Quotes about task
page 5

“Moral education is the development of individuality, and individuality can not be developed by formulas and mechanical processes: it is the work of the master who brings to his task a genuine and loving interest in the individual.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 116

Love, Education

“Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.”

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

Popolo d'Italia (14 July 1920) "The Artificer and the Material," quoted in Mussolini in the Making (1938) by Gaudens Megaro, p. 326
1920s

Men

“The 'Little' or 'Barebones' Parliament, summoned by Oliver Cromwell to meet at Westminster on 4th July, 1653, after the dissolution of the remains of the Long Parliament, may have been an unpractical body, so far as the task of administration in troublous times was concerned. But it seems quite possible that the wealth of contumely and scorn which has been poured upon it was, originally, due quite as much to the fierce anger of vested interests against outspoken criticism, as to any real vagueness or want of practical wisdom in the plans of the House itself.”

Edward Jenks (1861–1939) British legal scholar

Source: A Short History Of The English Law (First Edition) (1912), Chapter XII, Civil Procedure In The Middle Ages, p. 178

Wisdom, Time, Housing, Anger

“There are two ways of considering society. According to some, the development of human associations is not subject to providential, unchangeable laws. Rather, these associations, having originally been organized in a purely artificial manner by primeval legislators, can later be modified or remade by other legislators, in step with the progress of social science. In this system the government plays a preeminent role, because it is upon it, the custodian of the principle of authority, that the daily task of modifying and remaking society devolves.According to others, on the contrary, society is a purely natural fact. Like the earth on which it stands, society moves in accordance with general, preexisting laws. In this system, there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as social science; there is only economic science, which studies the natural organism of society and shows how this organism functions.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 15-16

Law, Way, Nature, Study

“Formal theories of organization have been taught in management courses for many years, and there is an extensive literature on the subject. The textbook principles of organization — hierarchical structure, authority, unity of command, task specialization, division of staff and line, span of control, equality of responsibility and authority, etc. — comprise a logically persuasive set of assumptions which have had a profound influence upon managerial behavior.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 15 (p. 21 in 2006 edition)

Behavior, Literature

“In 2000 Fiji experienced the greatest crisis in its contemporary history … Fiji came close to complete collapse and anarchy; some form of civil war was a real possibility. This would not only have pitted Fijians against Indians but Fijians against Fijians, and Province against Province. But the country did not fall. It stepped back from the brink. It drew on its inner strength and a vein of tolerance and restraint and began the task of remaking Fiji.”

Laisenia Qarase (1941) Prime Minister of Fiji

War, History, Country

“I now began to search for a new path in art [from 1914, with the outbreak of World War 1. ]. It was a major task. I understood that I did not have to paint what I saw, not even what I felt, but only that which lived within me, in my soul. To put it in symbolic terms, it is like this: I felt within myself, within my breast, the keyboard of an organ and I had to make it resonate. And the nature that was in front of me served me only as a prompter. And that was a key that unlocked this organ and made it resonate. In the beginning it was very difficult. But little by little, it became easy for me to use colours and forms to find what was within my soul.”

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864–1941) Russian painter

In his letter, 12 June, 1938 to P. Willibrord Verkade, as quoted in Alexej von Jawlensky, der Maler und Mensch, , Clemens Weiler; Wiesbaden 1955, pp. 39 ff
1936 - 1941

War, World, Art, Soul

“Language may not determine the way we think, but it does influence the way we perceive and remember, and it affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1987, p. 15

Way, Thinking

“I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)

Men, Thinking, Sense, Sleep

“Every profession has an ideology and a drive for power that goes far beyond its achievements and it is the task of democracy to keep this ideology and this drive under control. Science is here no different from other institutions.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

pg 151.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

Democracy, Science

“The fall of communism confirms century-old libertarian claims that equity and justice cannot be imposed by force, that interpreting "to each according to work" as "to each according to the marginal revenue product of one's labor" rationalizes privilege, and that central planning stifles workers' creative potentials. Clearly, enterprises whose inputs and outputs have been determined by a central planning procedure exclude workers and consumers from decision making, separate conceptual and manual tasks, and offer unequal consumption and work opportunities. For the Soviet, East German, Polish, Czechoslovakian, and Hungarian people to reject these injustices is encouraging. But it is dishonest to say this demonstrates that capitalism is optimal. It only bespeaks a lack of alternatives.”

Robin Hahnel (1946) American economist

Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. The political economy of participatory economics. Princeton University Press, 1991. p. 3

People, Justice, Communication, Optimism

“The history of technology will record that for the first time a machine of human construction, a five-and-a-half-ton missile, covered a distance of a hundred and twenty miles with a lateral deflection of only two and a half miles from the target. Your names, my friends and colleagues, are associated with this achievement. We did it with automatic control. From the artilleryman's point of view, the creation of the rocket as a weapon solves the problem of the weight of heavy guns. We are the first to have given a rocket built on the principles of aircraft construction a speed of thirty-three hundred miles per hour by means of rocket propulsion. Acceleration throughout the period of propulsion was no more than five times that of gravity, perfectly normal for maneuvering of aircraft. We have thus proved that it is quite possible to build piloted missiles or aircraft to fly at supersonic speed, given the right form and suitable propulsion. Our automatically controlled and stabilized rocket has reached heights never touched by any man-made machine. Since the tilt was not carried to completion our rocket today reached a height of nearly sixty miles. We have thus broken the world altitude record of twenty-five miles previously held by the shell fired from the now almost legendary Paris Gun.
The following points may be deemed of decisive significance in the history of technology: we have invaded space with our rocket and for the first time--mark this well--have used space as a bridge between two points on the earth; we have proved rocket propulsion practicable for space travel. To land, sea, and air may now be added infinite empty space as an area of future intercontinental traffic, thereby acquiring political importance. This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel....
So long as the war lasts, our most urgent task can only be the rapid perfection of the rocket as a weapon. The development of possibilities we cannot yet envisage will be a peacetime task. Then the first thing will be to find a safe means of landing after the journey through space…”

Walter Dornberger (1895–1980) German general

[Dornberger, Walter, Walter Dornberger, V2--Der Schuss ins Weltall, 1952 -- US translation V-2 Viking Press:New York, 1954, Bechtle Verlag, Esslingan, p17,236]

War, World, Travel, History

“There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics, and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Hate, War, Education

“By patronizing the Yellow Church we maintain peace among the Mongols. This being an important task we cannot but protect this (religion). (In doing so) we do not show any bias, nor do we wish to adulate the Tibetan priests as (was done during the) Yuan dynasty.”

Qianlong Emperor (1711–1799) emperor of the Qing Dynasty

Inscription on the Lama Shuo stele in 1792 in the Yonghe Gong temple in Beijing Source: Lopez 1999 http://books.google.com/books?id=mjUHF7kQfVAC&pg=PA20#v=onepage&q&f=false, p. 20. Source: Berger 2003 http://books.google.com/books?id=BsyFU9FwCIkC&pg=PA35#v=onepage&q&f=false, p. 35.

Peace, Religion

“Without a deadline, the motivation to do a task is small to nonexistent.”

Robert W. Bly (1957) American writer

101 Ways to Make Every Second Count: Time Management Tips and Techniques for More Success With Less Stress (1999)

Motivation

“The task of the mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

Past, Future, Help

“We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts. If we mean to teach the capacity for independent judgement, then I am appalled by the magnitude of the task.”

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) American writer and scientist

"The Ecological Conscience" [1947]; Published in The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott (eds.) 1991, p. 343.
1940s

Education

“On the abolition of the Macedonian monarchy, the supremacy of Rome was not only an established fact from the Pillars of Hercules to the mouths of the Nile and the Orontes, but, as if it were the final decree of fate, pressed on the nations with all the weight of an inevitable necessity, and seemed to leave them merely the choice of perishing in hopeless resistance or in hopeless endurance. If history were not entitled to insist that the earnest reader should accompany her through good and evil days, through landscapes of winter as well as of spring, the historian might be tempted to shun the cheerless task of tracing the manifold and yet monotonous turns of this struggle between power and weakness, both in the Spanish provinces already annexed to the Roman empire and in the African, Hellenic, and the Asiatic territories which were still treated as clients of Rome. But, however unimportant and subordinate the individual conflicts may appear, they possess collectively a deep historical significance; and, in particular, the state of things in Italy at this period is only intelligible in the light of the reaction which the provinces exercised over the mother-country.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol. 3, pg. 1, translated by W.P. Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 3

Fate, Exercises, History, Intelligence

“For the task assigned them
Men aren't smart enough or sly
Any rogue can blind them
With a clever lie.”

Bertolt Brecht The Threepenny Opera

Polly Peachum, in "The Song of the Futility of All Human Endeavor"; Act 3, scene 1, p. 75
The Threepenny Opera (1928)

Men, Lie

“to men and women there falls the task of exploring truth with their reason, and in this their nobility consists.”

Pope John Paul II (1920–2005) 264th Pope of the Catholic Church, saint

Encyclical Fides et Ratio, 14 September 1998 Source: www.vatican.va http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

Women, Men, Truth

“Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression.
The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion.
This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man.
Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective.
His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy.
Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind — exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Foreword of "Man and his Gods" by Homer W. Smith
Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and Religion (1999)

Truth, Books, Fear, Religion

“Mercer,” Rick said.
“I am your friend,” the old man said. “But you must go on as if I did not exist. Can you understand that?” He spread empty hands.
“No,” Rick said. “I can’t understand that. I need help.”
“How can I save you,” the old man said, “if I can’t save myself?” He smiled. “Don’t you see? There is no salvation.”
“Then what’s this for?” Rick demanded. “What are you for?”
“To show you,” Wilbur Mercer said, “that you aren’t alone. I am here with you and always will be. Go and do your task, even though you know it’s wrong.”
“Why?” Rick said. “Why should I do it? I’ll quit my job and emigrate.”
The old man said, “You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

“That’s all you can tell me?” Rick said.
Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 15 (pp. 178-179)

Life, Smile, Understanding, Universe

“What am I? I am a comet
in Creator’s night infernal,
dusty grain of far-flung matter
of his labour’s task eternal.Glow upon my moment’s fleeting –
that is all I want to furnish,
song of praise for my heart’s beating –
My desire to sing I’ll burnish.Yes, I want to sing and shining
even end as I once started
in a blinking eyelid’s moment
when a flash across sky darted!Flaming heart that once pulsated,
sun apart that once was burning,
boundless love was what I wanted –
beauty’s gift, my ardent yearning.Space deserted, now surrender
to the light of my star’s beating!
my desire to sing I’ll burnish –
song of praise for life repeating.”

L. Onerva (1882–1972) Finnish poet

Translation by Rupert Moreton

Love, Life, Beauty, Star

“The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. … From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is “noble” in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the “system of free competition,” on the other hand, the notions on life’s tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No “place” is more than a transitory point in this universal chase.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 56

Life, Sense, Universe

“Why then are the arts and sciences important? I suppose with the sciences we could say that the answer is obvious: we have radium, penicillin, television and recorded sound, motor-cars and aircraft, air-conditioning and central heating. But these achievements have never been the primary intention of science; they are a sort of by-product, the things that emerge only when the scientist has performed his main task. That task is simply stated: to be curious, to keep on asking the question 'Why?' and not to be satisfied till an answer has been found. The scientist is curious about the universe: he wants to know why water boils at one temperature and freezes at another; why cheese is different from chalk; why one person behaves differently from another. Not only 'Why?' but ‘What?' What is salt made of? What are the stars? What is the constitution of all matter? The answers to these questions do not necessarily malke our lives any easier. The answer to one question—'Can the atom be split?' - has made our lives somewhat harder. But the questions have to be asked. It is man's job to be curious; it is man's job to try to find out the truth about the world about us, to answer the big question 'What is the world really like?”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Truth, World, Art, Cars

“The developing world to which we belong, above all, needs peace, because it is engaged in a historic task – the task of rectifying the imbalances created by colonialism; the task of clearing the debris of departing empires. It is, therefore, necessary to work towards a world order that is democratic and truly multilateral and based upon equity and justice.”

R. Venkataraman (1910–2009) seventh Vice-President of India and the 8th President of India

Source: Commissions and Omissions by Indian Presidents and Their Conflicts with the Prime Ministers Under the Constitution: 1977-2001, P.194.

World, Peace, Justice

“By this time I had discovered that all the gamey bits were cut out of the school texts, because I had a Shakespeare of my own; the Ontario Department of Education was hard at its impossible task of trying to educate the masses without in any permanent way inflaming their minds.”

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

Shakespeare over the Port (1960)

Education, School, Way, Time

“If we believe that the task of physics is the discovery of a timeless mathematical equation that captures every aspect of the universe, then we believe that the truth about the universe lies outside the universe.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

Truth, Mathematics, Universe

“The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions, - that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: 1940's, Beyond the Aesthetics (1946), pp. 38-39

Feeling, Sleep, Passion

“To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Across the Plains

Source: Across the Plains (1892), Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.

Fate, Family, Hope, Soul

“This sensitivity to the phenomena of recession and inflation is a symptom of an increased public awareness of both the need for and the attainability of economic progress. It is precisely because so much of current industrial and governmental practice can be better in the future that our meetings this year are focused on the broad problem of improving the performance of the American economy. However, as we go about the task of appraisal and criticism, it will be well to discipline our impatience for reform. In the measure that we avoid exaggerating our nation's failures or understating its successes, we shall make it easier for ourselves as well as for economists in other countries to see current needs and developments in a just perspective.”

Arthur F. Burns (1904–1987) American economist and diplomat

Source: "Progress Towards Economic Stability", 1969, p. 101-2

Failure, Problem, Success, Future

“If running a productive, Western-style economy were simply a matter of culture, it should be possible for African and Middle Eastern countries to import Western institutions and business methods, just as East Asian countries have done. But this is evidently not a straightforward task. Though it was justifiable at first to blame the evils of colonialism, two generations or more have now passed since most foreign powers withdrew from Africa and the Middle East, and the strength of this explanation has to some extent faded.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Business, Evil, Country

“In the past there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness and start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Intelligence, Time, Past

“We have reached a crisis in world history, a crisis which demands swift and certain action…We believe in the freedom of the democratic way of life. If we serve that idea faithfully with tenacity of purpose, we have nothing to fear from Russian Communism…Communism seizes power by force, not by free choice of the people. The democratic nations must therefore have forces with which to fight it so that choice of government may be free. In the light of these convictions our task is clear. We must firstly believe in the Western way of life and serve it steadfastly. Secondly we must build up our fighting strength to be prepared to defend our ideals, for aggressive nations understand only the threat of force. The situation is already grave, but much is possible for a nation with clear intentions and the ability to carry them into action.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

New Year Message as Conservative candidate for Dartford (29 December 1950) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/100896 1950s

Life, People, World, Fear

“Classification is thought of by many librarians as either a fearful complication of a very simply act, or an outmoded, almost prehistoric, method of doing a very complex mathematical task.”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: The Classification Research Group 1952—1962 (1962), p. 138

Fear, Mathematics

“The historian's one task is to tell the thing as it happened.”

Lucian (120) ancient Greek writer

Sect. 39; vol. 2, p. 128; H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler (trans.) The Works of Lucian of Samosata.
How to Write History

“What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Wolverhampton (23 November 1918), quoted in The Times (25 November 1918), p. 13
Prime Minister

Country

“The general systems movement has taken up the task of helping scientists unravel complexity, technologists to master it, and others to learn to live with it.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975, p. 3; Quote in: Dieter Spath, Walter Ganz (2008) The Future of Services: Trends and Perspectives. p. 226

Learning, Help

“The viewpoint of the formalist must lead to the conviction that if other symbolic formulas should be substituted for the ones that now represent the fundamental mathematical relations and the mathematical-logical laws, the absence of the sensation of delight, called "consciousness of legitimacy," which might be the result of such substitution would not in the least invalidate its mathematical exactness. To the philosopher or to the anthropologist, but not to the mathematician, belongs the task of investigating why certain systems of symbolic logic rather than others may be effectively projected upon nature. Not to the mathematician, but to the psychologist, belongs the task of explaining why we believe in certain systems of symbolic logic and not in others, in particular why we are averse to the so-called contradictory systems in which the negative as well as the positive of certain propositions are valid.”

L. E. J. Brouwer (1881–1966) Dutch mathematician and logician

as translated by Arnold Dresden from: Brouwer, L. E. J. (1913). Intuitionism and formalism. Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, 20(2), 81–96. (quote on p. 84)

Law, Mathematics, Nature

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

People, Age, Knowledge, Time

“To be like other people is the real condition of happiness. Sea air and diversions are producing this miraculous effect upon me. What you need is just the contrary. You are dying of boredom from what most mortals regard as bliss – having nothing to do. You need the treatment opposite to mine; I am not joking in the very least: one has to be compelled to some task, driven to it: anyone who is not a drunken brute must achieve boredom at all costs unless he can discover the secret of a taste for amusements... These reflections.... are not likely to comfort you, but they will change your frame of mind for a few minutes. I shall probably be back in Paris on Thursday…”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

1831 - 1863
Source: a letter to Madame de Forget, Dieppe, 13 September 1852; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 68

Happiness, People, Secret, Change

“No task is more urgent than that of preserving peace. Without peace our independence means little. The rehabilitation and upbuilding of our countries will have little meaning. Our revolutions will not be allowed to run their course....”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Peace, Country

“In industrial marketing settings, the relationship between buyer and seller is frequently long term, close and involving a complex pattern of interaction between and within each company. The marketers' and buyers' task in this case may have more to do with maintaining these relationships than with making a straightforward sale or purchase.”

Håkan Håkansson

H. Hakansson (1982), International Marketing and Purchasing of Industrial Goods: An Interaction Approach. London: John Wiley and Sons, p. 14; as cited in : Christian Homburg (2001, 16)

“One part of the dreams of the eighteenth century intellectuals was realized: the resources of nature did yield a magnificent harvest. But the thinkers who helped to tap these resources… failed to attend, detained in their studies and laboratories, lost in their dreams and calculations, seeking new fields, co-ordinating old and new, spinning abstract theories… the thinkers were unequal to the task of developing these vast resources, most of which they had themselves uncovered. The shrewd declassés, who had… the world to gain, pioneered this development and took possession of the earth.”

Tobias Dantzig (1884–1956) American mathematician

Henri Poincaré, Critic of Crisis: Reflections on His Universe of Discourse (1954), Ch. 2. The Age of Innocence

World, Dreams, Nature, Study

“The abstract properties of this mapping are defined precisely, and its appropriateness and adequacy for the task at hand are demonstrated.”

David Marr (1945–1980) British neuroscientist and psychologist

p, 24
Vision, 1982

“They don’t believe in liberty. They don’t believe in China before the Communists. There is only one simple, clear task: to protect their control, to maintain their governing. Which is such a pity.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Wines, Michael. “ China’s Impolitic Artist, Still Waiting to Be Silenced http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/world/asia/28weiwei.html?pagewanted=all.” New York Times, November 28, 2009. 2000-09, 2009

“…under extremely difficult circumstances (Iraq) pursues the inherently complicated task of rebuilding the country. Yet Iraq continues, courageously, to reach for the promise of a democratic, federal and pluralistic state, where generations of oppressed Iraqis will regain their dignity, freedom and the right to join the civilized and progressive nations of the world.”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

Olivia Ward (September 23, 2006) "Keep U.S., British forces in Iraq, says Talabani", The Toronto Star, p. A12.

World, Courage, Freedom, Country

“The assumption that we would ever be called upon to perform this second task now appeared quite clearly to me as the most extravagant folly, based on a wild delusion conceived by a raving idiot.”

Michael Shea book Nifft the Lean

Part 3, Chapter 8 (p. 140)
Nifft the Lean (1982)

Appearance

“The task of immune cells is to recognize foreignness. And fight with it. An implanted foreign organ, or its fragment, is undoubtedly a foreign body. The immune system therefore begins to fight it. However, now immunopressives – and therefore immunosuppressants – are so effective that rejection of transplants is inhibited.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Mazurek, Maria (7 July 2017): Cudowna armia, która broni naszego ciała http://plus.gazetakrakowska.pl/magazyn/a/cudowna-armia-ktora-broni-naszego-ciala,12271571. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

Fight

“Asimov: I don't know of any science fiction writer who really attempts to be a prophet. Such authors accomplish their tasks not by being correct in their predictions, necessarily, but merely by hammering home—in story after story—the notion that life is going to be different.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life, Home, Science

“I think there's a time to work, and everyone has to kind of adjust. And then there's a time to relax, and be the mom or take the kids on vacation when you need to wind down. So it's a matter of planning, and being able to map out your year or your week or let's start with the day. It is just being multi-tasking and being available.”

Vanessa L. Williams (1963) American actress, singer and former Miss America

Vanessa Williams: 'Vacation' http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vanessa-williams-vacation/ (April 6, 2004)

Moms, Thinking, Time

“The imperative of plasticity requires that advances in productive or destructive powers be achieved through the subversion of fixed plans of social division and hierarchy and of stark contrasts between task setting and task following. All possible combinations have to be tried out, as quickly and as freely as possible. The only structure that can be allowed to subsist is one that offers the fewest obstacles to this principle of pitiless recombination.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Plasticity Into Power: Comparative-Historical Studies on the Institutional Conditions of Economic and Military Success (1987), p. 208

“It is not the task of the University to offer what society asks for, but to give what society needs.”

Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) Dutch computer scientist

Dijkstra (2000), "Answers to questions from students of Software Engineering" http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1305.PDF (EWD 1305). 2000s

Universe

“Firmly impressed in his own mind, that it was utterly vain for a soul to hope for salvation unless it believed in Jesus, the Virgin, the saints and holy martyrs; he brought heart and soul to his task; and the more he saw of Marie, the more painfully did he deplore her blind infatuation, and the more ardently desire, to save her from the eternal perdition which, as a Jewess, must await her.”

Grace Aguilar (1816–1847) Novelist, writer

Source: The Vale of Cedars (1850), Chapter VI

Hope, Soul, Heart

“The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct universal conditions of possible mutual understanding.”

Jürgen Habermas (1929) German sociologist and philosopher

Source: On the Pragmatics of Communication, 1998, p. 21

Understanding, Universe

“The idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet—someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be “selfish” unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be.”

Parker Palmer (1939) American theologian

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999)

Life, Feeling, Idea, Strong

“The United States has a tremendous responsibility to act according to the measure of our power for good in the world. We have learned that we must earn the peace we seek just as we earned victory in the war, not by wishful thinking but by realistic effort. At no time in our history has unity among our people been so vital as it is at the present time. Unity of purpose, unity of effort, and unity of spirit are essential to accomplish the task before us.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe (1948)

War, People, World, Peace

“Socrates compared living without thinking systematically to practicing an activity like pottery or shoemaking without following or even knowing of technical procedures. One would never imagine that a good pot or shoe would result from intuition alone; why then assume that the more complex task of directing one’s life could be undertaken without any sustained reflection on premises or goals? Perhaps because we don’t believe that directing our lives is in fact complicated. Certain difficult activities look very difficult from the outside, while other equally difficult activities look very easy. Arriving at sound views on how to live falls into the second category, making a pot or a shoe into the first.”

Alain de Botton book The Consolations of Philosophy

Source: The Consolations of Philosophy (2000), p. 21.

Life, Shoe, Imagination, Thinking

“For a cap and bells our lives we pay,
Bubbles we earn with a whole soul's tasking:
'Tis heaven alone that is given away,
'Tis only God may be had for the asking.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Prelude to Pt. I, st. 4
The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848)

God, Soul

“Afterwards, when Clavain tried to imaging how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not amongst them.”

Alastair Reynolds (1966) British novelist and astronomer

The Great Wall of Mars (p. 37)
Short fiction, Galactic North (2006)

“Our task is not so much discovery as re-discovery. What one needs is not so much thinking as remembering. Sometimes it suffices to sit quietly and listen well, when venerable men have thought before us. Constant forgettings of truths once perceived are the very charm of the human mind; the history of human thought is nothing more than the story of these forgettings and rememberings and forgettings again.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

On the Wisdom of America (1950), p. xiv

Men, Truth, History, Thinking

“A spontaneous, passionate, yet just, true-meaning man! Full of wild faculty, fire and light; of wild worth, all uncultured; working out his life-task in the depths of the Desert there.”

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

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

Life, Light, Passion

“The e-economy cannot function without workers able to navigate, both technically and in terms of content, this deep sea of information, organizing it, focusing it, and transforming it into specific knowledge, appropriate for the task and purpose of the work process.”

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

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

Knowledge, Sea

“When I use a direct manipulation system—whether for text editing, drawing pictures, or creating and playing games—I do think of myself not as using a computer but as doing the particular task. The computer is, in effect, invisible. The point cannot be overstressed: make the computer system invisible.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 6, p. 185.

Game, Thinking, Drawing

“The work organization of the new seam was, to us, a novel phenomenon consisting of relatively autonomous groups interchanging roles and shifts and regulating their affairs with a minimum of supervision. Cooperation between task groups was everywhere in evidence, personal commitment obvious, absenteeism low, accidents infrequent, productivity high. The contrast was large between the atmosphere and arrangements on these faces and those in the conventional areas of the pit, where the negative features characteristic of the industry were glaringly apparent. The men told us that in order to adapt with best advantage to the technical conditions in the new seam, they had evolved a form of work organization based on practices common in the unmechanized days when small groups, who took responsibility for the entire cycle, had worked autonomously.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 8

Men, Personality

“Reason has never really directed social reality, but now reason has been so thoroughly purged of any specific trend or preference that it has finally renounced even the task of passing judgment on man’s actions and way of life. Reason has turned them over for ultimate sanction to the conflicting interests to which our world actually seems abandoned.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 9.

Life, World, Way, Reality

“The social democracy of Germany must fulfill the role of champions of political freedom. The task of uniting the struggle for economic independence with that for political liberty has fallen upon the German laboring class.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Democracy, Freedom

“Entering a cell, penetrating deep as a flying saucer to find a new galaxy would be an honorable task for a new scientist interested more in the inner state of the soul than in outer space.”

Dejan Stojanovic (1959) poet, writer, and businessman

Inner Space http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/21400/Inner_Space From the poems written in English

Soul, Flying

“We cannot hope to give here a final clarification of the essence of fact, judgement, object, property; this task leads into metaphysical abysses; about these one has to seek advice from men whose name cannot be stated without earning a compassionate smile—e. g. Fichte.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Das Kontinuum. Kritische Untersuchungen uber die Grundlagen der Analysis (1918), as quoted/translated by Erhard Scholz, "Philosophy as a Cultural Resource and Medium of Reflection for Hermann Weyl" http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0409596 (2004)

Men, Smile, Hope

“I stand on the threshold of new missions and life is making new demands upon me. No matter what further tasks I shall be carrying out, it is perfectly clear to me that the complete liberation of the working woman and the creation of the foundation of a new sexual morality will always remain the highest aim of my activity, and of my life.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Life

“I had long admired the Chief Justice Sir Timoci Tuivaga for his many fine personal qualities and his courageous commitment to principles after the 1987 coups. To write adversely of his conduct after the events of May 19, 2000 was a painful experience, but a task I felt I could not evade.”

Vijay R. Singh (1931–2006) Fijian politician

Speaking Out (2006)

Pain, Justice, Courage, Personality

“When Christianity came into the world the task was simply to proclaim Christianity. The same is the case wherever Christianity is introduced into a country the religion of which is not Christianity.
In "Christendom" the situation is a different one. What we have before us is not Christianity but a prodigious illusion, and the people are not pagans but live in the blissful conceit that they are Christians. So if in this situation Christianity is to be introduced, first of all the illusion must be disposed of.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1850s, Attack upon Christendom (1855), p. 97

People, World, Religion, Country

“Himmler was certainly banal, but he was also baroque, steaming around in a special train and diverting large amounts of the Third Reich's increasingly thin resources to such 'tasks' as proving scholastically that the Japanese were Aryans. How could you show all that and be believed? The whole Nazi reality was a caricature. The more precisely you evoke it, the less probable it looks.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews

Reality, Training

“[Integration is defined as] the process of achieving unity of effort among the various subsystems in the accomplishment of the organization's task.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Variant: [Integration is defined as] the process of achieving unity of effort among the various subsystems in the accomplishment of the organization's task.
Source: Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration, 1967, p. 4

Effort

“the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty enacted in by the Knesset in 1992, to anchor in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state two strands – the Jewish heritage and the democratic tradition… and it is the task of the courts to interweave them into the synthesis indicated by the Basic Law”

Menachem Elon (1923–2013) Israeli High Court judge

see: Menachem Elon, English translation of Jewish Law : History, Sources, Principles / Jewish Publication Society, 1994

Law

“Taylor’s friend Henry Gantt explains to his fellow engineers in the middle of the First World War that they must "develop a task system on the basis of democracy that will yield as good, or better, results than those now in operation under autocracy"”

Henry Gantt (1861–1919) American engineer

Source: Industrial leadership, 1916, p. 53 as cited in: Thibault Le Texier (2011) "Management Is By Nature Knowledge Management: Taylor, Scientific Management and the Early Organization of Knowledge".

War, World, Democracy

“Fixing America is not an insurmountable task. It's actually about putting people first rather than politics. I wouldn't be involved in this if I didn't think that we can make a difference, and that it is easy, it's really easy to be principled and put the issues first and politics last.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Introduction to Gary Johnson
YouTube
2011-08-23
http://youtu.be/9XsRN5CWKrc
2012-02-24
Sound Government

People, Thinking

“Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, "How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?" and avoid "How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?"”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)
Letters and interviews

Nature, Help

“Almost 3 years have elapsed since the end of the greatest of all wars, but peace and stability have not returned to the world. We were well aware that the end of the fighting would not automatically settle the problems arising out of the war. The establishment of peace after the fighting is over has always been a difficult task. And even if all the Allies of World War II were united in their desire to establish a just and honorable peace, there would still be great difficulties in the way of achieving that peace.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe (1948)

War, World, Peace, Way

“As I have coached hundreds of individuals in the workplace, I have discovered that we waste precious time by delaying and procrastinating. We might know that the work is very urgent and important but we still might find ourselves being slow to start the task.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

page 100 p.102 Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), Successful Recruitment in a Week (2012) https://books.google.ae/books?idp24GkAsgjGEC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIGjAA#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Managing Teams in a Week (2013) https://books.google.ae/books?idqZjO9_ov74EC&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIIDAB#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse, Secrets of Success at Work – 50 techniques to excel (2014) https://books.google.ae/books?id4S7vAgAAQBAJ&printsecfrontcover&dqnigel+cumberland&hlen&saX&ved0ahUKEwjF75Xw0IHNAhULLcAKHazACBMQ6AEIJjAC#vonepage&qnigel%20cumberland&ffalse

Time

“Humanity-attached-to-the-task-of-changing-the-world, which is only a single and fragmentary aspect of humanity, will itself be changed in humanity-as-entirety.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxviii

World, Change

“It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation. My interests were aroused, and my faith in the cliches of the subject destroyed, as so often with other subjects, by the discussions with my friend, Aaron Director. This wonderful man is that rarest of scholars: a clear-headed, imaginative, erudite man who enjoys the task of constructing luminous and original theories but does not even write them down!”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"George J. Stigler - Biographical," 1982

Faith, Imagination, Study

“The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.”

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

Kenneth Boulding in the foreword of: Fred Polak (1972) The image of the future http://storyfieldteam.pbworks.com/f/the-image-of-the-future.pdf, p. V 1970s

Knowledge, Decision, Past, Future

“To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries — this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation

Wisdom, Color, Way, Future

“But as long as we know what comprises our vital interests and our long-range goals, we have nothing to fear from negotiations at the appropriate time, and nothing to gain by refusing to take part in them. At a time when a single clash could escalate overnight into a holocaust of mushroom clouds, a great power does not prove its firmness by leaving the task of exploring the other's intentions to sentries or those without full responsibility. Nor can ultimate weapons rightfully be employed, or the ultimate sacrifice rightfully demanded of our citizens, until every reasonable solution has been explored. "How many wars," Winston Churchill has written, "have been averted by patience and persisting good will! …. How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands!"”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1961, Address at the University of Washington

War, Fear, Time, Parting

“He was decisive and wholehearted in everything he did, so intent non the task at hand that he never looked over his shoulder, even if his cloak got caught in a thorny bush. When he did turn to speak to somebody, he used to swing his entire body and dress him full face. When he shook hands, he was never the first to withdraw his own. He inspired such confidence that he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable One.”

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

Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Times
Muhammad: A Biography of The Prophet (2001)

Confidence, Decision

“The whole history of the world shows that the Indian intellect is second to none. This must be proved by the performance of a task beyond the power of others, the seizing of the first place in the intellectual advance of the world. Is there any inherent weakness that would make it impossible for us to do this? Are the countrymen of Bhaskaracharya and Shankaracharya inferior to the countrymen of Newton and Darwin? We trust not. It is for us, by the power of our thought, to break down the iron walls of opposition that confront us, and to seize and enjoy the intellectual sovereignty of the world.”

Sister Nivedita (1867–1911) Scots-Irish social worker, author, teacher and a disciple of Swami Vivekananda

[The Spiritual Daughter Of Swami Vivekananda, http://www.srichinmoylibrary.com/books/0945/2/11, 21 June 2012]

World, History

“In the judgment of design engineers, the ordinary means of communicating with a computer are entirely inadequate. […] Graphical communication in some form or other is of vital importance in engineering as that subject is now conducted; we must either provide the capability in our computer systems, or take on the impossible task of training up a future race of engineers conditioned to think in a different way.”

Maurice Wilkes (1913–2010) British computer scientist

Sect. 4: Design and Assembly
"Computers Then and Now" (1968)

Way, Communication, Thinking, Future

“Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 154.

Truth, Reality, Falseness, Madness

“All poets face the same task to 'follow the prompts' and satisfactorily shape the amorphous sounds, rhythms, images or phrases by which a potential poem is recognised.”

Dennis O'Driscoll (1954–2012) Irish poet, critic

Poetry Quotes

“One foundation for the future of American democracy is a sound administrative system, able to discharge with competence and integrity the tasks laid upon it by the people. The present system is far in advance of that which sufficed in 1925, but its improvement has no more than kept pace with the added responsibilities heaped upon it.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. vii (in 1948 edition), as cited in: Moynihan (2009)

People, Democracy, Future

“On Vince Cable: But he's charming and northern; he's the man tasked with crushing the poor in their own accent, isn't he really?”

Jeremy Hardy (1961–2019) British comedian

The News Quiz series 72 episode 1, BBC Radio 4, 24 September 2010

““Machines!” the Clerk said scornfully. “We have many of them, some exquisitely complex. But event the best of them are much like idiot savants. They do adequately on tedious straightforward tasks like building stars or destroying planets. But give them something tough, like solacing a widow, and they simply go to pieces. Would you believe it, the largest computer in our section can landscape an entire planet; but it cannot fry an egg or carry a tune, and it knows less about ethics than a newborn wolf cub. Would you want something like that to run your life?”
“Of course not,” Carmody said. “But couldn’t someone build a machine with creativity and judgment?”
“Someone has,” the Clerk said. “It has been designed to learn from experience, which means that it must make errors in order to arrive at truths. It comes in many shapes and sizes, most of them quite portable. Its flaws are readily apparent, but seem to exist as necessary counterweights to it virtues. No one has yet improved on the basic design, though many have tried. This ingenious device is called ‘intelligent life.’””

Robert Sheckley book Dimension of Miracles

Source: Dimension of Miracles (1968), Chapter 3 (pp. 25-26)

Life, Truth, Error, Star

“The peculiar (or own) value that such and such activity can have for a man rather really depends ("dépend bien plutôt", Fr.) on the spirit in which it was deployed (or displayed, - "déployée", Fr.) than its importance or its scope. Thus the most humble work (or task, - "besogne", Fr.) can be accomplished by a great genius, whereas the highest functions (or offices), such as to rule over a whole people, can be practised in a petty”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

or mean or stingy) spirit of personal glorification, as it is frequently seen.", Fr.
Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 49.

People, Dependency, Personality