Quotes about research
page 8

“The researches of the last thirty or forty years into the history of mathematics (I need only mention such names as those of [Carl Anton] Bretschneider, Hankel, Moritz Cantor, [Friedrich] Hultsch, Paul Tannery, Zeuthen, Loria, and Heiberg) have put the whole subject upon a different plane. I have endeavoured in this edition to take account of all the main results of these researches up to the present date. Thus, so far as the geometrical Books are concerned, my notes are intended to form a sort of dictionary of the history of elementary geometry, arranged according to subjects; while the notes on the arithmetical Books VII.-IX. and on Book X follow the same plan.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements (1908)

Books, History, Mathematics

“Decision Points is based primarily on my recollections. With help from researchers, I have confirmed my account with government documents, contemporaneous notes, personal interviews, news reports, and other sources, some of which remain classified. There were instances in which I had to rely on memory alone. If there are inaccuracies in this book, the responsibility is mine. In the pages that follow, I have done my best to write about the decisions I got right, those I got wrong, and what I would do differently if given the chance. Of course, in the presidency, there are no do-overs. You have to do what you believe is right and accept the consequences. I tried to do that every day of my eight years in office. Serving as president was the honor of a lifetime, and I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to share my story.”

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

Source: 2010s, 2010, Decision Points (November 2010), p. xii

Books, Decision, Memory, Chance

“A world view is a coherent collection of concepts and theorems that must allow us to construct a global image of the world, and in this way to understand as many elements of our experience as possible.
Societies, as well as individuals, have always contemplated deep questions relating to their being and becoming, and to the being and becoming of the world. The configuration of answers to these questions forms their world view. Research on world views, although we are convinced of its practical value and necessity, will always be primarily an expression of a theoretical interest. It reflects the unlimited openness of the human mind to reality as a whole. Even if this research would not appear to be of any immediate value or necessity – quod non – we still should promote and encourage it energetically, because it also expresses the most unselfish striving of humanity “the desire to know,” a property of “Homo sapiens sapiens.””

Diederik Aerts (1953) Belgian theoretical physicist

Source: World views. From Fragmentation to Integration (1994), p. 8

World, Way, Understanding, Question

“Hans Haacke's "Visitor's Profile" encouraged visitors to interact with a computer by inputting personal information, which was then tabulated to output statistical data on the exhibition's audience. Such demographic research - as art - opened up a critical discourse, following Foucault and others, on the exclusivity of cultural institutions and their patrons, revealing the myth of public service as a thin veneer justifying the hierarchical values that reify extant social relations. Similarly, "Interactive Paper Systems" by Sonia Sheridan, engaged museum-goers in a creative exchange with the artist and 3M's first commercially available color photocopying machine, dissolving conventional artist-viewer-object relations. In "The Seventh Investigation (Art as Idea as Idea)" Joseph Kosuth utilized multiple forms of mass media and distribution (a billboard, an newspaper advertisement, a banner, and a museum installation) to question the conceptual and contextual boundaries between art, philosophy, commerce, pictures, and texts.”

Edward A. Shanken (1964) American art historian

Edward A. Shanken. " The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art http://www.artexetra.com/House.html" in Leonardo Electronic Almanac 6:10 (November, 1998)

Art, Color, Idea, Question

“Symbioses are central in the evolution of complexity; have evolved many times and are critical to the lifestyles of many animals and plants and also to whole ecosystems, in which symbiotic organisms are key players. The primary reason that symbiosis research is suddenly active, after decades at the margins of mainstream biology, is that DNA technology and genomics give us enormous new ability to discover symbiont diversity, and more significantly, to reveal how microbial metabolic capabilities contribute to the functioning of hosts and biological communities.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Nancy A. Moran, Election Year: 2004, Member Directory, National Academy of Sciences, http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/2538196.html]

Communication, Time, Animals

“To illustrate to what extent Hardy and Littlewood in the course of the years came to be considered as the leaders of recent English mathematical research, I may report what an excellent colleague once jokingly said: 'Nowadays, there are only three really great English mathematicians: Hardy, Littlewood, and Hardy-Littlewood.”

John Edensor Littlewood (1885–1977) English Mathematician

Harald Bohr, [Harald Bohr, Collected Mathematical Works, 1, 1952, Dansk Matematisk Forening, Copenhagen, 3172542, xiii-xxxiv, Looking Backward], p. xxvii
About

Mathematics

“Most proponents of a mandatory retirement age or term limits claim that we should amend the Constitution in order to alleviate the problems associated with life tenure. Their proposals implicitly reject an incentives approach to retirement because they assume that Justices will not act rationally in response to institutional modifications. In other words, both proposals are not only radical in their scope and represent substantial constitutional change, but they also rely on the remarkable proposition that Justices are fundamentally different from the rest of us in the way they approach economic decisions. There is little evidence to commend this view, and there is considerable empirical research to the contrary that supports Judge Posner’s thesis that Justices maximize the same thing everybody else does: their own utility.11 Put simply, legal scholars have not thought creatively about life tenure, shunning promising interdisciplinary approaches in favor of drastic constitutional change.”

David Stras (1974) American judge

The Incentives Approach to Judicial Retirement https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=550083013021092016089124092101123109019053019081050000104123078004026111095112098007032035042036057108108088070117116005124105087007061001121113115101118119116088029023111029064077104010121092024068066031005116087002001031092011074124095102105073&EXT=pdf (October 25, 2005)

Life, Age, Justice, Way

“Models of management sometimes come from task and function analyses of management jobs. Someone studies what managers do, or what duties and responsibilities they are expected to perform, and then develops a model or image of what competent management is (Mintzberg, 1973). Typically, task and function analyses result in detailed descriptions of what activities must be performed in the job. Often these are not arrayed in any order of importance or relevance to the particular job or to the desired output from someone performing the job. Such models have been tested, in that systematic research is conducted to determine if the dentified activities are part of the job. Unfortunately, models based on task or function analysis focus on the job and do not address the person in the job. In doing so, the models include many specific and detailed descriptions of activities, but no mention is made of the characteristics that enable or increase the likelihood of a person performing those activities. These models do not establish a casual link between characteristics of people and performance in a job.”

Richard Boyatzis (1946) American business theorist

Source: Competent manager (1982), p. 7-8.

People, Study, Parting, Personality

“But what is the use of this history, what the use of all this minute research? I well know that it will not produce a fall in the price of pepper, a rise in that of crates of rotten cabbages, or other serious events of this kind, which cause fleets to be manned and set people face to face intent upon one another's extermination. The insect does not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the inexhaustible variety of its manifestations; it helps us to decipher in some small measure the obscurest book of all, the book of ourselves.”

Jean Henri Fabre (1823–1915) French entomologist and author

In 'Minotaurus typhoeus'

Life, People, Books, History

“I am interested in letting many people know that Wikipedia is a flawed and irresponsible research tool.”

John Seigenthaler A false Wikipedia 'biography'

Op-Ed Piece: "A false Wikipedia 'biography'" http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm, USA Today (29 November 2005)

People

“Post-war Labour ideology in Britain has reached the end of the road. We tried the state (1945), we tried the market (1997), then we tried them both together (2007) and Britain is still not generating value in anything other than financial services and high end university teaching and research. Paradoxically, both sectors are protected by the two most ancient, and most democratic self-governing institutions left in the country. Cambridge University on the one side and the City of London Corporation on the other. It is time for our socialist tradition to rediscover the social.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, The Profundity of Defeat http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/10/30/285/

War, Universe, Time, Country

“Young painters are amazingly involved in their own research and are coming into their own personal perceptions. There is great hope for the future of art here. We will be the most vital art expression in the world.”

S. H. Raza (1922–2016) Indian artist

This is a sum of all my experiences: SH Raza

World, Hope, Art, Future

“Nothing should be done to impede people from teaching and doing their research even if at that very moment it was being used to massacre and destroy. […] the radical students and I wanted to keep the labs on campus, on the principle that what is going to be going on anyway ought to be open and above board, so that people would know what is happening and act accordingly.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

referring to 1969 https://web.archive.org/web/20031106175309/http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/4/11.html Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1992

People

“It is a pity that thanks to our thoughtless 'secularism' and waning sense of history, such primary sources of medieval history.. are presently in danger of suppression or total extinction. Instead of launching sustained search and research in this behalf, 'secular' historians are going about dismissing relevant data out of hand, imputing unfounded motive to the recorders themselves. The state in general and the universites in particular must do something to protect and retrieve such invaluable documents from unscrupulous hands.”

Harsh Narain (1921–1995) Indian writer

The Ayodhya temple-mosque dispute: Focus on Muslim sources (1993)

History, Search, Motivation, Sense

“When investigating theories at the tiniest conceivable scales in nature, almost all researchers today revert to the quantum language, accepting the verdict from the Copenhagen doctrine that the only way to describe what is going on will always involve states in HIlbert space, controlled by operator equations.”

Gerardus 't Hooft (1946) Dutch theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner

The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, 21 December 2015, arXiv:1405.1548v3 https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.1548,

Way, Nature

“The concept of action research arises in the behavioural sciences and is obviously applicable to an examination of human activity systems carried out through the process of attempting to solve problems. This core is the idea that the researcher does not remain an observer outside the subject of investigation but becomes a participant in the relevant human group. The researcher becomes a participant in the action, and the process of change itself becomes the subject of research. In action research the roles of researcher and subject are obviously not fixed: the roles of the subject and the practitioner are sometimes switched: the subjects become researchers… and researchers become men of action.”

Peter Checkland (1930) British management scientist

Source: Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, 1981, p. 152 as cited in: R.L. McCown (2001) "Learning to bridge the gap between science-based decision support and the practice of farming". In: Aust. J. Agric. Res., Vol 52, p. 560-561

Men, Idea, Problem, Science

“Given the present state of our knowledge, and insufficient thought on my part, my own prescription for the time being is to deal as best we can with individual differences and let the statistical group differences fall where they may. Society’s general concern with race and other social group differences is not the product of research on these matters, but arises from chauvinist-like attitudes of racial group identity and solidarity in connection with political power and economic interest. It might be termed meta-racism. The ‘race problem’ from that viewpoint is lower in my own hierarchy of values than concern with individual justice and alleviation of individual misfortune. Though it would be blind not to acknowledge the reality of certain statistical differences among populations, I would find it difficult to be the least concerned with any given individual’s racial heritage. Perhaps I may be too insensitive on this score, never having felt much sense of racial identity myself.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

Source: Differential Psychology: Towards Consensus (1987), p. 443

Justice, Knowledge, Problem, Reality

“The lesson is that the number of patents (produced by Taiwan) is irrelevant. After all, products that are discarded do not need patents. Universities and researchers must adjust their modes of thought. It is not just the sheer quantity of papers published, but whether the topics of such papers would be of help in ensuring the future of Taiwanese society.”

Chen Liang-gee (1956) politician

Chen Liang-gee (2017) cited in " INTERVIEW: Minister says role is to be ‘trailblazer’ for technology http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2017/04/03/2003667988/3" on Taipei Times, 3 April 2017

Universe, Future, Help

“IT architecture is often assumed to follow business strategy, to align IT with the business's strategic objectives. Increasingly, though, many business strategies depend on specific underlying IT capabilities. To develop a synergy between business strategy and IT architecture, firms must develop organizational competencies in IT architecture. My research has identified four IT architectural stages, each with its own requisite competencies. The "application silo architecture stage" consists of IT architectures of individual applications. The "standardized technology architecture stage" has an enterprise-wide IT architecture that provides efficiencies through technology standardization. The "rationalized data architecture stage" extends the enterprise-wide IT standards to data and processes. And the "modular architecture stage" builds onto enterprise-wide global standards with loosely coupled IT components to preserve the global standards while enabling local differences. Each stage demands different organizational competencies to implement the architecture and prepare the firm to move to the next stage.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Jeanne W. Ross (2003) Creating a Strategic IT Architecture Competency: Learning in Stages. MIT Sloan Working Paper No. 4314-03, April 2003. Abstract

Business, Dependency

“Billions of dollars in research knowledge lie dormant at universities waiting for the right disruptor to come along and create a business.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p.140

Lie, Business, Knowledge, Universe

“In principle, a self-organising system cannot be constructed, since its organisation and behaviour cannot be prescribed and created by an external source. It emerges autonomously in certain conditions (which cannot be prescribed either). The task of the researcher is to investigate in what kind of systems and under what kind of conditions self-organisation emerges.”

Rein Vihalemm (1938–2015) Estonian philosopher of chemistry

Source: Chemistry as an Interesting Subject for the Philosophy of Science, 2001, p. 195

“In my own researches and findings I have always insisted on plastic and sculptural values, and also on what I call a poetic climate. The object, whether it is a book, a bottle, or a human body, once it is visualized and expressed by means of clay, stone, or wood, ceases to be a document and becomes an animated object in stone, wood, or bronze and lives its independent life..”

Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) French sculptor

Quote of Zadkine from New York, early 1944; as cited in: Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 430
1940 - 1960

Life, Books, Animals

“I am sick and tired of reality refusing to conform to the requirements of my meticulously-researched near-future or proximate-present fictions.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

The Curse of Laundry http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/10/the-curse-of-laundry.html, October 19, 2014 The Laundry Files

Reality, Future

“I feel the Indian industry should contribute to help the government towards scientific research. The government alone can't do it. As of now, there's nothing. I have been into research for about 40 years. In the US, 50 to 60 per cent of the research and development (R&D) cost would be covered by the industry. There is a need for the same here and the industry needs to do it. Earlier, the industry in India didn't feel the need to do research. They could sell anything. Now, it wants to compete with the likes of South Korea and Japan, but they can't. We need to change this or the industry can't compete.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Quoted in "We need to have an instinct for self-preservation: C N R Rao".

Feeling, Change, Help

“The brilliant summaries by Bourbaki (1969) and Weyl (1951)… set a high standard of exposition, but… there is room for a history of mathematical ideas which will demand less mathematical expertise and offer a more detailed account of the motivation of research.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

History, Mathematics, Motivation, Idea

“Scientists are used to debating with one another about the finer points of new research. But increasingly, they find themselves battling their televisions and computer screens, which transmit ever-more-heated rhetoric from politicians, pundits, and other public figures who misinterpret, misrepresent, and malign scientific results.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Lewis M. Branscomb and Andrew A. Rosenberg, " Science and Democracy http://the-scientist.com/2012/10/01/science-and-democracy" The Scientist, October 1, 2012.

“Waterborne diseases kill millions every year, over 1.3 billion people have no clean water. ICROSS has provided safe drinking water to over 300 000 people through innovative ground breaking research spanning three decades”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

ICROSS Annual Report 2015

People, Disease, Drink, Water

“These three classes of problems—determination of significant fact, matching of facts with theory, and articulation of theory—exhaust, I think, the literature of normal science, both empirical and theoretical. They do not, of course, quite exhaust the entire literature of science. There are also extraordinary problems, and it may well be their resolution that makes the scientific enterprise as a whole so particularly worthwhile. But extraordinary problems are not to be had for the asking. They emerge only on special occasions prepared by the advance of normal research.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), III. The Nature of Normal Science, p. 34 (2012 ed.)

Literature, Problem, Thinking, Science

“When looking at the two streams of research these men produced, it is tempting to characterize Buchanan as a somewhat romantic optimist holding the belief that the pursuits of selfish individuals can be channeled for the common good, if the right set of constitutional constraints are adopted, and believing that individuals are capable of designing constitutions that achieve this goal. Thus, some 35 years after the publication of The Calculus, we find Buchanan, in joint work with Roger Congleton (1998), accepting the fact that legislatures always will adopt the simple majority rule, and trying to design constitutional constraints that will lead to outcomes benefiting all members of the community under that rule.”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Men, Communication, Selfishness

“You are always too late with a development if you are so slow that people demand it before you yourself recognize it. The research department should have foreseen what was necessary and had it ready to a point where people never knew they wanted it until it was made available to them.”

Charles Kettering (1876–1958) American inventor, engineer, businessman, and the holder of 140 patents

As quoted in Scientific American (August 1934) p. 243

People

“It may also be pertinent to ask whether a greater effort in the less expensive basic stages of research may not lead to reductions of effort in the far costlier stages of development and prototype construction.”

Alan Tower Waterman (1892–1967) American physicist

in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1953), Vol. 9, No. 2,ISSN 0096-3402, published by Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc., p. 38.

Effort

“While brands slowly transform the experience of campus life for undergraduates, another kind of takeover is under way at the institutional research level. All over the world, university campuses are offering their research facilities, and priceless academic credibility, for the brands to use as they please.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Four: "The Branding of Learning"

Life, World, Way, Universe

“I know, if anyone does — all research workers know — how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can't take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley book Trent's Own Case

Source: Trent's Own Case (1936), Chapter XXI: "Aunt Judith Knits"

“Given the five parts of the organization - operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and support staff - we may now ask how they all function together. In fact, we cannot describe the one way they function together, for research suggests that the linkages are varied and complex. The parts of the organization are joined together by different flows - of authority, of work material, of information, and of decision processes”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

themselves informational
Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 35

Way, Support, Decision, Parting

“Early in 1943 I got full time war research work… My first project was to evaluate long term weather forecast. Longe range, in that time, meant three to four days.”

Theodore Wilbur Anderson (1918–2016) American statistician

Source: "The ET interview: Professor TW Anderson," 1986, p. 525

War, Time, Weather

“[C. West Churchman exposed the indifferentist position of some researchers — planners belonging to this school in the following terms:] And if our clients blow up the world, land us in starvation or totalitarianism, that is too bad, but we remained pure in heart to the last, didn't we?”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Costs, Utilities, and Values, Sections I and II. (1956), p. 412 as cited in: Bogdan Mieczkowski, Oleg Zinam (1984) Bureaucracy, ideology, technology: quality of life East and West. p. 97

World, School, Heart

“It is well known to researchers of nature that one cannot perform even the slightest movement without motivation, meaning without somehow benefiting oneself. When, for example, one moves one’s hand from the chair to the table it is because one thinks that by putting one’s hand on the table one will thus receive greater pleasure. If one would not think so, one would leave one's hand on the chair for the rest of one's life without moving it an inch, all the more so concerning greater efforts.”

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

Assorted Themes, On Human Nature

Life, Pleasure, Motivation, Nature

“After careful research along these lines, I came to the annoying conclusion that Keynes had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. Previously, I had thought the opposite. But facts were facts and there was no denying my conclusion. It didn’t affect the argument in my book, which was only about the rise and fall of ideas. The fact that Keynesian ideas were correct as well as popular simply made my thesis stronger.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

Bruce Bartlett, "Revenge of the Reality-Based Community" (2012).
2010s

Books, Idea

“In April 1946, when I came to Hughes Aircraft to institute high-technology research and development, it was far from the place it was to become. Howard Hughes, I was informed, rarely came around. When he did show up, it was to take up one or another trivial issue. He would toss off detailed directions, for instance, on what to do next about a few old airplanes decaying out in the yard or what kind of seat covers to buy for the company-owned Chevrolets, or he would say he wanted some pictures of clouds taken from an airplane. An accountant from Hughes Tool Co. ((started by Howard's father)) had the title of general manager but was there only to sign checks. A few of Howard's flying buddies were on the payroll, using assorted fanciful titles like some in Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, but apparently did next to nothing. A lawyer was on hand to process contracts, but there were practically none. In addition to the Spruce Goose flying freighter, a mammoth eight-engine plywood seaplane that barely managed to fly even once, there was an experimental Navy reconnaissance plane under development (which, with Hughes at the controls, later crashed, almost killing him). The contracts for both planes had been canceled. Perhaps, I said to myself, this is one of those unforeseeable lucky opportunities. Why not use Hughes Aircraft as a base to create a new and needed defense electronics supplier?”

Simon Ramo (1913–2016) Father of the ICBM

MEMOIRS OF AN ICBM PIONEER Simon Ramo broke with Howard Hughes, then built TRW, the company that developed the U.S. missile. He says what went right then would go wrong today. http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1988/04/25/70453/index.htm in FORTUNE Magazine, April 25, 1988

Flying

“Aiki lab is a place for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and of course, learning.”

Bassel Khartabil (1981–2015) free culture and democracy activist, Syrian political prisoner

Tweet July 14, 2010, 3:59AM https://twitter.com/basselsafadi/status/18511132112 at Twitter.com

Learning

“Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don’t want to live up there anymore than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, League Confederation Goes Outer-Track (September 2018)

Way, Imagination, Understanding, Reading

“Decision theory can be pursued not only for the purposes of building foundations for political economy, or of understanding and explaining phenomena that are in themselves intrinsically interesting, but also for the purpose of offering direct advice to business and governmental decision makers. For reasons not clear to me, this territory was very sparsely settled prior to World War II. Such inhabitants as it had were mainly industrial engineers, students of public administration, and specialists in business functions, none of whom especially identified themselves with the economic sciences. Prominent pioneers included the mathematician, Charles Babbage, inventor of the digital computer, the engineer, Frederick Taylor and the administrator, Henri Fayol.
During World War II, this territory, almost abandoned, was rediscovered by scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians concerned with military management and logistics, and was renamed “operations research” or “operations analysis.””

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

So remote were the operations researchers from the social science community that economists wishing to enter the territory had to establish their own colony, which they called “management science”.
1960s-1970s, "Rational decision making in business organizations", Nobel Memorial Lecture 1978

War, World, Communication, Understanding

“The following list has been compiled from the wealth of research I have put together over the last ten years. I would suggest that all of these are reptilian bloodline, but I only mention shapeshifting where it has been witnessed. It is only an initial list and will be added to. If you can add names, and give the supporting evidence, that would be most helpful in exposing these horrors. By "Satanists", of course, I mean those involved in human sacrifice…. George Bush: U. S. President and Vice President, head of the CIA, and a stream of other roles in the Illuminati. Satanist, mind controller, torturer of children and adults, paedophile, shapeshifting reptilian, and major drug runner. Serial killer. Nice man…. Queen Elizabeth II of the U. K.: Satanist, child sacrificer, shapeshifting reptilian. Major Illuminati figure.”

David Icke (1952) English writer and public speaker

Source: List of Famous Satanists, Paedophiles And Mind Controllers, davidicke.com

Children, Support, Help, Wealth

“Identify an agrarian problem—greenhouse gas emissions, overuse of antibiotics and dangerous pesticides, genetically modified crops, salmonella, E. coli, waste disposal, excessive use of water—and trace it to its ultimate origin and you will likely find an animal. … Research shows that veganism, which obviates the inherent waste involved in growing the grains used to fatten animals for food in conventional systems, is seven times more energy efficient than eating meat and, if embraced globally, could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from conventional agriculture by 94 percent. … But with rare exception, those in the big, lumpy tent have thrown down a red carpet for “ethical butchers” while generally dismissing animal rights advocates as smug ascetics (which they can be) and crazed activists (ditto) who are driven more by sappy sentiment than rock-ribbed reason. It’s an easy move to make. But the problem with this dismissal—and the overall refusal to address the ethics of killing animals for food—is that it potentially anchors the Food Movement’s admirable goals in the shifting sands of an unresolved hypocrisy. Let’s call it the “omnivore’s contradiction.””

James E. McWilliams (1968) American historian

"Loving Animals to Death: How Can We Raise Them Humanely and Then Butcher Them?", in The American Scholar (Spring 2014) https://theamericanscholar.org/loving-animals-to-death/.

Food, Problem, Water, Time

“There are two kinds of thinkers, scholars and scientists. The first are the 'trail blazers' who propose new revolutionary ideas, point to new directions for scientific and intellectual developments, create new paradigms of science and scholarship, but leave the details to others. The second are those who follow the new trail, carry out careful experimentation and research within the established paradigm, and work out the precise formulations of theories in a particular domain of knowledge.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) (1989), p. 2

Idea, Knowledge, Science

“The arrangement of the whole work is probably different… from any other… the extent of the subjects… rendered it necessary to preserve a… methodical and uniform system; and it is presumed, that this arrangement will be… of some value, especially in a work calculated to serve as a key, by means of which, access may be obtained to all the widely scattered treasures of science; and which will enable those… desirous of extending their researches in any particular department, to obtain expeditiously all the information that books can afford them.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)

Books, Science

“I was a student at the Delhi School at the very end of its Golden Age. The departments of economics and sociology were still world-class. Amartya Sen had left for England and M. N. Srinivas had retired to Bangalore; but Sukhamoy Chakravarty and André Béteille remained. There were also other brilliant scholars on the faculty—such as A. L. Nagar and Kaushik Basu in economics, and Veena Das and J. P. S. Uberoi in sociology. Both departments had active research programmes.”

Ramachandra Guha (1958) historian and writer from India

[Guha, Ramachandra, A SALUTE TO THE COFFEE HOUSE, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/a-salute-to-the-coffee-house.html, The Telegraph, 29th September 2007]

Age, World, School

“In this book, we have reported on a behavioral research study of hospital patients that included a post-hospital follow-up and an investigation of patients'families, We have in brief attempted to state what the borderline syndrome is and speculate on the how and the why.”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

Source: The borderline syndrome, (1968), p. v

Books, Behavior, Study

“Graphics owes its special significance to its double function as a storage mechanism and a research instrument.”

Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer

Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 2

“Their deceitful role in Ayodhya – which in the end harmed their clients more than anyone else – was just symptomatic. For fifty years this bunch has been suppressing facts and inventing lies. How concerned they pretend to be today about that objective of the ICHR – to promote objective and rational research into events of our past! How does this concern square with the guidelines issued by their West Bengal government in 1989 which Outlook itself had quoted – ‘Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned?’ But incorporating their wholesale fabrications of the destruction of Buddhist viharas, about the non-existent ‘Aryan invasion’, that is mandatory – to question them is to be communal, chauvinist! The capture of institutions like the ICHR has been bad enough, but in the end it has been a device. The major crime of these ‘historians’ has been this partisanship: suppresso veri, suggesto falsi.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud

Quotes, Communication, Question, Past

“There is a revolutionary scientific perspective (stemming) from the General Systems Research movement and (with a) wealth of principles, ideas and insights that have already brought higher degree of scientific order and understanding to many areas as of biology, psychology and some physical sciences… Modern systems research can provide the basic of a framework more capable of doing justice to the complexities and dynamic properties of the socio-cultural system.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. vii as cited in: cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 7-8.

Justice, Idea, Understanding, Science

“Even a single missed crucial consideration could vitiate our most valiant efforts or render them as actively harmful as those of a soldier who is fighting on the wrong side. The search for crucial considerations (which must explore normative as well as descriptive issues) will often require crisscrossing the boundaries between different academic disciplines and other fields of knowledge. As there is no established methodology for how to go about this kind of research, difficult original thinking is necessary.”

Nick Bostrom book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Source: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), Ch. 15

Search, Knowledge, Thinking, Effort

“This volume is an analysis of the American party system, an account of the structure, processes and significance of the political party, designed to show as clearly as possible within compact limits what the function of the political party is in the community. My purpose is to make this, as far as possible, an objective study of the organization and behavior of our political parties. It is hoped that this volume may serve as an introduction to students and others who wish to find a concise account of the party system; and also that it may serve to stimulate more intensive study of the important features and processes of the party. From time to time in the course of this discussion significant fields of inquiry have been indicated where it is believed that research would bear rich fruit. In the light of broader statistical information than we now have and with the aid of a thorough-going social and political psychology than we now have, it will be possible in the future to make much more exhaustive and conclusive studies of political parties than we are able to do at present. The objective, detailed study of political behavior will unquestionably enlarge our knowledge of the system of social and political control under which we now operate. But such inquiries will call for funds and personnel not now available to me.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: The American Party System, 1922, p. v; Preface lead paragraph

Hope, Behavior, Communication, Knowledge

“Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC—which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries—has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy ‘research’.”

Melanie Phillips (1951) British journalist

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/000686.html

Hate

“Research bear a true fruit, the research must start from needs.”

Masaru Ibuka (1908–1997) Japanese businessman

Masaru Ibuka in: Nick Lyons (1976), The Sony vision. p. 147

“the Cubists in Paris made me see that there was also a possibility of suppressing the natural aspect of form. I continued my research by abstracting the form and purifying the colour more and more. While working, I arrived at suppressing the closed effect of abstract form, expressing myself exclusively by means of the straight line in rectangular opposition; thus by rectangular planes of colour with white, grey and black. At that time, I encountered artists with approximately the same spirit, First Van der Leck, who, though still figurative, painted in compact planes of pure colour. My more or less cubist technique - in consequence still more or less picturesque - underwent the influence of his exact technique. Shortly afterwards I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of Van Doesburg. Full of vitality and zeal for the already international movement that was called 'abstract', and most sincerely appreciative of my work, he came to ask me to collaborate in a review he intended to publish, and which he [Theo van Doesburg] was to call 'De Stijl.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

I was happy with an opportunity to publish my ideas on art, which I was engaged in writing down: I saw the possibility of contacts with similar efforts. Quote of Mondrian c 1931, in 'De Stijl' (last number), p. 48; as cited in De Stijl 1917-1931 - The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art, by H.L.C. Jaffé http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/jaff001stij01_01/jaff001stij01_01.pdf; J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1956, pp. 44-45 published in the memorial number of 'De Stijl', after the death of Theo Van Doesburg in 1931 1930's

Pleasure, Art, Idea, Nature

“Current ideas of the uses of Model Organisms spring form the exemplars of the past and choosing the right organism for one's research is as important as finding the right problems to work on. In all my research these two problems have been closely intertwined.”

Sydney Brenner (1927–2019) South African biologist, Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine 2002

Nobel Lecture http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2002/brenner-lecture.pdf, Sydney Brenner, The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2002

Spring, Idea, Problem, Past

“If a mathematician wishes to disparage the work of one of his colleagues, say, A, the most effective method he finds for doing this is to ask where the results can be applied. The hard pressed man, with his back against the wall, finally unearths the researches of another mathematician B as the locus of the application of his own results. If next B is plagued with a similar question, he will refer to another mathematician C. After a few steps of this kind we find ourselves referred back to the researches of A, and in this way the chain closes.”

Alfred Tarski (1901–1983) Polish-American logician

Source: The Semantic Conception of Truth (1952), p. 41.

Way, Question

“President Herbert Hoover promised “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” With warnings about global warming reaching feverish levels, many are having second thoughts about all those cars. It seems they should instead be worrying about the chickens. … It turns out that raising animals for food is a primary cause of land degradation, air pollution, water shortage, water pollution, loss of biodiversity, and not least of all, global warming. …The researchers found that, when it’s all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius. … Now that we know a greener diet is even more effective than a greener car, we can make a difference at every single meal, simply by leaving the animals off of our plates. Who would have thought: what’s good for our health is also good for the health of the planet!”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

"Vegetarian is the New Prius", in the HuffPost (18 January 2007) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/vegetarian-is-the-new-pri_b_39014.html.

Health, Food, Cars, Water

“In every field there is a need for writing where the main objective is to extend the reader's field of acquaintance with the complex cases of the real world. Such writing does not have to be very exact or quantitative; it does not even have to formulate or to demonstrate hypotheses. It constitutes, as it were, travel over the field of study. Travel is certainly not enough, even for a geographer, but we would feel, I imagine, that a geographer who had never travelled would be under a serious handicap. Similarly the student of organizations who has never, even vicariously through reading, been in a hospital, a bank, a research laboratory, a large corporation, a Soviet factory, a revolution, an Egyptian civil service department, and so on, has missed something. His generalizations are apt to be based on too narrow a selection of the field.”

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

Kenneth Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1-22.as cited in: John Van Maanen (1998) Qualitative Studies of Organizations. p.xx
1950s

World, Travel, Feeling, Imagination

“[M]y main task when I was artistic director at Thomson for four years: to make the company virtuous. Not because there was a desire there to do evil, but because they had simply forgotten their purpose in life - to be of service, to use their skills to be of service. It is essential to try to play the role of a friendly "enemy within". That is, to catch the interest of these big companies so that they make money available, and research facilities, and distribution networks, for this return to what is the origin of all their activities - to serve others. It even means changing the words they use. One of the things I did at Thomson was to change their name. Thomson used to be called TCE, Thomson Consumer Electronic, and I asked them: who wants to be a "consumer of electronics?"”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck, 2000

Life, Money, Evil, Change

“Effective science teaching calls for active contact with research and that teachers need to mingle with other scientists and to know what is going on in the field.”

Alan Tower Waterman (1892–1967) American physicist

in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1953), Vol. 9, No. 2,ISSN 0096-3402, published by Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science, Inc., p. 38.

Teachers, Science

“High expectations are a powerful driving force, helping you become better than you already are. Sometimes you need to go one step further and step out on faith, even when you don’t have history or research to predict success. As the biblical writer said: ‘Now faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see’ (Heb. 11:1). Yes, past performance is the greatest predictor of future performance—but if we lived by that credo alone, no one would do anything bold and new. Sometimes we need good, old-fashioned faith.”

Don Soderquist (1934–2016)

Don Soderquist “ The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company https://books.google.com/books?id=mIxwVLXdyjQC&lpg=PR9&dq=Don%20Soderquist&pg=PR9#v=onepage&q=Don%20Soderquist&f=false, Thomas Nelson, April 2005, p. 105. On Striving for Excellence

Faith, Hope, History, Fashion

“Despite its potential, the federal government has restricted funding for creating new cell lines – putting the burden of any future research squarely on the shoulders of the private sector. Government’s most basic responsibility, however, is the health and welfare of its people, so it has a duty to encourage appropriate scientific investigations that could possibly save the lives of millions.”

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

http://www.mikebloomberg.com/en/news/mayor_michael_bloombergs_address_to_graduates_of_johns_hopkins_university_school_of_medicine
Stem Cell Research

People, Health, Future

“One solace yet remains for us who came
Into this world in days when story lacked
Severe research, that in our hearts we know
How, for exciting youth's heroic flame,
Assent is power, belief the soul of fact.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Memorials of a Tour in Italy (1837), IV ("story" refers to History).

Youth, World, Soul, Heart

“Time study is the art of recording, analyzing, and synthesizing the time of the elements of any operation, usually a manual operation, but it has also been extended to mental and machinery operations.
It is one of the many remarkable inventions of Dr. Taylor while he was working at the Midvale Steel Works. It differs from the well-known process of timing the complete operation, as, for instance, the usual method for timing the athlete, in that the timing of time study is done on the elements of the process. Much ridiculous criticism has been put forward by well-meaning but uninformed persons, who claim that timing a worker down to a three hundredth of a minute is unkind, inhuman, and conducive to the worst form of slavery ever known.
On the contrary, obtaining precise information regarding the smallest elements into which an art or a trade can be subdivided, and examining them separately, is the method adopted hi all branches of scientific research.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: Primer of scientific management, 1912, p. 7

Art, Study, Time, Personality

“If you think research is expensive, try disease”

Mary Lasker (1900–1994) American health activist and founder of Lasker Awards

Source: The Lasker Legacy http://www.laskerfoundation.org/about/lasker-legacy/

Disease, Thinking

“I consider myself a mainstream researcher in the field of business policy, and the ideas I want to describe in this paper concern the foundations of a theory of business strategy that is rooted in economics. But is such a paper, whatever its merits, really appropriate at a conference entitled 'Non-traditional Approaches to Policy Research'? Surprisingly, it is. The use of economic theory to model and explicate business strategy, as it is understood within the field of business policy, is distinctly non-traditional.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: "Towards a strategic theory of the firm." 1997, p. 131; Lead paragraph

Idea, Business

“The world's most prominent human population geneticists have publicly criticized the people who claim genetic research supports the notion of biological races, and the unfounded inferences derived from that notion.”

Daniel J. Fairbanks (1956) American artist

154.
Everyone is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (2015)

People, World, Support

“There are few things more important in the business of the state, than that the results of inquiry and research should be realised by those who have had the conduct of it.”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Source: The Statesman (1836), Ch. 25. p. 198

Business

“Contemporary theories of politics tend to portray politics as a reflection of society, political phenomena as the aggregate consequences of individual behavior, action as the result of choices based on calculated self-interest, history as efficient in reaching unique and appropriate outcomes, and decision making and the allocation of resources as the central foci of political life. Some recent theoretical thought in political science, however, blends elements of these theoretical styles into an older concern with institutions. This new institutionalism emphasizes the relative autonomy of political institutions, possibilities for inefficiency in history, and the importance of symbolic action to an understanding of politics. Such ideas have a reasonable empirical basis, but they are not characterized by powerful theoretical forms. Some directions for theoretical research may, however, be identified in institutionalist conceptions of political order.”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

James G. March and Johan P. Olsen. "The new institutionalism: organizational factors in political life." American political science review 78.03 (1983): 734-749.

Life, Behavior, History, Idea

“What I think is fair to say about Fox — and certainly it’s the way we view it — is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party. They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that’s fine. But let’s not pretend they’re a news network the way CNN is.”

Anita Dunn (1958) American political strategist

CNN interview, October 12, 2009. http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/10/white_house_reveals_tactics_in.html

Way, Thinking

“I shall now address you on the subject of the present situation in research in the foundations of mathematics. Since there remain open questions in this field, I am not in a position to paint a definitive picture of it for you. But it must be pointed out that the situation is not so critical as one could think from listening to those who speak of a foundational crisis. From certain points of view, this expression can be justified; but it could give rise to the opinion that mathematical science is shaken at its roots.”

Paul Bernays (1888–1977) Swiss mathematician

Paul Bernays, Platonism in mathematics http://sites.google.com/site/ancientaroma2/book_platonism.pdf (1935) Lecture delivered June 18, 1934, in the cycle of Conferences internationales des Sciences mathematiques organized by the University of Geneva, in the series on Mathematical Logic.) Translation by: Charles Parsons

Mathematics, Question, Thinking, Science

“The University of Oregon has long been known as a renowned research institution. The Brain, Biology and Machine Initiative continues in that distinguished tradition.”

Peter DeFazio (1947) American politician

Peter DeFazio (June 21, 2006), DeFazio Secures $8 Million For Research At Oregon Universities: He also secured $2.5 million for the Northwest Manufacturing Initiative and $2.7 million for the Metals Affordability Initiative http://www.defazio.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=124&Itemid=65, Website, Congressman Peter DeFazio, United States House of Representatives.

Universe

“Why doesn't policy-relevant work seem to conflict with my "real" research? I think that it's because I have been able to approach policy issues using almost exactly the same method that I use in my more basic work.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

How I Work (1993)

Thinking

“Brain research in the last five years at Dartmouth and elsewhere has shown that human brains are not fully developed until age 25 and are particularly deficient in their frontal lobes, which control decision-making, rational thinking, judgment, the ability to plan ahead and to resist impulses. Unfortunately, we didn't know that in 1971. Those of you who have made it to age 26 without dying in a stupid drinking game — and I think congratulations are in order, by the way — understand how insane it is to allow young people to vote.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

"Repeal the 26th Amendment!" (10 November 2010).
2010

People, Age, Stupidity, Way

“The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skillful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), IV. Normal Science as Puzzle-solving, p. 38.

Motivation, Problem, Time

“In 1950, I received my PhD in psychology. I was offered a fellowship to attend the Graduate School of Public Health at the that I had previously studied in clinical and abnormal psychology. Reflecting this disappointment, I entitled my Public Health Practice thesis Mental Health Is Not the Opposite of Mental Illness. After receiving my master’s degree in public health, I took a job as research director for Psychological Services of Pittsburgh. A local industrialist came to see me after a nasty labor relations disturbance and asked me plaintively, ‘What do people want from their jobs?’ I answered him in typical academic fashion, ‘Sir, I don’t know but if you give me enough money I will find out.’. I followed up on my School of Public Health thesis by designing a study to test the hypothesis that job satisfaction and job dissatisfaction were separate concepts. The result was the book, The Motivation to Work, which led to a fundamentally different approach to the study of people’s affective states.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Frederick I. Herzberg in: "This Week’s Citation Classic," in: CC, Nr. 19, May 7, 1984; Re-published in: Neil J. Smelser (1987) Contemporary Classics in the Social and Behavioral Science. p. 199

Money, People, Health, Books

“Now, it is a recognised fact that the contribution of European scholars in general and of British historians in particular to the study of Muslim literature and history is invaluable. … Their painstaking diligence and honesty compel our admiration. … Indian historians owe a lot to the pioneering researches of British historians, whatever may be said about their merits and shortcomings. …. There is no need to get ruffled about such assertions. Most of the conclusions of British historians about Muslim history do find confirmation in the description of cruelties perpetrated by the Muslims in their own chronicles as well as their reiteration in indigenous source materials in Hindi, Sanskrit, Rajasthani and Marathi. Hindu source materials are few. They are also not as informative as the Muslim chronicles. But curiously enough the meagre Hindu and the voluminous Muslim source-materials corroborate and supplement rather than contradict each other about the behaviour of the Muslim regime.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 3

History, Literature, Study

“Darwin's racism has nothing to do with the credibility of the theory of evolution…. However, after much research, I do concede that you won't find anything in Darwin's writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Color, Way

“The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors… The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heterosexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.”

Rolf Gindorf (1939–2016) German sexologist

"Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event," from The repressed sexes: Historical texts and commentaries on homosexuality, ed. J.S. Hohmann (Lollar: Achenbach, 1977), pp. 129-44

Sex, Behavior, Error, Help

“Evolutionary game theory is one of the most active and rapidly growing areas of research in economics. Unlike traditional game theory models, which assume that all players are fully rational and have complete knowledge of details of the game, evolutionary models assume that people choose their strategies through a trial-and-error learning process in which they gradually discover that some strategies work better than others. In games that are repeated many times, low-payoff strategies tend to be weeded out, and an equilibrium may emerge.”

Larry Samuelson (1953) American economist

Larry Samuelson. Evolutionary Games and Equilibrium Selection. 1997. Overview.

People, Error, Game, Knowledge

“In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men’s bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Men, Sadness, Angels, Quotes

Johan Olsen (1939) Norwegian political scientist

James G. March and Johan P. Olsen. "The new institutionalism: organizational factors in political life." American political science review 78.03 (1983): 734-749; Abstract.

Life, Behavior, History, Idea

“This article [entitled A framework for the comparative analysis of organizations], was one of three independent statements in 1967 of what came to be called "contingency theory." It held that the structure of an organization depends upon (is ‘contingent’ upon) the kind of task performed, rather than upon some universal principles that apply to all organizations. The notion was in the wind at the time.
I think we were all convinced we had a breakthrough, and in some respects we did — there was no one best way of organizing; bureaucracy was efficient for some tasks and inefficient for others; top managers tried to organize departments (research, production) in the same way when they should have different structures; organizational comparisons of goals, output, morale, growth, etc., should control for types of technologies; and so on. While my formulation grew out of fieldwork, my subsequent research offered only modest support for it. I learned that managers had other ends to maximize than efficient production and they sometimes sacrificed efficiency for political and personal ends.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Charles Perrow, in "This Week’s Citation Classic." in: CC, Nr. 14. April 6, 1981 (online at garfield.library.upenn.edu)
Comment:
The other two 1967 publications were Paul R. Lawrence & Jay W. Lorsch. Organization and environment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, and James D. Thompson. Organizations in action. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.
1980s and later

Way, Support, Thinking, Learning

“My job was to manage the editorial production of the first—and as yet only—Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health … My first day on the job, I was given the rules: No matter what the research indicated, the report could not recommend “eat less meat” as a way to reduce intake of saturated fat, nor could it suggest restrictions on intake of any other category of food. In the industry-friendly climate of the Reagan administration, the producers of foods that might be affected by such advice would complain to their beneficiaries in Congress, and the report would never be published.”

Marion Nestle American academic

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, University of California Press (2002, 2013), Introduction, p. 3 https://books.google.it/books?id=39oVBbtt6IEC&pg=PA3

Health, Food, Way

“I have always found it a little strange that the majority of schools are utilizing filters. It seems to me that this is the environment where filters would not be used because the students are so carefully monitored, the activities in which they engage all go toward the same goals of education, and this is the very place where young people should be learning about information and its uses, in other words, where they should be learning information literacy.A recent National Research Center report, commissioned by Congress, clearly stated that information and media literacy are the most important things we can teach our children in order to truly protect them. Instead of placing barriers around the swimming pool, we must teach children to swim. We must teach children to find and use accurate information.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"Children's Internet Protection Act" http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/washtech_policy060302.htm by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post (June 3, 2002 )

Children, People, Education, School

“Unsurprisingly, the recipients of climate change subsidies and climate change research grants think action is very urgent indeed. As for the general public, of course saving the planet counts – until the bills come in and then the humbug detector is switched on.”

Tony Abbott (1957) Australian politician

Quoted in "'I've learnt to speak my mind': 10 excerpts from Tony Abbott's climate change speech in London'" http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/ive-learnt-to-speak-my-mind-ten-excerpts-from-tony-abbotts-climate-change-speech-in-london-20171009-gyxk92.html, Sydney Morning Herald, October 10, 2017 2017

Thinking, Change

“This is the research we did online for the 9/11 attacks… we gave this briefing internally at the CIA, they said, 'how'd you know all this stuff?' because at the same time one of the emails had the date… 9/11 as the attack date that was given”

William Binney former U.S. intelligence official and cryptoanalyst; whistleblower

source: William Binney - 'The Government is Profiling You' - video lecture at MIT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB3KR8fWNh0

Time

“True or false? "America is falling behind in world competition". The surprise answer is "false". Recent research on industrialized nations shows that American workers outproduce workers in Germany and France by 20 percent, workers in Britain by over 30 percent, and Japanese workers by over 60 percent. The reason has nothing to do with technology, worker attitude, or worker skill… [Looking] at some of the best American firms… [we can concluded] that the key to strategic advantage is organization: they are organized to focus on the things that motivate their own people, and organized to anticipate customer needs.”

Robert H. Waterman (1950) American writer

Robert H. Waterman (1994). What America Does Right: Learning from Companies that Put People First. W.W. Norton; Book summary .

People, World, Motivation, Falseness

“There is no question that the adult caregivers play an important role in the baby's life. It is from these older people that babies learn their first language, have their first experiences in forming and maintaining relationships, and get their first lessons in following rules. But the socialization researchers go on to draw other conclusions: that what children learn in the early years about relationships and rules sets the pattern for later relationships and later rule-following, and hence determines the entire course of their lives. I used to think so too. I still believe that children need to learn about relationships and rules in their early years; it is also important that they acquire a language. But I no longer believe that this early learning, which in our society generally takes place within the home, sets the pattern for what is to follow. Although the learning itself serves a purpose, the content of what children learn may be irrelevant to the world outside their home. They may cast it off when they step outside as easily as the dorky sweater their mother made them wear.”

Judith Rich Harris book The Nurture Assumption

The Nurture Assumption, chapter 1. http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/harris-nurture.html

Life, Children, People, World

“The personality of firms like Polaroid, Xerox, Control Data, IBM, ITT, LTV and General Motors clearly reflects aspects of company and management intent that are manifested only partially in such activities as research expenditures, choice of product line and recruitment and development of organization members.”

Kenneth R. Andrews (1916–2005) Business scholar

Source: Quote, The Concept of Strategy, 1971, p. 30

Personality

“The empirical research of the last fifteen years on the structure of large organizations seems to confirm the hypothesis of Herbert Simon that human cognitive limits are a basic limiting factor in determining organization structures.”

Jay R. Galbraith (1939–2014) American business theorist

Source: Organization design: An information processing view, 1977, p. 21

“The Management Process School : This approach to management theory perceives management as a process of getting things done through and with people operating in organized groups. It aims to analyze the process, to establish a conceptual framework for it, to identify principles underlying it, and to build up a theory of management from them. It regards management as a universal process, regardless of the type that the environment of management differs widely between enterprises and levels. It looks upon management theory as a way of organizing experience so that practice can be improved through research, empirical testing of principles, and teaching of fundamentals involved in the management process.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: "The Management Theory Jungle," 1961, p. 175-6

People, School, Way, Universe

“The fact is that the present structure of science is entrepreneurial, with individual investigative teams vying for funding from organizations that all too often have a clear stake in the outcome of the research—or appear to, which may be just as bad. This is not healthy for science.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Aliens Cause Global Warming (2003)

Appearance, Science

“In these discussions we are not asking you to accept anything on blind faith. We are definitely asking that you not immediately reject anything either. We suggest that you do some research for yourself. Just ponder the basic points, investigate them and, most importantly, try to know better how to protect yourself against subtle forces so that you will not become a casualty. If you take these simple steps, you will be one of those who helps to bring about a new era for humankind.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 3: Angels and Demigods, p. 55

Faith, Help

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People, School, Faith, Way

“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

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

1960s, Farewell address (1961)

Money, Idea, Fashion, Universe

“But the negationists are not satisfied with seeing their own version of the facts being repeated in more and more books and papers. They also want to prevent other versions from reaching the public. Therefore, in 1982 the National Council of Educational Research and Training issued a directive for the rewriting of schoolbooks. Among other things, it stipulated that: "Characterization of the medieval period as a time of conflict between Hindus and Muslims is forbidden."”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

Under Marxist pressure, negationism has become India's official policy.
1990s, Negationism in India, (1992)

Books, Education, Time, Training

“Hours of research can cut months of field work.”

E. Lee Spence (1947) German anthropologist, photographer, archaeologist, historian, photojournalist and academic

Full quote: In today's world, time is the most expensive part of an expedition. Man hours spent in the archives can cut hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of time from the field phase of most projects.
from 'About the Author' by Charles King, Treasures of the Confederate Coast: the 'Real Rhett Butler' & Other Revelations by Dr. E. Lee Spence (Narwhal Press, Charleston/Miami, 1995), p. 517.

Quotes about research page 8

Quotes about research
page 8