencies, the continuing value of which is not open to question.

Truth , Food , Help

“Patriotism means equipped forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible--from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1950s, First Inaugural Address (1953)
Context: We must be ready to dare all for our country. For history does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. We must acquire proficiency in defense and display stamina in purpose. We must be willing, individually and as a Nation, to accept whatever sacrifices may be required of us. A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both. These basic precepts are not lofty abstractions, far removed from matters of daily living. They are laws of spiritual strength that generate and define our material strength. Patriotism means equipped forces and a prepared citizenry. Moral stamina means more energy and more productivity, on the farm and in the factory. Love of liberty means the guarding of every resource that makes freedom possible--from the sanctity of our families and the wealth of our soil to the genius of our scientists.

Love , Family , Freedom , Wealth

“This mysterious something has been called God, the Absolute, Nature, Substance, Energy, Space, Ether, Mind, Being, the Void, the Infinite—names and ideas which shift in popularity and respectabilitywith the winds of intellectual fashion, of considering the universe intelligent or stupid, superhuman or subhuman, specific or vague. All of them might be dismissed as nonsense-noises if the notion of an underlying Ground of Being were no more than a product of intellectual speculation. But these names are often used to designate the content of a vivid and almost sensorily concrete experience—the "unitive" experience of the mystic, which, with secondary variations, is found in almost all cultures at all times. This experience is the transformed sense of self which I was discussing in the previous chapter, though in "naturalistic" terms, purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other intellectually gaseous words.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 104-105

God , Stupidity , Soul , Intelligence

“Nabokov is more like a master swordsmith making a fine blade; nothing is amiss, nothing is too much, there is no fuss, and the finished product must be handled with great care, or it will cut you badly.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

Review of Nabokov's Lolita (1958).
Context: Many authors write like amateur blacksmiths making their first horseshoe; the clank of the anvil, the stench of the scorched leather apron, the sparks and the cursing are palpable, and this appeals to those who rank "sincerity" very high. Nabokov is more like a master swordsmith making a fine blade; nothing is amiss, nothing is too much, there is no fuss, and the finished product must be handled with great care, or it will cut you badly.

“But a greater evil of the present system becomes more and more marked; namely, that in a system based on private appropriation, all that is necessary to life and to production — land, housing, food and tools — having once passed into the hands of a few, the production of necessities that would give well-being to all is continually hampered.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: The masses have never believed in sophisms taught by economists, uttered more to confirm exploiters in their rights than to convert exploited! Peasants and workers, crushed by misery and finding no support in the well-to-do classes, have let things go, save from time to time when they have affirmed their rights by insurrection. And if workers ever thought that the day would come when personal appropriation of capital would profit all by turning it into a stock of wealth to be shared by all, this illusion is vanishing like so many others. The worker perceives that he has been disinherited, and that disinherited he will remain, unless he has recourse to strikes or revolts to tear from his masters the smallest part of riches built up by his own efforts; that is to say, in order to get that little, he already must impose on himself the pangs of hunger and face imprisonment, if not exposure to Imperial, Royal, or Republican fusillades.
But a greater evil of the present system becomes more and more marked; namely, that in a system based on private appropriation, all that is necessary to life and to production — land, housing, food and tools — having once passed into the hands of a few, the production of necessities that would give well-being to all is continually hampered. The worker feels vaguely that our present technical power could give abundance to all, but he also perceives how the capitalistic system and the State hinder the conquest of this well-being in every way.
Far from producing more than is needed to assure material riches, we do not produce enough.

Life , Food , Evil , Housing

“The productions of the earth require long and difficult preparations, before they are rendered fit to supply the wants of men.”

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot (1727–1781) French economist

§ 3
Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth (1766)
Context: The productions of the earth require long and difficult preparations, before they are rendered fit to supply the wants of men.
The productions which the earth supplies to satisfy the different wants of man, will not, for the most part, administer to those wants, in the state nature affords them; it is necessary they should undergo different operations, and be prepared by art. Wheat must be converted into flour, then into bread; hides must be dressed or tanned; wool and cotton must be spun; silk must be taken from the cod; hemp and flax must be soaked, peeled, spun, and wove into different textures; then cut and sewed together again to make garments, &c. If the same man who cultivates on his own land these different articles, and who raises them to supply his wants, was obliged to perform all the intermediate operations himself, it is certain he would succeed very badly.

Men

“Only the fresh revolutionary storms were strong enough to sweep away hoary prejudices against woman and only the productive-working people is able to effect the complete equalization and liberation of woman by building a new society.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)
Context: If I have attained something in this world, it was not my personal qualities that originally brought this about. Rather my achievements are only a symbol of the fact that woman, after all, is already on the march to general recognition. It is the drawing of millions of women into productive work, which was swiftly effected especially during the war and which thrust into the realm of possibility the fact that a woman could be advanced to the highest political and diplomatic positions. Nevertheless it is obvious that only a country of the future, such as the Soviet Union, can dare to confront woman without any prejudice, to appraise her only from the standpoint of her skills and talents, and, accordingly, to entrust her with responsible tasks. Only the fresh revolutionary storms were strong enough to sweep away hoary prejudices against woman and only the productive-working people is able to effect the complete equalization and liberation of woman by building a new society.

People , Strong

“These creatures are all of them part products of the Almighty Conception”

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

Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 235
Context: It may be asked, if He, as appears, has chosen to employ inferior organisms as a generative medium for the production of higher ones, even including ourselves, what right have we, his humble creatures, to find fault? There is, also, in this prejudice, an element of unkindliness towards the lower animals, which is utterly out of place. These creatures are all of them part products of the Almighty Conception, as well as ourselves.... Let us regard them in a proper spirit, as parts of the grand plan, instead of contemplating them in the light of frivolous prejudices, and we shall be altogether at a loss to see how there should be any degradation in the idea of our race having been genealogically connected with them.

Parting

“I have designed a decorative and monumental work as a group of subjects representing the three ages of sacred and profane mythology: the Golden Age, the Silver Age and the Iron Age. I have symbolised these different ages by dividing each one into compositions representing the three phases of the day: morning, noon and evening.
The Golden Age comprises three compositions (Adam and childhood):
:1. Prayer at sunrise.
:2. A walk in Paradise or the ecstasy before nature.
:3. All nature asleep.
The Silver Age. The second phase is taken from pagan mythology (Orpheus and youth):
:1. The dream nature is revealed to the senses of the inspired poet.
:2. The song.
: 3. Orpheus in the forest, his lyre broken and he longs for unknown countries and immortality.
The Iron Age (Cain and the maturity of man):
:1. The Sower making the earth productive (production).
:2. The Ploughman (work).
:3. Death (Cain and Abel).
Fourth panel:
The Triumph of Christ.
These three periods of humanity also correspond to the three periods in the life of a man:
The purity of childhood: Adam –
The poetic and unhappy aspirations of youth: Orpheus –
The grievous sufferings and death of mature age: Cain with the redemption of Christ.
D— thought it was an extremely ingenious and intelligent device to have used a figure from pagan antiquity for the cycle of youth and poetry instead of a Biblical figure, because intelligence and poetry are far better personified in these periods which were devoted to art and the imagination than in the Bible which is all sentiment and religiosity.
The Golden Age: the beginning of the world, naïveté, candour, purity. The morning: prayer. Noon: ecstasy and evening: sleep. No passion, nothing but elementary feelings. —
The Silver Age, corresponding to the civilization of humanity, already begins to feel emotion; it is the age of poets. I can only find this cycle in Greece. The morning: inspiration. Noon: song. Evening: tears. —
The Iron Age. Decadence and fall of humanity. I shall represent Cain ploughing and Abel sowing. Noon: Cain rests while Abel tends the altar of the Lord from which smoke, a symbol of purity, rises straight to the heavens. The evening: death at the hands of Cain.
The first death corresponds to the other deaths in the two other paintings: sleep and death of the senses; tears and the death of the heart. Do you understand the progression?
Sleep, though sad, is gentler than tears which, though painful, are gentler than death. Ecstasy is more delightful than song, which is gentler than work. Prayer is superior to dreaming which is more elevated than manual work.”

Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) French painter

Notes to his mother, on The Life of Humanity (1884-6) http://www.wikiart.org/en/gustave-moreau/humanity-the-golden-age-depicting-three-scenes-from-the-lives-of-adam-and-eve-the-silver-age-1886, his composition of a ten image polyptych, p. 48 · Photo of its exhibition on the 3rd Floor of Musée National Gustave Moreau http://en.musee-moreau.fr/house-museum/studios/third-floor
Gustave Moreau (1972)

Life , Death , Pain , Youth

Quotes about productivity page 24

Quotes about productivity
page 24