Quotes about quality
page 8

Peter Greenaway photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Erik Naggum photo
Edward Hopper photo

“The only quality that endures in art is a personal vision of the world. Methods are transient: personality is enduring.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1941 - 1967
Source: 'statement by the Chairman of the Jury', Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 1951, p. 7

Alan Rusbridger photo
Johan Cruyff photo

“Quality without results is pointless. Results without quality is boring.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

reported in Leo Messi's Twitter page https://twitter.com/messi10stats/status/713002758203310080 (24 March 2016).

Bala photo
Ismail Serageldin photo

“I do believe that encyclopedias are dead as dodos in the old fashioned way. Let me just go back, because earlier around I was interviewed and I said: The book will always be with us. Books - we used to read in scrolls and then they got invented the codex which is basically the form of the book. It has not been improved on. It's like scissors, like a spoon, and like a hammer. It's technology that's perfect in itself and will remain very good. But: What about the content inside of it? Now, there are books that you read for information. And there what you want to do is how to get the information. And it is infinitely more efficient, of higher quality, to use digital sources rather than the published sources for references. So dictionaries and encyclopedias are not going to be done in this very ponderous way of having old books that by the time they come out the information in them is obsolete. Second, you have to search in all of these and open the pages and then you go to an index and come back whereas you can type to search in. […] But if you want to hold in your hand a slim volume, nicely bound, of the love sonnets of Shakespeare or historical romans, that's a different story. There is the book as artifact, there is the joy in holding the book. And there is an efficiency in the book that you can carry with you in different ways. But I think that the encyclopedias and the dictionaries really are providing a service. And that service can be provided so much more efficiently online that they are bound to change. And if they don't change themselves and go online themselves … I mean, the old providers, like Britannica, will go online, will provide it, and will try to, in fact, compete with the model that Wikipedia pioneered.”

Ismail Serageldin (1944) egyptian academic

Wikimania 2008 press conference 0'33 (August 2008).

George Holmes Howison photo
Andrew Sega photo
James Bolivar Manson photo
Nigel Cumberland photo

“Dreams are the fuel for your success. Without them there can never be any meaningful and lasting success in your life. Like a car engine without high-quality fuel you risk living a life that never quite gets started.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, 100 Things Successful People Do: Little Exercises for Successful Living (2016) https://books.google.ae/books?idnu0lCwAAQBAJ&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIMjAE

Paul Gauguin photo

“This Cézanne [a 'Still life with Compotier, Fruit and Glass', Cézanne made c. 1879-1882!! ], that you ask me for is a pearl of exceptional quality and I already have refused three hundred francs for it; it is one of my most treasured possessions, and except in absolute necessity, I would give up my last shirt before the picture.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Quote in a letter (June 1888) to Gauguin's friend Émile Schuffenecker; as cited in Impressionism: A Centenary Exhibition, Anne Distel, Michel Hoog, Charles S. Moffett, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New York, N.Y.) 1975, p. 56
1870s - 1880s

Michael Moorcock photo
Abraham Joshua Heschel photo
Paul Klee photo
Thomas Robert Malthus photo

“It cannot be true, therefore, that among animals some of the offspring will possess the desirable qualities of the parents in greater degree, or that animals are indefinitely perfectible.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter IX, paragraph 9, lines 1-3

Dean Acheson photo
Balasaraswati photo
Hermann Weyl photo
David Mitchell photo

“Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.”

David Mitchell (1969) English novelist

Part 6
number9dream (2001)

Robert Morgan photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo
Anders Nygren photo
George Henry Lewes photo
Marie-Louise von Franz photo
Doris Lessing photo
Fali Sam Nariman photo
John Constable photo

“The buffoonery of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart is only an exaggeration of an essential quality of the classical style. This style was, in its origins, basically a comic one.”

Part II. The Classical Style. 1. The Coherence of the Musical Language
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

John Keats photo
Michio Kushi photo
Georg Brandes photo
D. V. Gundappa photo
Nicolas Bratza photo

“The Strasbourg court has been particularly respectful of decisions emanating from courts in the UK since the coming into effect of the Human Rights Act, and this because of the very high quality of those judgments.”

Nicolas Bratza (1945) British judge

"Britain should be defending European justice, not attacking it", The Independent, Tuesday 24 January 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/nicolas-bratza-britain-should-be-defending-european-justice-not-attacking-it-6293689.html

Georges Braque photo
Gene Wolfe photo

“There is no human quality more attractive than the courage of the weak.”

Home Fires (2011), Reflection 1
Fiction

John McCarthy photo
André Maurois photo

“Friendship is the positive and unalterable choice of a person whom we have singled out for qualities that we most admire.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship

Nicholas Roerich photo
Samuel Smiles photo
Pierre Trudeau photo
William McFee photo
José Ortega Y Gasset photo
Ilana Mercer photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The sculptural qualities of the image dim down the purely personal identity.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 369

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Antonio Negri photo

“The contemporary scene of labor and production, we will explain, is being transformed under the hegemony of immaterial labor, that is, labor that produces immaterial products, suchs as information, knoledges, ideas, images, relationships, and affects. This does not mean that there is no more industrial working class whose calloused hands toil with machines or that there ae no more agricultural workers who till the soil. It does not even mean that the numbers of such workers have decreased globally. In fact, workers involved primarily in immaterial production are a small minority of the gloval whole. What it means, rather, is that the qualities and characteristics of immaterial production are tending to transform the other forms of labor and indeed society as a whole. Some of these new characteristics are decidedly unwelcome. When our ideas and affects, or emotions, are put to work, for insance, and when they thus become subject in a way to the command of the boss, we often experience new and intense forms of violation or alienation. Furthermore, the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor that tend to spread to the entire labor market are making the position of labor in general more precarious. The is one tendency, for example, in various forms of immaterial labor to blur the distinction between work time and nonwork time, extending the working day indefinietly to fill all of life, and another tendency for immaterial labor to function without stable long-term contracts, and thus to adopt the precarious position of becoming flexible (to accomplish several tasks) and mobile (to move continually among locations). […] The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects, for example, does not merely create means by which society is formed and maintained; such immaterial labor also directly produces social relationships. […] immaterial labor tends to take the social form of network based on communication.”

65-66
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Jimmy Carter photo
George Eliot photo
Gregory of Nyssa photo
Aung San Suu Kyi photo
Gerard Bilders photo

“I have seen pictures [on the Salon of Brussel, 1860], of which I had never dreamed and in which I found all that my heart desires, all that I nearly always miss in the Dutch painters. Troyon, Courbet, Diaz, Dupré [all painters of the School of Barbizon, Robert Fleury have made a great impression on me. I am a good Frenchman, therefore; but, as Simon van den Berg says, it is just because I am a good Frenchman that I am a good Dutchman, since the great Frenchmen of today and the great Dutchmen of the past have much in common. Unity, restfulness, earnestness and, above all, an inexplicable intimacy with nature are what struck me most in these pictures. There were certainly also a few good Dutch pieces, but, generally speaking, when you place them next to the great Parisians, they lack that mellowness, that quality which, so to speak, resembles the deep tones of an organ. And yet this luxurious manner came originally from Holland, from our steaming, fat-coloured Holland! They were courageous pictures; there was a heart and a soul in them.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

Quote from Bilders in his letter (End of 1860); as cited in Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century – 'The Hague School; Introduction' https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dutch_Art_in_the_Nineteenth_Century/The_Hague_School:_Introduction, by G. Hermine Marius, transl. A. Teixera de Mattos; publish: The la More Press, London, 1908
1860's

Otto Pfleiderer photo
Felix Frankfurter photo
Yehudi Menuhin photo
John Maynard Keynes photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Gerald Ford photo

“It's the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It's a quality to be proud of. But it's a quality that many people seem to have neglected.”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

As quoted by TIME magazine (28 January 1974)
1970s

Robert E. Howard photo
Vernon Corea photo

“I want the program to be very open and develop in style as time goes on. But I am also interested in the positive aspects of Asian family life and other Asian qualities, although overall, my style is very informal.”

Vernon Corea (1927–2002) The legendary broadcaster – a pioneer with Radio Ceylon/Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation and the BBC.

Vernon Corea The Golden Voice of Radio Ceylon http://ivan_corea.tripod.com : Vernon Corea on 'London Sounds Eastern'.

Johannes Grenzfurthner photo
Thomas Edison photo

“Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions”

Thomas Edison (1847–1931) American inventor and businessman

Thomas Edison ""No Immortality of the Soul" says Thomas A. Edison. In Fact, He Doesn't Believe There Is a Soul — Human Beings Only an Aggregate of Cells and the Brain Only a Wonderful Machine, Says Wizard of Electricity". New York Times. October 2, 1910
1910s

Kenneth Grahame photo
Paul Morphy photo
Frances Burney photo
George W. Bush 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

Ralph Bakshi photo
Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

“In short, enjoy the blessing of strength while you have it and do not bewail it when it is gone, unless, forsooth, you believe that youth must lament the loss of infancy, or early manhood the passing of youth. Life's race-course is fixed; Nature has only a single path and that path is run but once, and to each stage of existence has been allotted its own appropriate quality; so that the weakness of childhood, the impetuosity of youth, the seriousness of middle life, the maturity of old age—each bears some of Nature's fruit, which must be garnered in its own season.”
Denique isto bono utare, dum adsit, cum absit, ne requiras: nisi forte adulescentes pueritiam, paulum aetate progressi adulescentiam debent requirere. cursus est certus aetatis et una via naturae eaque simplex, suaque cuique parti aetatis tempestivitas est data, ut et infirmitas puerorum et ferocitas iuvenum et gravitas iam constantis aetatis et senectutis maturitas naturale quiddam habet, quod suo tempore percipi debeat.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

section 33 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2007.01.0039%3Asection%3D33
Cato Maior de Senectute – On Old Age (44 BC)

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner photo

“.. the feeling that pervades a city presented itself in the qualities of lines of force.”

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) German painter, sculptor, engraver and printmaker

from Diary entry 'Das Werk', 1925, in E. L. Kirchner Davoser Tagebuch, ed. Grisebach, p. 86
1920's

Max Müller photo

“As for more than twenty years my principal work has been devoted to the ancient literature of India, I cannot but feel a deep and real sympathy for all that concerns the higher interests of the people of that country. Though I have never been in India, I have many friends there, both among the civilians and among the natives, and I believe I am not mistaken in supposing that the publication in England of the ancient sacred writings of the Brahmans, which had never been published in India, and other contributions from different European scholars towards a better knowledge of the ancient literature and religion of India, have not been without some effect on the intellectual and religious movement that is going on among the more thoughtful members of Indian society. I have sometimes regretted that I am not an Englishman, and able to help more actively in the great work of educating and improving the natives. But I do rejoice that this great task of governing and benefiting India should have fallen to one who knows the greatness of that task and all its opportunities and responsibilities, who thinks not only of its political and financial bearings, but has a heart to feel for the moral welfare of those millions of human beings that are, more or less directly, committed to his charge. India has been conquered once, but India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by education. Much has been done for education of late, but if the funds were tripled and quadrupled, that would hardly be enough. The results of the educational work carried on during the last twenty years are palpable everywhere. They are good and bad, as was to be expected. It is easy to find fault with what is called Young Bengal, the product of English ideas grafted on the native mind. But Young Bengal, with all its faults, is full of promise. Its bad features are apparent everywhere, its good qualities are naturally hidden from the eyes of careless observers.... India can never be anglicized, but it can be reinvigorated. By encouraging a study of their own ancient literature, as part of their education, a national feeling of pride and self-respect will be reawakened among those who influence the large masses of the people. A new national literature may spring up, impregnated with Western ideas, yet retaining its native spirit and character. The two things hang together. In order to raise the character of the vernaculars, a study of the ancient classical language is absolutely necessary: for from it these modern dialects have branched off, and from it alone can they draw their vital strength and beauty. A new national literature will bring with it a new national life and new moral vigour. As to religion, that will take care of itself. The missionaries have done far more than they themselves seem to be aware of, nay, much of the work which is theirs they would probably disclaim. The Christianity of our nineteenth century will hardly be the Christianity of India. But the ancient religion of India is doomed — and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

Letter to the Duke of Argyll, published in The Life and Letters of Right Honorable Friedrich Max Müller (1902) edited by Georgina Müller

Theo de Raadt photo

“Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue.”

Theo de Raadt (1968) systems software engineer

Quoted in U.S. military helps fund Calgary hacker, Akin, David, 2004-04-06, 2007-01-10, Globe and Mail, http://web.archive.org/web/20040815134728/http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd, 2004-08-15 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030406.whack46/BNStory/Technology/?query=openbsd,

Joseph E. Stiglitz photo
Amir Taheri photo
Ted Kennedy photo
Arsène Wenger photo
Marcus Aurelius photo

“Things that have a common quality ever quickly seek their kind.”

IX, 9
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX

Jean Baudrillard photo

“One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.”

Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French sociologist and philosopher

1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Glenn Greenwald photo
Hans Freudenthal photo
Eugène Delacroix photo