Quotes about standardization
page 6

“I am glad that the life of pandas is so dull by human standards, for our efforts at conservation have little moral value if we preserve creatures only as human ornaments; I shall be impressed when we show solicitude for warty toads and slithering worms.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"How Does a Panda Fit?", p. 21
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

Life, Effort

“I humbly accept the Centennial Nobel Peace Prize. Forty years ago today, the Prize for 1961 was awarded for the first time to a Secretary-General of the United Nations — posthumously, because Dag Hammarskjöld had already given his life for peace in Central Africa. And on the same day, the Prize for 1960 was awarded for the first time to an African — Albert Luthuli, one of the earliest leaders of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. For me, as a young African beginning his career in the United Nations a few months later, those two men set a standard that I have sought to follow throughout my working life.”

Kofi Annan (1938–2018) 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations

Nobel lecture (2001)

Life, Men, Peace, Time

“We can testify to these opinions, not by our words but by our actions. Our country can not exist on the renunciation of the heroic souls of the past. Public service, from the action of the humblest voter to the most exalted office, can not be made a mere matter of hire and salary. The supporters of our institutions must be inspired by a more dominant motive than a conviction that their actions are going to be profitable. We can not lower our standards to what we think will pay, but we must raise them to what we think is right. It is only in that direction that we shall find true patriotism. It is only by that method that we can maintain the rights of the individual, the sovereignty of the States, the integrity of the Union, the permanency of peace, and the welfare of mankind. You soldiers of the Republic enrolled under her banner that through your sacrifices there might be an atonement for the evils of your day. That is the standard of citizenship for all time. It is the requirement which must be met by those who hold public place. That must be the ideal of those who are worthy to share in the glory which you have given to the name of America, the ideal of those who hold fellowship with Washington and Lincoln.”

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

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Peace, Soul, Motivation, Support

“Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question; and that many profess to be entirely devoted to it, who have no good works to produce in support of their pretensions. The catholic poetical church, too, has worked but few miracles since the first ages of its establishment; and has been more prolific, for a long time, of doctors than of saints: It has had its corruptions, and reformation also, and has given birth to an infinite variety of heresies and errors, the followers of which have hated and persecuted each other as cordially as other bigots.”

Francis Jeffrey, Lord Jeffrey (1773–1850) British politician

Review of Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer, in the Edinburgh Review (October 1802)

Hate, Age, Religion, Law

“The story begins with a somewhat disgruntled hero, who perceived of the world as populated with stupid people, everywhere committing the environmental fallacy. The fallacy was a case not merely of the “mind’s falling into error,” but rather of the mind leading all of us into incredible dangers as it first builds crisis and then attacks crisis.
Like all heroes, this one looked about for resources, for aids that would help in a dangerous battle, and he found plenty of support – in both the past and the present. It won’t hurt to summarize the story thus far. If the intellect is to engage in the heroic adventure of securing improvement in the human condition, it cannot rely on “approaches,” like politics and morality, which attempt to tackle problems head-on, within the narrow scope. Attempts to address problems in such a manner simply lead to other problems, to an amplification of difficulty away from real improvement. Thus the key to success in the hero’s attempt seems to be comprehensiveness. Never allow the temptation to be clear, or to use reliable data, or to “come up to the standards of excellence,” divert you from the relevant, even though the relevant may be elusive, weakly supported by data, and requiring loose methods.
Thus the academic world of Western twentieth century society is a fearsome enemy of the systems approach, using as it does a politics to concentrate the scholars’ attention on matters that are scholastically respectable but disreputable from a systems-planning point of view.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach and Its Enemies (1979), p. 145; cited in C. WEST CHURCHMAN: CHAMPION OF THE SYSTEMS APPROACH http://filer.case.edu/nxb41/churchman.html, 2004-2007 Case Western Reserve University

People, Stupidity, World, Error

“In the 1850s and 18605 the modern commodity dealer who purchased directly from the farmer and sold directly to the processor took over the marketing and distribution of agricultural products. In the same years the full-line, full-service wholesaler began to market most standardized consumer goods. Then in the 1 870s and 188os the modern mass retailer — the department store, the mail-order house, and the chain store — started to make inroads on the wholesaler's markets.”

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918–2007) American historian

Source: The Visible Hand (1977), p. 209.

Housing

“The inductive-reasoning system I have described above consists of a multitude of “elements” in the form of belief-models or hypotheses that adapt to the aggregate environment they jointly create. Thus it qualifies as an adaptive complex system. After some initial learning time, the hypotheses or mental models in use are mutually co-adapted. Thus we can think of a consistent set of mental models as a set of hypotheses that work well with each other under some criterion—that have a high degree of mutual adaptedness. Sometimes there is a unique such set, it corresponds to a standard rational expectations equilibrium, and beliefs gravitate into it. More often there is a high, possibly very high, multiplicity of such sets. In this case we might expect inductive reasoning systems in the economy—whether in stock-market speculating, in negotiating, in poker games, in oligopoly pricing, in positioning products in the market—to cycle through or temporarily lock into psychological patterns that may be non-recurrent, path-dependent, and increasingly complicated. The possibilities are rich.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem) (1994), p. 8

Game, Thinking, Learning, Time

“When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.”

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

Rock My Soul (2003)

Life, People, Beauty

“Since dreams are influenced by the predominant activities and mental preoccupations of the waking state, in order to attract higher beings you must engage in consciously higher activities. If we spend our days speaking verbal garbage and engaging in activities that do harm to ourselves and other living entities, why would any being of a higher vibration want to associate with us in our dreams or other- wise? Thus, if we raise the vibrations of our surroundings by meditating and acting according to a higher standard, utilizing prayer and focusing on helping others, we will be guided by those whose role it is to assist souls in their spiritual development.”

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 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 29

Dreams, Soul, Help

“We are so proud of our guarantees of freedom in thought and speech and worship, that, unconsciously, we are guilty of one of the greatest errors that ignorance can make — we assume our standard of values is shared by all other humans in the world.”

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

As quoted in Strategies of Containment : A Critical Appraisal of Post-war American National Security Policy (1982) by John Lewis Gaddis
1960s

World, Error, Freedom

“We all travelled light, taking with us only what we considered to be the bare essentials of life. When we opened our luggage for Customs inspection, the contents of our bags were a fair indication of character and interests. Thus Margo's luggage contained a multitude of diaphanous garments, three books on slimming, and a regiment of small bottles each containing some elixir guaranteed to cure acne. Leslie's cases held a couple of roll-top pullovers and a pair of trousers which were wrapped around two revolvers, an air-pistol, a book called Be Your Own Gunsmith, and a large bottle of oil that leaked. Larry was accompanied by two trunks of books and a brief case containing his clothes. Mother's luggage was sensibly divided between clothes and various volumes on cooking and gardening. I travelled with only those items that I thought necessary to relieve the tedium of a long journey: four books on natural history, a butterfly net, a dog, and a jam jar full of caterpillars all in imminent danger of turning into chrysalids. Thus, by our standards, fully equipped, we left the clammy shores of England.”

Gerald Durrell book My Family and Other Animals

On the family's move from England to Corfu
My Family and Other Animals (1956)

Life, Books, Dogs, Travel

“When the environs of Orchha became the site of the royal standards, an ordinance was issued authorising the demolition of the idol temple, which Bir Singh Deo had erected at a great expense by the side of his private palace, and also the idols contained in it…”

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Orchha (Madhya Pradesh) Shahjahan-Nama The Shahjahan Nama of ‘Inayat Khan, translated by A.R. Fuller and edited and compiled by W.E. Beyley and Z.A. Desai, OUP, Delhi, 1090, p. 161.

“The paucity of its vocabulary and syntax is for the Beats essentially expressive of withdrawal from the standard civilization and its learning. On the other hand this paucity gives, instead of opportunities for thought and problem solving, considerable satisfaction in the act and energy of speaking itself, as is true of any simple adopted language, such as pig Latin. But this can have disadvantages. One learns to one’s frustration that they regard talk as an end in itself, as a means of self-expression, without subject matter. In a Beat group it is bad form to assert or deny a proposition as true or false, probable or improbable, or to want to explore its meaning.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

(describing the language of the “Beat” generation, p. 175.
Growing Up Absurd (1956)

Problem, Learning, Falseness

“Money is only important for what it will procure. Thus a change in the monetary unit, which is uniform in its operation and affects all transactions equally, has no consequences. If, by a change in the established standard of value, a man received and owned twice as much money as he did before in payment for all rights and for all efforts, and if he also paid out twice as much money for all acquisitions and for all satisfactions, he would be wholly unaffected.”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), Social Consequences of Changes in The Value of Money (1923)

Money, Effort, Change

“In a word, CLEANTHES, a man who follows your hypothesis is able perhaps to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance; and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him. You justly give signs of horror, DEMEA, at these strange suppositions; but these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are CLEANTHES’s suppositions, not mine. From the moment the attributes of the Deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot, for my part, think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is, in any respect, preferable to none at all.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Philo to Demea, Part V
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Death, Age, World, Thinking

“These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact, any more than life is planned or compact. They are often too long, too full of incident, too crowded with character, a medley of fact and fiction as to material, and a medley of romance and realism as to method, so that an impossible event of magic or dream may be described with such exact semblance of detail that one is compelled to belief against all reason”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

The Chinese Novel (1938)

Life, Dreams, Perfection

“One of its [the First World War’s] most certain results will be the partial destruction of the aristocratic classes everywhere in northern Europe … This will tend to realize the standardization of type so dear to democratic ideals. If equality cannot be obtained by lengthening and uplifting the stunted of body and of mind, it can be at least realized by the destruction of the exalted of stature and of soul.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 173.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

War, World, Soul

“There is little doubt that the observation that quality may depend on price (productivity on wages; default probability on interest rates) has provided a rich mine for economic theorists: A simple modification of the basic assumptions results in a profound alteration of many of the basic conclusions of the standard paradigm. The Law of Supply and Demand has been repealed. The Law of the Single Price has been repealed. The Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics has been shown not to be valid.
More than that, the theories that we describe here provide the basis of progress toward a unification of macroeconomics and microeconomics. They pro vide an explanation of unemployment and credit rationing, derived from basic microeconomic principles. It is a theory in which the extensive idleness that periodically confronts society's resources, human and capital, is seen as but the most obvious example of market failures that prevasively and persistently distort the allocation of resources.”

Joseph E. Stiglitz (1943) American economist and professor, born 1943.

"The Causes and Consequences of The Dependence of Quality on Price", Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1987)

Law, Failure, Dependency

“Muhammad became the archetypal example of that perfect submission to the divine, and Muslims, as we shall see, would attempt to conform to this standard in their spiritual and social lives. Muhammad was never venerated as a divine figure, but he was held to be the Perfect Man. His surrender to God had been so complete that he had transformed society and enabled the Arabs to live together in harmony. The world Islam is etymologically related to salam (peace), and in these early years Islam did promote cohesion and concord.”

Karen Armstrong (1944) author and comparative religion scholar from Great Britain

Islam: A Short History (2000), Chapter 1: Beginnings

God, World, Peace, Perfection

“Now I know the public's perception is equally important and I am willing to hold myself to the highest moral standards.”

Wang Ju-hsuan (1961) Taiwanese politician

Wang Ju-hsuan (2015) cited in " Wang vows to move out of controversial housing http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2015/11/27/2003633429" on Taipei Times, 27 November 2015.

“Let's bear in mind that the chances to multiply wealth are unlimited. All people can become rich. There is an error in our understandings - that all people cannot become equally rich. Wealth can not exist where the people are busy with mutual cheating, have no time for creating values and wealth. It is remarkable that we can find the greatest number of wealthy tradesmen and a population on a high standard of living in countries with a high level of business morality. On the other hand, we can find poor tradesmen and entrepreneurs and an impoverished population in countries with a low standard of business morality. This is natural because these people concentrate on cheating one another instead of trying to create value.
We are granting you the profit share not because we feel a need to give money to the people just out of the goodness of the heart. No, we are aiming at other goals by this step. By this measure we want to reach a further decrease of production costs. We want to reach the situation that the shoes are cheaper and workers earn even more. We think that our products are still too expensive and worker's salary too low.”

Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932) Czech businessman

Attributed to Tomáš Baťa in: Rybka, Zdeněk. Principles of the Bata Management System. Tomas Bata University, Faculty of Management and Economics, 2013.
Attributed to Tomas Bata

Money, People, Shoe, Error

“Alexander Bain was probably the first modern thinker whose primary concern was with psychology itself He has been credited with writing the first 'comprehensive treatise having psychology as its sole purpose'. His two-volume systematic work, The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859), was the standard British text for almost half a century, until Stout's replaced it. He also founded Mind (1876-), the first psychological journal in any country. His work requires close attention, because it is the meeting-point of experimental sensory-motor physiology and the association psychology. His influence on the conceptions of later workers was direct and extremely important. Ferrier studied classics and philosophy under Bain at Aberdeen (first class honours, 1863). When he and Jackson acknowledge their intellectual debts or make references to psychology, the names most often mentioned are Bain and Spencer-the figures whose work was the culmination of the association psychology in its traditional form.”

Robert Maxwell Young (1935–2019) American medical historian

Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, 1970. p. 101

Sense, Study, Country

“Remember the Italian steward who put on women's clothes and so filched a seat in a lifeboat? "A cur in human shape, certainly he was born and saved to set a new standard by which to judge infamy and shame.”

William S. Burroughs book The Western Lands

Source: The Western Lands (1987), p. 6

Women, Clothes

“Jaspers sees the historical meaning of existential philosophy as a struggle to awaken in the individual the possibilities of an authentic and genuine life, in the face of the great modern drift toward a standardized mass society.”

William Barrett (philosopher) book Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy

Source: Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958), Chapter Two, The Encounter With Nothingness, p. 28

Life

“The revolution in scientific ideas just mentioned is primarily logical. It is due to recognition that the very method of physical science, with its primary standard units of mass, space, and time, is concerned with measurements of relations of change, not with individuals as such.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Idea, Science, Change, Time

“The approach to the study of economic history that dominates the presentation of the subject in this volume is that of the economist whose immediate and primary function is to study the production and distribution of wealth with the objective of learning how the nation's economic progress can be promoted and its standard of living advanced. It can be called the functional approach to economic history. Although the narrative should provide such knowledge of the general background of economic history as is needed for most purposes in the interpretation of political history, and has frequently been turned aside to indicate the reactions thus involved, this has been a secondary rather than a primary consideration in the selection and organization of the material. Some material has been included because it served certain of the other objectives mentioned in the introductory chapter, though for the most part these objectives are served also by the material primarily of significance in relation to the major objective.”

Chester W. Wright (1879–1966) American economic historian

Chester W. Wright (1941). Economic History of the United States, p. xi-xii " Wright (1941)

History, Knowledge, Study, Learning

“When you are very young, you tend to accept standards for such momentous judgments as to whether a girl is beautiful; when you reach the age of experience you come to know beauty in the sense that “knowing” is to possess. Beauty does more than reflect light, it is the action of energy on form, glowing as a total function. This is singularly true of a grouse dog in his consecration to his bird.”

George Bird Evans (1906–1998) American writer

An Affair with Grouse (1982)

Age, Beauty, Dogs, Girl

“Editions and Revisions. The printed Bible text of Luther had the same fate as the written text of the old Itala and Jerome's Vulgate. It passed through innumerable improvements and mis-improvements. The orthography and inflections were modernized, obsolete words removed, the versicular division introduced (first in a Heidelberg reprint, 1568), the spurious clause of the three witnesses inserted in 1 John 5:7 (first by a Frankfurt publisher, 1574), the third and fourth books of Ezra and the third book of the Maccabees added to the Apocrypha, and various other changes effected, necessary and unnecessary, good and bad. Elector August of Saxony tried to control the text in the interest of strict Lutheran orthodoxy, and ordered the preparation of a standard edition (1581). But it was disregarded outside of Saxony.
Gradually no less than eleven or twelve recensions came into use, some based on the edition of 1545, others on that of 1546. The most careful recension was that of the Canstein Bible Institute, founded by a pious nobleman, Carl Hildebrand von Canstein (1667-1719) in connection with Francke's Orphan House at Halle. It acquired the largest circulation and became the textus receptus of the German Bible.
With the immense progress of biblical learning in the present century, the desire for a timely revision of Luther's version was more and more felt. Revised versions with many improvements were prepared by Joh.- Friedrich von Meyer, a Frankfurt patrician (1772-1849), and Dr. Rudolf Stier (1800-1862), but did not obtain public authority.
At last a conservative official revision of the Luther Bible was inaugurated by the combined German church governments in 1863, with a view and fair prospect of superseding all former editions in public use.”

Philip Schaff (1819–1893) American Calvinist theologian

Luther's Bible club

Fate, Books, Learning, Change

“He [Chomsky] has now been impeached by his own standards, since scrutiny of the evidence does not bear him out on Serbia or Afghanistan or Iraq. It didn't bear him out on Cambodia either, though he was never a "Holocaust denier" or anything like it. And he has, I think, ceased to be of any use to young people who might pardonably doubt the official story. The position he took, comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to an admittedly criminal Clintonian strike on Sudan (and virtually concluding that the latter was worse!) showed the absolute exhaustion of the glib "double standards" school, as I point out extensively in Love, Poverty and War. But his decline and fall is a loss, and you miss the point by denying it.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"Love, Poverty and War" http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=C78DC231-4599-4745-9CA5-A398398916A0, FrontPageMagazine.com (2004-12-29): On Noam Chomsky 2000s, 2004

Love, War, People, World

“Although there was much to criticize in American domestic and foreign policy, what struck me was the one-sidedness, unfairness, and systematic use of the double standard in the attacks against the United States and South Vietnam. … He called upon the United States "to denazify itself," but not North Vietnam or China. What practices in the United States, compared to the barbarous practices of Cuba or of China or of North Vietnam, warrant such a characterization? In those countries how long would one survive who whispered the kind of criticisms Chomsky was perfectly free to broadcast in the United States and be rewarded for it?”

Sidney Hook (1902–1989) American philosopher

Out of Step (1985)

Country

“Earlier contentions that the right hemisphere is not even conscious largely gave way by the mid seventies to an intermediate position conceding that the mute hemisphere may be conscious at some lower elemental levels, but claiming that it lacks the higher, reflective, self-conscious kind of inner awareness that is special to the human mind and is needed, so it is said, to qualify the right conscious system as a "self' or "person". Self awareness in particular is reported, on the basis of mirror tests mainly, to be a predominantly human attribute and is rated by developmental as well as by evolutionary standards to be a highly advanced phase of conscious awareness.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

Nobel lecture (1981)

Way, Personality

“How many Microsoft employees does it take to screw in a light bulb?" The answer to that is none because Bill Gates has declared darkness the new standard.”

Guy Kawasaki (1954) American businessman and author

Speech at Stanford University 2 March 2011 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2669

Light

“However much the theory of political realism may have been misunderstood and misinterpreted, there is no gainsaying its distinctive intellectual and moral attitude to matters political.
Intellectually, the political realist maintains the autonomy of the political sphere, as the economist, the lawyer, the moralist maintain theirs. He thinks in terms of interest defined as power, as the economist thinks in terms of interest defined as wealth; the lawyer, of the conformity of action with legal rules; the moralist, of the conformity of action with moral principles. The economist asks: "How does this policy affect the wealth of society, or a segment of it?" The lawyer asks: "Is this policy in accord with the rules of law?" The moralist asks: "Is this policy in accord with moral principles?" And the political realist asks: "How does this policy affect the power of the nation?" (Or of the federal government, of Congress, of the party, of agriculture, as the case may be.)
The political realist is not unaware of the existence and relevance of standards of thought other than political ones. As political realist, he cannot but subordinate these other standards to those of politics.”

Hans Morgenthau book Politics Among Nations

Six Principles of Political Realism, § 6.
Politics Among Nations (1948)

Law, Thinking, Wealth

“To countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy: "Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the love of money is the root of all evil." Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase and expansion, became the goal of the Christian's efforts.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Part IV, Ch. 4
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Love, Life, Money, World

“Ashtadhyayi Sanskrit treatise on grammar was written in the 6th to 5th century BCE by the Indian grammarian Panini. This work set the linguistic standards for Classical Sanskrit. It sums up in 4,000 sutras the science of phonetics and grammar that had evolved in the Vedic religion. Panini divided his work into eight chapters, each of which is further divided into quarter chapters, beyond defining the morphology and syntax of Sanskrit language.”

Pāṇini ancient Sanskrit grammarian

Encyclopedia Britannica in: Panini Indian grammarian http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/441324/Panini, britannica.com.

Religion, Science

“The advent of Atombomb into a world of varying moral standards and uncertain international friendships has made everyone aware for the first time of the awful fact that, if the world ever lost its spiritual and moral equilibrium, it was now possible completely to eliminate life itself.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

During his scholarly lecture tours as a philosopher, in Ghana, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Life, Friendship, World, Time

“If all the theories pertinent to systems engineering could be discussed within a common framework by means of a standard set of nomenclature and definitions, many separate courses might not be required.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Source: A Mathematical Theory of Systems Engineering (1967), p. vi; cited in: Jack Murph Pollin (1969) Theoretical Foundations for Analysis of Teleological Systems. p. 63.

“These are strange times, when we are healthier than ever but more anxious about our health. According to all the standard benchmarks, we've never had it so healthy. Longevity in the West continues to rise -- a typical British woman can now expect to live to seventy-nine, eight years more than just half a century ago, and over double the life expectation when Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Break the figures down a bit and you find other encouraging signs even in the recent past; in 1950, the UK experienced 26,000 infant deaths; within half a century that had fallen by 80 per cent. Deaths in the UK from infectious diseases nearly halved between 1970 and 1992; between 1971 and 1991 stroke deaths dropped by 40 per cent and coronary heart disease fatalities by 19 per cent -- and those are diseases widely perceived to be worsening.”

Roy Porter (1946–2002) British historian

Introduction, lead paragraph; as cited nytimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/porter-benefit.html 1998 The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (1997)

Life, Death, Health, Disease

“The Uniﬁed Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is used to specify, visualize, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. It captures decisions and understanding about systems that must be constructed. It is used to understand, design, browse, conﬁgure, maintain, and control information about such systems. It is intended for use with all development methods, lifecycle stages, application domains, and media. The modeling language is intended to unify past experience about modeling techniques and to incorporate current software best practices into a standard approach. UML includes semantic concepts, notation, and guidelines. It has static, dynamic, environmental, and organizational parts. It is intended to be supported by interactive visual modeling tools that have code generators and report writers. The UML speciﬁcation does not deﬁne a standard process but is intended to be useful with an iterative development process. It is intended to support most existing object-oriented development processes.”

Ivar Jacobson (1939) Swedish computer scientist

James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, & Grady Booch (1999) The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. p. 1.

Understanding, Support, Decision, Past

“I am very conscious that you can't condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours. Just as we don't look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can't find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Giles Whittell, " The world according to Richard Dawkins http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/science/article4191347.ece" (), The Times, quoted in Trevor Grundy, " Richard Dawkins Pedophilia Remarks Provoke Outrage http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/richard-dawkins-pedophilia_n_3895514.html" (), The Huffington Post.

People, Way, Childhood, Personality

“Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?”

Stewart Brand book Whole Earth Discipline

Whole Earth Discipline (2009), page 277.

Tear, Housing

“The people who live here [in and around Davos] are proud. The hard work, which is done with great love, the way they treat animals (you very seldom see an animal being mishandled) entitle them to be proud. In most cases, work here has reached the ideal standard of being done with love. You can see it in the movements of their hands. And that, in turn, ennobles the facial expression and imbues all personal contacts with a great delicacy.”

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

Quote, c. 1920; as cited by Kornfield, E. W.; Stauffer, Christine E. Stauffer (1992), Biography Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Kirchner Museum Davos. Retrieved March 21, 2016; from Wikipedia: Kirchner
1920's

Love, People, Way, Animals

“It is these double standards that have and are still keeping the ordinary Fijian shackled to a now outdated system of feudal control, thus contributing to their poverty and misery, whilst certain chiefs and a large number of Fijian elites continue to substantially increase their wealth at the expense of their poorer subjects.”

Mahendra Chaudhry (1942) Fijian politician

Reaction to Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase's address to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association in Nadi, 31 August 2005

Wealth

“The problems of hunger and food, unemployment, a growing and crushing price rise in the commodities needed for one’s day-to-day subsistence have naturally found angry expressions, sometimes violent expression in many parts of the country. Corruption and falling standard in administration and public life have added to their dimension.”

V. V. Giri (1894–1980) Indian politician and 4th president of India

Source: Presidents of India, 1950-2003, P.83

Life, Hunger, Food, Nature

“By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers don't pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy. At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“Life in the Oink Sector,” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=516 WorldNetDaily.com, September 25, 2009. 2000s, 2009

Money

“Here, India will be a global player of considerable political and economic impact. As a result, the need to explicate what it means to be an Indian (and what the ‘Indianness’ of the Indian culture consists of) will soon become the task of the entire intelligentsia in India. In this process, they will confront the challenge of responding to what the West has so far thought and written about India. A response is required because the theoretical and textual study of the Indian culture has been undertaken mostly by the West in the last three hundred years. What is more, it will also be a challenge because the study of India has largely occurred within the cultural framework of America and Europe. In fulfilling this task, the Indian intelligentsia of tomorrow willhave to solve a puzzle: what were the earlier generations of Indian thinkers busy with, in the course of the last two to three thousand years? The standard textbook story, which has schooled multiple generations including mine, goes as follows: caste system dominates India, strange and grotesque deities are worshipped in strange andgrotesque ways, women are discriminated against, the practice of widow-burning exists and corruption is rampant. If these properties characterize India of today and yesterday, the puzzle about what the earlier generation of Indian thinkers were doing turns into a very painful realization: while the intellectuals of Europeanculture were busy challenging and changing the world, most thinkersin Indian culture were apparently busy sustaining and defendingundesirable and immoral practices. Of course there is our Buddha andour Gandhi but that is apparently all we have: exactly one Buddha and exactly one Gandhi. If this portrayal is true, the Indians have butone task, to modernize India, and the Indian culture but one goal: to become like the West as quickly as possible.”

S. N. Balagangadhara (1952) Indian philosopher

Foreword by S. N. Balagangadhara in "Invading the Sacred" (2007)
Source: Balagangadhara, S.N. (2007), "Foreword." In Ramaswamy, de Nicolas & Banerjee (Eds.), Invading the Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America . Delhi: Rupa & Co., pp. vii–xi.

Women, Pain, World, School

“The Roman de la Rose is the end of true mediæval poetry […] Our age calls it false taste, and no doubt our age is right;— every age is right by its own standards as long as its standards amuse it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Adams specifies that he refers "only to the Roman of William of Lorris, which dates from the death of Queen Blanche and of all good things, about 1250". He describes the rather cynical continuation by Jean de Meung, about 1300, as "beyond our horizon".
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Age, Falseness

“In the last centuries of the empire, educational standards and literacy had fallen. In the dulled heads of the masses, distracted by cheap food and the barbaric spectacles of the coliseums, the values on which Rome had been founded and the ancient rationalism of the Greeks had been replaced by mysticism and superstition. It was—Honorius had explained to his pupil—as if a whole culture was losing its mind. People were forgetting how to think, and soon they would forget they had forgotten. And, to Honorius’s thinking, Christianity only exacerbated that problem.
“You know, Augustine warned us that belief in the old myths was fading—even a century and a half ago, as the dogma of the Christians took root. And with the loss of the myths, so vanishes the learning of a thousand years, which are codified in those myths, and the monolithic dogmas of the Church will snuff out rational inquiry for ten more centuries. The light is fading, Athalric.””

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 15 “The Dying Light” section III (p. 502)

People, Education, Food, Problem

“She was by some standards slovenly, failing to see any virtue in made beds, since, as she put it, you are either asleep or somewhere else. On her birthdays she was sad. This tradition traced to earliest childhood, when she had consistently misinterpreted her birthday parties to mean that she was dying. Why else would the world be going to such exorbitant lengths to cheer her up?
Science was her first love. Long after the preschool years, she aspired to know the why of everything. Why babies had a Babinski reflex, and why the reflex disappeared. Why people licked their upper lips when concentrating, and why there was humor. Tez wanted to understand light. She wanted to solve mud, decipher rocks, and unlock grass.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 4 (p. 48)

Love, People, World, Sadness

“It's sort of root and branch, some of our agencies are taking. Every single regulation they have ever done, they are looking at it over and over again, and hopefully, sometimes it's gonna be cleaning things out. There are regulations that are no longer used, right? Does that have an effect? Maybe not, but at least it's some sort of process where we get rid of setting standards for things that don't even exist anymore. All of this allows us to redirect resources from this useless amount of compliance, the time we spend and they spend on dealing with this and redirect it to providing resources and care to where it should be directed. When you look at it, we say we're giving billions of dollars to a hospital; they may be able to hire more nurses or doctors or buy more drugs, be able to provide more charity care. They are gonna be able to liberate those resources and put them where they're supposed to go. It's a benefit on jobs as well.”

Eric Hargan (1968) American civil servant

Acting HHS chief: Opioid epidemic is 'the crisis of our time' http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/acting-hhs-chief-opioid-epidemic-is-the-crisis-of-our-time/article/2642232 (December 4, 2017)

Time

“In this world, the question has already been asked. The world has already started to face the problems, the problems which are vital for the human race. There is no need to discuss the problems, but I would like to present my opinion. In the midst of all this, I still sincerely think that this Knowledge, the Knowledge of God, the Knowledge of our Creator, is our solution. Many people might not think so, and carry a completely different opinion, but my opinion is that since man came on this planet earth, he has always been taking from it. Remember, this planet Earth is not infinite, it is finite, and though it has a lot to give, it is limited. Maybe now we can somehow manage to stagger along, cutting our standards of living, cutting gas, reducing the speed limit more, but the next very terrifying question is What about the future? I think this Knowledge which I have to offer this world, free of charge, is the answer. For if everybody can understand that everybody is a brother and sister, and this world is a gift, not a human-owned planet, and have the true understanding of such, we'll definitely bring peace, tranquillity, love and Grace, which we need so badly. I urge this world to try. I do not claim to be God, but do claim I can establish peace on this Earth by our Lord's Grace, and everyone's joint effort.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Proclamation for 1975, signed Sant Ji Maharaj the name by which Prem Rawat was known at that time. Divine Times (Vol.4 Issue.1, February 1, 1975)
1970s

Love, God, People, World

“When asked why she thought there was deterioration in standards and expectations of art, she suggested it was the result of the fuss generated around young dancers, the pressures to perform at an early debut, and the indiscriminate acclaim given to young dancers before they had found their feet.”

Balasaraswati (1918–1984) Indian dancer

On her abhinaya (the art of expression'). Dance readings and musings Balasaraswati: Her Art and Life, 1 December 2013, Narthaki.com http://www.narthaki.com/info/bookrev/bkrev1a.html, Quote

Art

“The Benthamic standard of "the greatest happiness" was that which I had always been taught to apply; I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on Government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, deduced from phrases like "the law of nature," "right reason," "the moral sense," "natural rectitude," and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments upon others under cover of sounding expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before, that Bentham's principle put an end to all this. The feeling rushed upon me, that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873), Ch. 3: Last Stage of Education and First of Self-Education (pp. 45-46)

Happiness, Law, Feeling, Nature

“Politicians may initially find it difficult to accept new standards of public accountability, but we must make the costs of not doing so even greater. The best way to do this is by publicly embarrassing and shaming those officials and departments who refuse to answer to the public.”

Heather Brooke (1970) American journalist

Page 286.
Your Right to Know: A Citizen's Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, 2nd Edition

Way

“All potential energy exists in the ether. It may vibrate, and it may rotate, but as regards locomotion it is stationary—the most stationary body we know: absolutely stationary, so to speak; our standard of rest.”

Oliver Lodge (1851–1940) British physicist

The Ether of Space https://books.google.com/books?id=ycgEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA118, p. 118 The Ether of Space (1909)

“As for it's results, they have been, by the grace of Allah, positive and enormous, and have, by all standards, exceeded all expectations. This is due to many factors, chief among them, that we have found it difficult to deal with the Bush administration in light of the resemblance it bears to the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half which are ruled by the sons of kings and presidents.
Our experience with them is lengthy, and both types are replete with those who are characterised by pride, arrogance, greed and misappropriation of wealth. This resemblance began after the visits of Bush Sr to the region.
At a time when some of our compatriots were dazzled by America and hoping that these visits would have an effect on our countries, all of a sudden he was affected by those monarchies and military regimes, and became envious of their remaining decades in their positions, to embezzle the public wealth of the nation without supervision or accounting.
So he took dictatorship and suppression of freedoms to his son and they named it the Patriot Act, under the pretence of fighting terrorism. In addition, Bush sanctioned the installing of sons as state governors, and didn't forget to import expertise in election fraud from the region's presidents to Florida to be made use of in moments of difficulty.”

Osama bin Laden (1957–2011) founder of al-Qaeda

Full transcript of bin Ladin's speech http://www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html Aljazeera, (01 Nov 2004) 2000s, 2004

Hope, Fraud, Freedom, Light

“Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth: to bring the poverty-stricken segments of the world up to a decent living standard, without recourse to war or punitive action against those already in material comfort; to provide for a maturing civilization the basic energy vital to its survival.”

Gerard O'Neill (1927–1992) Physicist, author, and inventor

The High Frontier (1976)

War, World, Problem, Wealth

“A man full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society otherwise constituted than he finds it, but a good patriot and a true politician always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Country

“Heisenberg finds that facts of observation lead uniquely and inevitably to the theoretical structure known as matrix mechanics. This shows that the total radiation in any region of empty space can change only by a single complete quantum at a time. Thus not only in the photo-electric phenomenon, but in all other transfers of energy through space, energy is always transferred by complete quanta; fractions of a quantum can never occur. This brings atomicity into our picture of radiation just as definitely as the discovery of the electron and its standard charge brought atomicity into our picture of matter and of electricity.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Photo, Change, Time

“We want a better America, an America that will give its citizens, first of all, a higher and higher standard of living so that no child will cry for food in the midst of plenty. We want to have an America where the inventions of science will be at the disposal of every American family, not merely for the few that can afford them. An America that will have no sense of insecurity and which will make it possible for all groups, regardless of race, creed, or color to live in friendship, to be real neighbors; an an America that will carry its great mission of helping other countries to help themselves, thinking not in terms of exploitation, but of creating plenty abroad so we can all enjoy it here in America.”

Sidney Hillman (1887–1946) American labor leader

Speech, reported in The New Republic, Vol. 115 (1946), p. 379

Friendship, Family, Food, Color

“Therapists probably can't ethically do it, and they may have anti-deception provisions in their standards of conduct. But bad governments, bad people, they don't have requirements of conduct. When we recently published a study about planting false memories among U. S. soldiers, I was worried we were putting out a recipe for how you can do horrible things to somebody and then wipe their memory away.”

Elizabeth Loftus (1944) American cognitive psychologist

I could have sworn...Why you can’t trust your memory https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929310-400-i-could-have-sworn-why-you-cant-trust-your-memory/ (8/21/2013)

People, Study, Memory, Falseness

“The descriptive sciences rely on skill and connoisseurship. At all these points the act of knowing includes an appraisal; and this personal coefficient, which shapes all factual knowledge, bridges in doing so the disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity. It implies the claim that man can transcend his own subjectivity by striving passionately to fulfil his personal obligations to universal standards.”

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

Source: Personal Knowledge (1958), p. 17

Knowledge, Universe, Passion, Science

“The Nazis were ‘convinced that evil-doing in our time has a morbid force of attraction,’ Bolshevik assurances inside and outside Russia that they do not recognize ordinary moral standards have become a mainstay of Communist propaganda, and experience has proven time and again that the propaganda value of evil deeds and general contempt for moral standards is independent of mere self-interest, supposedly the most powerful psychological factor in politics.”

Hannah Arendt book The Origins of Totalitarianism

Part 3, Ch. 1 § 1.
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Evil, Time

“The individual under socialism, despite apparent standardization, is more complete.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

“Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate) the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equipment and products come to be rated on a scale of money values, which has only a circuitous and often only a putative relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their serviceability. Those occupations and those aptitudes that yield good returns in terms of price are reputed valuable and commendable, — the accepted test of success, and even of serviceability, being the gains acquired. Workmanship comes to be confused with salesmanship, until tact, effrontery and prevarication have come to serve as a standard of efficiency, and unearned gain is accepted as the measure of productiveness.”

Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) American academic

Source: The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, 1914, p. 349

Money, Business, Sense, Success

“4th. Savings in labor: (a) By the lowness of the walls… (b) in the use of unskilled labor in building walls, by backing the face stones with concrete, and placing the face stones in the forms dry without the use of mortar, except for pointing… (c) in the simplification of woodwork, especially in the hanging of windows and doors, and in the setting of trim… (d) in the application of hardware, chiefly on account of the kind of hinges used… (e) in the standardization of parts and the use of similar members… (f) by cutting about one-half the labor in the installation of plumbing drainage… and (g) by the greater use of machine and shop work, which the exposed structural members permit of.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Introduction
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Parting

“(Gardner) writes about various kinds of cranks with the conscious superiority of the scientist, and in most cases one can share his sense of the victory of reason. But after half a dozen chapters this non-stop superiority begins to irritate; you begin to wonder about the standards that make him so certain he is always right. He asserts that the scientist, unlike the crank, does his best to remain open-minded. So how can he be so sure that no sane person has ever seen a flying saucer, or used a dowsing rod to locate water? And that all the people he disagrees with are unbalanced fanatics? A colleague of the positivist philosopher A. J. Ayer once remarked wryly "I wish I was as certain of anything as he seems to be about everything."”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Martin Gardner produces the same feeling.
Source: The Quest For Wilhelm Reich (1981), pp. 2-3

People, Feeling, Sense, Water

“Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul;
The mind's the standard of the man.”

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English hymnwriter, theologian and logician

"False Greatness" in Horae Lyricae Book II (1706).
Compare: "I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man", Seneca, On a Happy Life (L'Estrange's Abstract), chap. i
&: "It is the mind that makes the man, and our vigour is in our immortal soul", Attributed uncertainly to Ovid
1700s

Soul

“Today the changes that are generating enormous inequality, progressively destroying "real jobs" with security and benefits, demanding longer and longer hours and at least two incomes per household as prerequisites for a minimally middle-class existence, and depriving people of control over their work even in the professional classes are taking place in the absence of any credible opposition to the free-market dogma that rules the day. On the contrary, the capitalist triumphalists are riding high on a wave of "prosperity" that has enriched a minority of the population while obscuring the long-term slippage of our standard of living and our quality of life.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"How Now, Iron Johns?", The Nation (13 December 1999)

Life, People, Change

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, & Booch (1999) The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. p. 1

Understanding, Support, Decision, Past

“Holders of public offices should set salutary example of rectitude and of high standards of personal conduct and accountability.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, P.233.

Personality

“Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader. and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf. Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today but last week you already found me guilty. You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice.”

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

" Galloway v the US Senate: transcript of statement http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1616578,00.html", The Times, May 18, 2005 Testimony before the US Senate on May 17, 2005.

World, Justice, Idea, Question

“So whether information represents one man's sentimental archive, the accumulating knowledge base of the human-machine civilization, or the mind files stored in our brains, what can we conclude about the ultimate longevity of software? The answer is simply this: Information lasts only so long as someone cares about it. The conclusion that I've come […] is that there is no set of hardware and software standards existing today, nor any likely to come along, that will provide any reasonable level of confidence that the stored information will still be accessible […] decades from now.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 329

Confidence, Knowledge

“Because truths of different kinds exhibit the characteristics of incommensurability (their difference is such that they cannot be measured by a single standard or reduced to members of one series) and incompossibility (their difference is such that they cannot co-exist within the same system), such openness introduces both multiplicity and contradiction, and the creature in question stands “divided against himself.””

David L. Norton (1930–1995) American philosopher

Source: Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (1976), pp. 9-10

Truth, Question

“In this constant battle which we call living, we try to set a code of conduct according to the society in which we are brought up, whether it be a Communist society or a so-called free society; we accept a standard of behaviour as part of our tradition as Hindus or Muslims or Christians or whatever we happen to be. We look to someone to tell us what is right or wrong behaviour, what is right or wrong thought, and in following this pattern our conduct and our thinking become mechanical, our responses automatic. We can observe this very easily in ourselves.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1960s, (1969)

Thinking, Parting

“Then, in 1998, I had the chance to talk with Steve Jobs after he’d come back and turned Apple around. I was there to help Telecom Italia try to do a deal with Apple, but after that business was completed I couldn’t help asking a question. “Steve,” I said, “this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the personal-computer business says that Apple will always have a small niche position. The network externalities are just too strong to upset the de facto “Wintel” standard. So what are you trying to do? What’s the longer-term strategy?”
He didn’t agree or disagree with my assessment of the market. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing.””

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

About strategy starts with identifying changes, and companies taking position (2)
"McKinsey Quarterly interview," 2007

Smile, Question, Business, Strong

“The Bodhisattva lives by the sufferer’s standard, and he must be effective in aiding those who suffer.”

Gary Snyder (1930) American poet

"Buddhism and the Coming Revolution" (1961, 1969)

Suffering

“A high proportion of the population enjoys many of the ‘luxuries’ which until recently were considered the prerogative of the rich; and the ordinary worker lives at what even two decades ago would have been considered in Britain a middle-class standard of life.”

Anthony Crosland book The Future of Socialism

The Future of Socialism by Anthony Crosland.
The Future of Socialism (1956)

Life

“The Founding Fathers, those who wrote the Constitution and founded the American Republic, they understood the benefits of sound money and the evils of paper money. They’ve put America on a gold standard from the very birth of the republic and we should heed their wise - they were very learned men. I think they were much more educated and understanding about economics then the people who lead the U. S. today. So, to try to suggest that we will have less robust economy if we went back to gold standard - mostly, that’s propaganda from Central Bankers and politicians, who want to scare us from going back to something that works, because when you go back to free market, the politicians and bankers will lose their power, and they want to maintain their power by scaring people into thinking that if we just go back to freedom and market forces, that’s somehow is going to be bad and we have to surrender our freedoms to politicians and bankers because they know much better than the market. They can define the proper rate of interest and they can manage the money supplier, centrally planning the economy, and it’s going to be more effective than free market capitalism - and that is just not the case.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/peter-schiff-for-us-senate/http://rt.com/shows/sophieco/190800-economy-dollar-financial-armageddon/
Economic Views

Men, Money, People, Education

“I am not here concerned with intent, but with scientific standards, especially the ability to tell the difference between a fact, an opinion, a hypothesis, and a hole in the ground.”

Serge Lang (1927–2005) mathematician

"HIV and AIDS: Have We Been Misled?; Questions of Scientific and Journalistic Responsibility," http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/slquestions.htm Yale Scientific (Fall 1994), reprinted in Challenges (Springer, 1997, ISBN 0387948619, p. 70

“Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of a company's operation model… The key to effective enterprise architecture is to identify the processes, data, technology, and customer interfaces that take the operating model from vision to reality.”

Jeanne W. Ross (1958) American computer scientist

Source: Enterprise architecture as strategy, 2006, p. 47

Business, Reality

“I’ve stayed interested in Hamilton not because he was a standard-issue hero, but because of his complications; he was self-destructive, had a highly problematic personality, and was often extreme in his politics. I don’t like hero history. It does the study of history a disservice on a thousand different levels. It’s far more interesting to study complicated people and the history they helped to shape.”

Joanne B. Freeman (1962) US historian and tenured professor of History and American Studies at Yale University

In conversation: Joanne Freeman on Alexander Hamilton the man and 'Hamilton' the musical https://news.yale.edu/2016/08/11/conversation-joanne-freeman-alexander-hamilton-man-and-hamilton-musical

People, History, Study, Help

“By forbearing to march behind the yin-yang flag at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, the South Korean athletes are making a bigger sacrifice than the North Koreans, in whose iconography the banner of the DPRK ranks lower than the party standard, which in turn ranks much lower than the Supreme Commander's standard, the flag of the personality cult.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, On the February 8 Parade and the Olympics (February 2018)

Personality

“Though the destinations differ, the roads leading there would look the same, if road infrastructures are standardized. Senator Chiz Escudero's Senate Bill 2886 seeks to regulate and standardize all road infrastructures, including street signs and sidewalks, from the poorest barangays to the richest enclaves. The bill will not only improve aesthetics in all areas, it will also promote road safety in a country known as having one of the worst road conditions in the world.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2015, August 16). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10153505589600610/ 2015, Facebook

World, Country

“The collapse of the standard of living, engineered as result of macro-economic policy, is without precedent in Russian history: " We had more to eat during the Second World War."”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 16, The "Thirdworldization" of the Russian Federation, p. 241

War, World, History

“Staff standards are not theological abstractions, but scientific approximations, and are evolved for the use of the line, the sole justification of the standards being that they will make line work more efficient. Staff standards being for the benefit of the line and often entrusted to line officials, must be put in the form of permanent instructions so that all may understand what is being aimed at, and deviations by the line be noted and reprimanded.”

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

Source: Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages, p. 70; Cited in: Morgen Witzel (2003) Fifty Key Figures in Management. p. 79

Understanding

“The earlier political thinkers used the term "organization" in the broadest sense of the term, that is, with reference to the widest aspects of the patterns of political forces in a given state. Thus a political society might be organized as a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy, as a city-state, feudal state, a national state, imperial state, or a world state. Emphasis was also placed on the organs of organization. These came to be standardized in the course of time under the categories of legislative, executive, and judicial organs, the combination of which in some form of balance was held to be the indispensable basis of sound organization.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

170 ; as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 220-1
Systematic Politics, 1943

World, Democracy, Sense, Time

“Mandingo is racist trash, obscene in its manipulation of human beings and feelings, and excruciating to sit through in an audience made up largely of children, as I did last Saturday afternoon. The film has an "R" rating, which didn't keep many kids out, since most came with their parents… if [Chicago] believes Mandingo should be shown to children, then there are no possible standards left and the only thing to do is transfer the censors to the parks department, where they can supervise paper‑plate‑ throwing contests.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/mandingo-1975 of Mandingo (25 July 1975) Reviews, Zero star reviews

Children, Feeling, Parent

“The low dive had set a standard that only middle-aged hooligans could remember and to which they looked back as Mrs Lot at Sodom.”

Quentin Crisp book The Naked Civil Servant

Source: The Naked Civil Servant (1968), Ch. 26

Age

“Ever since language allowed human cultural evolution to impinge upon age-old processes of biological evolution, humankind has been in a position to upset older balances of nature in quite the same fashion as disease upsets the natural balance within a host's body. Time and again, a temporary approach to stabilization of new relationships occurred as natural limits to the ravages of humankind upon other life forms manifested themselves. Yet, sooner or later, and always within a span of time that remained miniscule in comparison with the standards of biological evolution, humanity discovered new techniques allowing fresh exploitation of hitherto inaccessible forms of life.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.1.

Life, Age, Disease, Fashion

“In America's ideal of freedom, the public interest depends on private character — on integrity and tolerance toward others and the rule of conscience in our own lives. Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self.
That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran and the varied faiths of our people. Americans move forward in every generation by reaffirming all that is good and true that came before — ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today and forever.”

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

2000s, 2005, Second Inaugural Address (January 2005)

Life, People, Truth, Family

“It is the foundation of my Government's mission to build a modern, compassionate and just society in Scotland. A society where we not only meet our immediate needs, but ensure that all can share in the benefits of prosperity. And a Scotland that is ever conscious of its global responsibilities - promoting peace, supporting international development and protecting our environment. Building this society and instilling these values in our population requires the highest standards of teaching in our education system - and a strong ethical dimension.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Cardinal Winning Lecture (February 2, 2008)

Education, Peace, Support, Strong

“Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.”

Cyril Connolly (1903–1974) British author

'Loser Take All', Sunday Times, p. 5 (27 May 1956)

World, Religion, Way, Problem

“The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.”

Grace Hopper (1906–1992) American computer scientist and United States Navy officer

Attributed to Hopper, without source, in The UNIX-HATERS Handbook http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf (1994), edited by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann ISBN 1-56884-203-1, p. 9, this is most commonly attributed to Andrew Tanenbaum, as it appears in his book Computer Networks (1981), p. 168, but has also been attributed to Patricia Seybold and Ken Olsen. Disputed

“By standardization is meant the reduction of any one line to fixed types and sizes. Thus in the case of the manufacturer of shoes he selects a few types that, in his opinion, will find favor in the market. But each foot is not measured and a shoe of the required type made to these measurements. A limited number of sizes of each type is manufactured, these sizes being selected, by previous experience, so that any average man can find a pair that will fit him. The same holds true for the case of electric motors discussed above, and in fact for the entire field of manufactured products.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 42

Shoe

“It’s not like my standards are that high to begin with. As someone who has spent the greater part of a decade being sexually neglected because I don’t perform gender properly, my standards are comically low. You don’t have to be talented to get in my pants. You don’t have to be charming or funny or witty or able to make great conversation to make me fall for you. You don’t have to have a well-furnished apartment or a beautiful house in order to take me home. Just tell me that you don’t believe in the gender binary, let me know that you want to put it in, and I am pretty much yours.”

Jacob Tobia (1991) american LGBTIQ activist

Sissy Diaries: The Harsh Realities of Dating for Gender-Nonconforming Femmes https://www.them.us/story/sissy-diaries-dating-while-nonbinary (April 25, 2018).

Beauty, Home, Parting, Housing

“When the afiairs of this tract was settled, the royal army marched, in the year 592 h., (1196 a. d.) "towards Galewar (Gwalior), and invested that fort, which is the pearl of the necklace of the castles of Hind, the summit of which the nimble-footed wind from below cannot reach, and on the bastion of which the rapid clouds have never cast their shade, and which the swift imagination has never surmounted, and at the height of which the celestial sphere is dazzled."…In compliance with the divine injunction of holy war, they drew out the bloodthirsty sword before the faces of the enemies of religion…Solankh Pal who had raised the standard of infidelity, and perdition, and prided himself on his countless army and elephants, and who expanded the fist^ of oppression from the hiding place of deceit, and who had lighted the flame of turbulence and rebellion, and who had fixed the root of sedition and enmity firm in his heart, and in the courtyard of whose breast the shrub of tyranny and commotion had shot forth its branches, when he saw the power and majesty of the army of Islam," he became alarmed and dispirited. " Wherever he looked, he saw the road of flight blocked up."”

Muhammad of Ghor (1160–1206) Ghurid Sultan

He therefore " sued for pardon, and placed the ring of servitude in his ear," and agreed to pay tribute...
About the capture of Gwalior. Hasan Nizami. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 227-228 Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.

War, Religion, Imagination, Light

“Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. (Cheers.) It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds. It is for this process that Mr. MacDonald asks us to make ourselves responsible. We are to render these tyrannies possible by lending to their authors money to pay for the ammunition to murder the Georgians, to enable the Soviet sect to keep its stranglehold on the dumb Russian nation, and to poison the world, and so far as they can, the British Empire, with their filthy propaganda. (Cheers.) That is what we are asked to take upon ourselves. It is an outrage on the British name.”

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

Speech in Edinburgh (25 September 1924), quoted in The Times (26 September 1924), p. 14
Early career years (1898–1929)

Money, People, World, History

“Death is a terrible provocation. It appears almost everywhere, presenting a stern but effective scale for both values and ethical standards.”

Peter Wessel Zapffe (1899–1990) Norwegian philosopher, mountaineer, and author

Source: The Last Messiah (1933), To Be a Human Being https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4m6vvaY-Wo&t=1110s (1989–90)

Death, Appearance

“The coordination of information technology management presents a challenge to firms with dispersed IT practices. Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources.
Here we explore three major mechanisms for facilitating inter-unit coordination of IT management: structural design approaches, functional coordination modes, and computer-based communication systems. We define these various mechanisms and their interrelationships, and we discuss the relative costs and benefits associated with alternative coordination approaches.
To illustrate the cost-benefit tradeoffs of coordination approaches, we present a case study in which computer-based communication systems were used to support team-based coordination of IT management across dispersed business units. Our analysis reveals possibilities for future approaches to IT coordination in large, dispersed organizations.”

Gerardine DeSanctis (1954–2005) American organizational theorist

Gerardine DeSanctis and Brad M. Jackson (1994) "Coordination of information technology management: Team-based structures and computer-based communication systems." Journal of Management Information Systems Vol 10 (4). p. 85-110. Abstract

Communication, Business, Support, Study

Quotes about standardization page 6

Quotes about standardization
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