Quotes about testing
page 10

“The test of any scheme of factory organization is the extent to which it creates and fosters the atmosphere and spirit of cooperation and good-will, without in any sense lessening the loyalty of the worker to his own class and its organizations.”

Edward Cadbury (1873–1948) British businessman

Introduction, p. vii
Experiments in industrial organization (1912)

Sense, Loyalty

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

and may Allah bless you and grant you success in these examinations – but even in the Akhirah we ask Allah to bless you, to open your doors. To prepare for the Akhirah, it's not an easy task, but with the hope in the mercy of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala things will be made easy, and at the same time, with the constant preparation, without giving up hope – never ever giving up, never saying no, never just throwing the towel – by the will of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala we will achieve, and we will achieve great heights. "Exams in Life - Never Give Up - Mufti Menk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4w4pak66V0, YouTube (2013) Lectures

Life, Death, People, World

“Hysteria will not help us to solve the problem that confronts us. We overstate the danger when we say that twelve millions seek, because of post-war conditions abroad, to come immediately to America. Ending June 30, 1914, the year's immigration figures were 1,218,480. Then came the war and a vast slump, from which we are just recovering. Calculations placed immigration statistics for the current year as 1,079,428—figures still below the prewar status. But even though we need have no grave fears, now is the time for a careful reexamination and revision of our immigration policies. We should have no more aliens to cope with, in the immediate months to come, than our institutions are able to handle. To assume burdens we can not easily meet would lie unfair both to us and to the alien. In protecting ourselves we are protecting him as well. We can not lower our standards, or allow them to be lowered, so as to include him. We must prepare him for our standards. And that means wise education. In the home, in the school, in industry, in citizenship, we have not heretofore applied thoroughly the human test, and that is our next step in the Americanization of the alien. Much work has yet to be done in the immediate months to come. Some protective measure, therefore, seems necessary.”

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

1920s, Whose Country Is This? (1921)

War, Lie, Education, Fear

“A large proportion of allegedly feeble-minded children are actually attempted abortion cases... However many billions America spends yearly on institutions for the insane and jails for the criminals are spent primarily because of attempted abortions done by some sex-blocked mother to whom children are a curse, not a blessing of God... All these things are scientific facts, tested and rechecked and tested again.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Dianetics : The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950)

God, Children, Sex

“All of them had been so tested and retested that they had acquired considerable skill in answering test questions the way the examiners wanted them answered.”

Frederik Pohl book Man Plus

Source: Man Plus (1976), Chapter 4, “Group of Probable Pallbearers” (p. 41)

Way, Question

“Each piece, or part, of the whole of nature is always merely an approximation to the complete truth, or the complete truth so far as we know it. In fact, everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws as yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected. … The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific “truth.””

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume I; lecture 1, "Atoms in Motion"; section 1-1, "Introduction"; p. 1-1
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Truth, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“Actually, even with tested missiles, results of attacks are not really mathematically predictable. The probability of extreme variations in performance, the upper and lower limits, cannot be calculated accurately. But laymen or narrow professionals persist in regarding the matter as a simple problem in engineering and physics.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

Mathematics, Problem

“I don’t know if I’m the right person to be doing jokes about religion; in the past few months, I’ve become religious, I’ve started to believe in god, creationism and intelligent design, and the reason that I now believe in god and creationism and intelligent design is because of Professor Richard Dawkins. Because when I look at something as complex and intricate and beautiful as Professor Richard Dawkins, I don’t think that just could’ve evolved by chance! Professor Richard Dawkins was put there by god to test us, like fossils. And facts.”

Stewart Lee (1968) English stand-up comedian, writer, director and musician

Series 1 Episode 6: "Religion"

God, Religion, Beauty, Intelligence

“Visionaries are the first people in their industry segment to see the potential of the High Tech Marketing Enlightenment new technology. Fundamentally, they see themselves as smarter than their opposite numbers in competitive companies—and, quite often, they are. Indeed, it is their ability to see things first that they want to leverage into a competitive advantage. That advantage can only come about if no one else has discovered it. They do not expect, therefore, to be buying a well—tested product with an extensive list of industry references. Indeed, if such a reference base exists, it may actually turn them off, indicating that for this technology, at any rate, they are already too late.”

Geoffrey Moore book Crossing the Chasm

Source: Crossing the Chasm, 1991, p. 41-42

People

“The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know.”

John Holt book How Children Learn

How Children Learn (1967).

Children, Fear, Fools, Feeling

“How can America be in a position to assimilate its many races and to select intelligently its future immigrants unless it has a clear understanding of each race, a clear comprehension of its ideals and achievements and of its contributive relation to its own development? We have tried the haphazard method. We concentrated races indiscriminately in cities, and the result was colonies and ghettos. We dumped them into industries, and got immigrant slums and "dagos" and "hunkies" and "kikes". We tried to shut them out, and could think of nothing better to accomplish this than a literacy test. We set the beauty-loving Italian digging ditches and put the Greek in factories, and in our negligence we wasted both.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Love, Beauty, Intelligence, Understanding

“The only thing that makes the modern sciences elevated beyond epistemic procedures seen in other times and other cultures is the fact that there is a mechanism beyond human political manipulation for the elimination of defective theories. Karl Popper is on that level just totally right. If it’s politically negotiable, it’s useless, it’s unscientific by definition. You don’t trust scientists, you don’t trust scientific theories, you don’t trust scientific institutions in so far as they have integrity, what you trust is the disintegrated zone of criticism and the criteria for criticism and evaluation in terms of repeated experiments, in terms of the heuristics that are built up to decide whether a particular theory has been defeated and eliminated by a superior theory. It’s that mechanism of selection that is the only thing that makes science important and makes it a system of reality testing. And this is obviously intrinsically directed against any kind of organic political community aiming to internally determine—through its own processes—the negotiation of the nature of reality. Reality has to be an external disruptive critical factor.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ Interview with Nick Land" https://syntheticzero.net/2017/06/19/the-only-thing-i-would-impose-is-fragmentation-an-interview-with-nick-land/ (2017)

Communication, Nature, Reality, Science

“There are a couple of skills you take away from Housewives. You learn to be quick on your feet, stand your ground. I’ve always been kind of unapologetic, but you grow into that or into your own skin. You have a choice: you can either grow into your skin or you can back out. It will test your strength and patience - it will definitely run the gamut so you can figure out a little bit more of what you’re made of.”

Erika Jayne (1969) American singer, actress and television personality

Erika Jayne interview to Billboard https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/8301673/erika-jayne-pretty-mess-interview (2018)

Learning, Patience

“I did learn one valuable lesson, though.
I learned that you can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.”

Robert J. Sawyer book Calculating God

Source: Calculating God (2000), Chapter 7 (p. 77)

Way, Learning

“"The serious meaning of a concept," writes James, following Peirce, "lies in the concrete difference to some one which its being true will make. Strive to bring all debated conceptions to that "pragmatic" test, and you will escape vain wrangling. … If it can make no practical difference whether a given statement be true or false, then the statement has no real meaning."
If the method defined in this passage be accepted, and I can not see how any one can fail to accept it even if one prove unfaithful to it afterwards, then could anything more fully illustrate the meaning of the 'meaningless' than that hypothesis of other minds in which the analogy argument culminates? Whatever may be said for the reasoning, is its conclusion at least right? Alas, I can not know. If right, my experience cannot inform me if wrong, my experience cannot disillusion me. It makes no practical difference to me whether I am right or wrong. Pragmatic conclusion: I cannot have made a meaningful hypothesis.”

Edgar A. Singer, Jr. (1873–1954) American philosopher

Source: Mind As Behavior And Studies In Empirical Idealism, (1924), p. 5

Unfaithfulness, Falseness

“I've got a fair few kilometres under my belt, but it's the short distances that wear me out. They're tests of your mental stamina, rather than your speed. For Neil Armstrong, it was walking on the surface of the moon and, in my case, the ultra-green pitch of the Olympiastadion.”

Andrea Pirlo (1979) Italian footballer

On the 2006 World Cup Final
Ibid [pp. 31-32]

Speed

“She wanted to test her husband.
She knew exactly what to do:
A pseudonym to fool him.
She couldn't have made a worse move.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)

Fools

“Science is unusual in that it is cumulative. It is a system built over time, wherein useful information is retained and ideas that simply don't stand up are discarded, based on the confirmation of knowledge through testing.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

Books, Tricks of the Mind (2006)

Idea, Knowledge, Science, Time

“Several of the quality-control methods have been carried on in industry for many years. What are new in the modern approach to quality control are integration of these often uncoordinated activities into an over-all administrative program for a factory and the addition to the time-tested methods used of a few new techniques which have been found useful in dealing with and thinking about the increased emphasis upon precision in manufactured parts.”

Armand V. Feigenbaum (1922–2014) American businessman

Source: Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration. 1951, p. 1

Thinking, Time, Parting

“No, no. I stop in Victoria's reign. I could not write about the woe and ruin of the terrible twentieth century. We answered all the tests. But it was useless.”

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

His answer to Charles Moran, who asked him whether he would write about the 20th century in his A History of the English Speaking Peoples (19 June 1956), quoted in Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London: Sphere, 1968), p. 732
Post-war years (1945–1955)

“At different stages in the educational process different changes are required. In schools the chief need is for a general change in the attitude towards science, which should be from the beginning an integral part and not a mere addition, often an optional addition, to the curriculum. Science should be taught not merely as a subject but should come into all subjects. Its importance in history and in modern life should be pointed out and illustrated. The old contrast, often amounting to hostility, between scientific and humane subjects need to be broken down and replaced by a scientific humanism. At the same time, the teaching of science proper requires to be humanized. The dry and factual presentation requires to be transformed, not by any appeal to mystical theory, but by emphasizing the living and dramatic character of scientific advance itself. Here the teaching of the history of science, not isolated as at present, but in close relation to general history teaching, would serve to correct the existing atmosphere of scientific dogmatism. It would show at the same time how secure are the conquests of science in the control they give over natural processes and how insecure and provisional, however necessary, are the rational interpretations, the theories and hypotheses put forward at each stage. Past history by itself is not enough, the latest developments of science should not be excluded because they have not yet passed the test of time. It is absolutely necessary to emphasize the fact that science not only has changed but is continually changing, that it is an activity and not merely a body of facts. Throughout, the social implications of science, the powers that it puts into men's hands, the uses they could make of them and those which they in fact do, should be brought out and made real by a reference to immediate experience of ordinary life.”

John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971) British scientist

Source: The Social Function of Science (1939), p. 246 : How such a method of teaching could become an integral part of general education is sketched by H. G. Wells' British Association address, "The Informative Content of Education," reprinted in World Brain (Mathuen, 1938).

Life, Men, Hostility, Education

“But inequality of representation in both Houses of our legislature, is not the only republican heresy in this first essay of our revolutionary patriots at forming a constitution. For let it be agreed that a government is republican in proportion as every member composing it has his equal voice in the direction of its concerns (not indeed in person, which would be impracticable beyond the limits of a city, or small township, but) by representatives chosen by himself, and responsible to him at short periods, and let us bring to the test of this canon every branch of our constitution.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

1810s, Letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (1816)

Housing, Personality

“Claims of supernatural phenomena like the efficacy of prayer are rendered unfalsifiable by the assertion that “God will not be tested.” (Of course, if the tests had been successful, then testing God would have been fine!)”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 34

God, Success

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

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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

Motivation, Problem, Time

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

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

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

Money, People, Health, Books

“The test for aid to poor nations is therefore whether it makes them capable of being productive. If it fails to do so, it is likely to make them even poorer in the – not so very – long run.”

Dean Acheson book Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department

Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (1969), Foreign Aid

“Print also created new literary forms and altered ideas of literary style. Medieval poetry was conceived for the ear, and each poem had to stand the test of recitation. In addition, medieval audiences were not always interested in the poet himself, since his work was known to them only through the interpretations of minstrels, who frequently rephrased poems to suit their own image and images. The printed page changed these conditions. Slowly, the printed poet came into a new relationship with his reader. He learned not to be so repetitive as his predecessors since a reader could be depended upon to return as often as needed to uncompromised passages. …After the flowering of dramatic poetry during the Elizabethan Age, the printed page substituted for the theater, and millions of children came to know Shakespeare only through this form.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

Children, Age, Flowers, Idea

“Americanization is a common citizenship. Does it make any difference what kind of citizenship, and over what road a man travels mentally, spiritually, and economically to citizenship? If every man in America were to be made into a citizen tomorrow by any of the prevailing superficial methods, America basically would be unchanged, and most of the new citizens would not be greatly affected. Would the examination of any ten newly naturalized citizens give a common denominator of Americanization? How can it when several thousand judges who apply the tests vary in their own concept so widely that of two men equally qualified one gets the coveted paper and the other fails? And what of women, who become citizens automatically with their husbands, and who in three of the greatest immigration States in the union have equal citizenship powers? Are we really any nearer Americanization with each new citizen admitted by inadequate naturalization law requirements and through superficial judicial examinations?”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Women, Men, Law, Travel

“Prison itself is a tremendous education in the need for patience and perseverance. It is above all a test of one's commitment.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, Long Walk to Freedom (1995)

Education, Patience, Perseverance

“If this conversion was genuine, we would have to go back 2,000 years to find another as rapid and as radical. Saul’s embrace of Christianity on the road to Damascus stood the test of time but the Taoiseach’s [Bertie Ahern] embrace of socialism on the banks of the Tolka hardly will.”

Joe Higgins (1949) Irish socialist politician

Last Man Standing http://www.socialistparty.net/pub/news/villageprofilejoe22-06-05.htm

Time

“How important it is, then, that the child be taught to govern its passions! How important that it be taught to be kind, gentle, loving, and humane; and in all the range of human thought there is not a better, wiser, or more expedient way of accomplishing this end than by teaching kindness towards God's lower creatures. If children are thus taught they will have instilled into their hearts those principles of action which will make them kind and merciful not only to the lower animals, but also toward their fellow-men as they attain to manhood. Let them be taught that the lower animals are God's creatures, as they themselves are, put here by a common Heavenly Father, each for its own special purpose, and that they have the same right to life and protection. Let them be taught that principle recognised by all noble-hearted men, that it is only a depraved, debased, and cowardly nature that will injure an inferior, defenceless creature, simply because it is in its power to do so, and that there is no better, no grander test of true bravery and nobility of character than one's treatment of the lower animals.”

Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958) American author

Source: Every Living Creature (1899), pp. 6-7

Love, Life, Men, God

“When humans face testings and tragedy, they should remember the angels who are always standing ready to lend their celestial assistance, comfort and council. You should never feel lonely, neglected, fearful, or defeated when you remember that there are the shining ones. They are watching with keen interest and a great desire to help to raise you, to stimulate you into contact with your own superior inner resources.”

Flower A. Newhouse (1909–1994) American mystic

Touched by Angels
Angels

Fear, Angels, Feeling, Help

“I had my own mercury levels tested recently, Bill, and my levels are about three times what are considered safe, just from eating fish. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury would have children with cognitive impairment, with permanent brain damage, probably an IQ loss of 5 to 7 points… Under Clinton rules, they would have had to remove 90% of that mercury within three-and-a-half years. But this president, eight weeks ago, announced he was scrapping those rules and substituting rules that were written by industry lobbyists that will require that they never have to clean up. This is an issue that affects hundreds of thousands of people and directly impacts the health of millions and millions of Americans. But you don't see it in the newspaper. It should be the headlines every single day. But we don't know about it.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

To Bill Maher on Real Time with Bill Maher (22 October 2004).

Children, People, Health, Fish

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

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

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

People, School, Way, Universe

“There are those who are going to be disappointed when no life is found on other planets. Not I — I want to be reminded and delighted and surprised once again, through interplanetary exploration, with the infinite variety and novelty of phenomena that can be generated from such simple principles. The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colorful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets — those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust cloud and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume II; lecture 41, "The Flow of Wet Water"; section 41-6, "Couette flow"; p. 41-12
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

Life, Law, Disappointment, Color

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

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

1960s, Farewell address (1961)

Money, Idea, Fashion, Universe

“There is arguably something wrong with a method of persuasion that cannot pass the test of publicity.”

Randal Marlin (1938) Canadian academic

Source: Propaganda & The Ethics Of Persuasion (2002), Chapter Four, Ethics And Propaganda, p. 166

“Evolution’s logical, unlike religion. Even the Church will agree with that. You have to take religion on faith and you can’t test it by common sense.”

Lester del Rey (1915–1993) Novelist, short story writer, editor

Source: The Eleventh Commandment (1962), Chapter 8 (p. 72)

Faith, Religion, Sense

“Behind all the Great-Society-style and standardized testing, wars on poverty or drugs, self-esteem seminars. A good portion of the African-American population was simply institutionalized or interned, in public housing complexes, in urban schools, and in one of the biggest prison systems the world has ever known. It all amounts to a sprawling race gulag in which people are both dependent and hedged about with restrictions.”

Crispin Sartwell (1958) American philosopher

White Liberals: We’re Not Racist (August 29, 2016)

War, People, World, School

“The structural tools developed by the profession – hierarchical classifications, facets, thesaural relations, topic maps, the predicates used in ontology – will still be of use, provided that they can in each case pass a test of utility.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxvii.

“We are content to accept without testing any belief that fits in with our prejudices and whose truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our desires.”

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943) British philosopher

As quoted in Thinking to Some Purpose (1939), p. 204

Truth

“This conference was worse than a Rorschach test: There's a meaningless inkblot, and the others ask you what you think you see, but when you tell them, they start arguing with you!”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

Part 5: "The World of One Physicist", "Is Electricity Fire?", p. 283
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (1985)

Thinking

“Of all countries passing through these difficult times the one that has stood the test with the greatest measure of success is the United Kingdom. Without underrating the hardships of our situation—the long tragedy of the unemployed, the grievous burden of taxation, the arduous and painful struggle of those engaged in trade and industry—at any rate we are free from that fear, which besets so many less fortunately placed, the fear that things are going to get worse. We owe our freedom from that fear largely to the fact that we have balanced our Budget.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1933/apr/25/direct-taxation in the House of Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer (25 April 1933) Chancellor of the Exchequer

Pain, Fear, Freedom, Time

“Contingency theories dominate scholarly studies of organization behavior, design, performance, planning and management strategy. While they vary widely in subject matter, they have the common proposition that an organizational outcome is the consequency of a "fit" or match between two or more factors. "Fit" is the key concept in this proposition, and the core problem common to contingency theories is not defining this term clearly. This paper examines three ways to define and test this concept of fit: Selection, Interaction, and Systems approaches. A critical discussion of these three approaches will clarify much of the current confusion in the literature on contingency theories, and suggest ways that future theorizing and research can become more systematic and constructive.”

Andrew H. Van de Ven (1945) American business theorist

Andrew H. Van de Ven and Robert Drazin (1984). The Concept of Fit in Contingency Theory http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA152603. No. SMRC-DP-19). Minneapolis: Minnesota University Minneapolis Strategic Management Research Center.

Way, Behavior, Literature, Problem

“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) American politician, 28th president of the United States (in office from 1913 to 1921)

1910s, Address to Congress on War (1917)

World, Peace, Democracy

“I believe that we must look outwards, not inwards, to test our true economic potential - measuring ourselves against our international competitors.”

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

Scotland in the World Forum (February 4, 2008)

“What must be acknowledged, for example the prevalence of anxiety, is grafted onto man’s essence as if it grew there. Such is the tried and tested method of the apologist: what is social in origin is presented as natural.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 63

Nature

“You see before you a man in his right mind
Worldly-wise and with access to death
Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies
Having sometimes even astonished the professors
Good with languages
Having travelled a great deal
Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost my best friends in the butchery
As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know”

Guillaume Apollinaire book Calligrammes

Me voici devant tous un homme plein de sens
Connaissant la vie et de la mort ce qu'un vivant peut connaître
Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l'amour
Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées
Connaissant plusieurs langages
Ayant pas mal voyagé
Ayant vu la guerre dans l'Artillerie et l'lnfanterie
Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme
Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l'effroyable lutte
Je sais d'ancien et de nouveau autant qu'un homme seul pourrait des deux savoir
"La jolie rousse" (The Pretty Redhead), line 1; p. 133.
Calligrammes (1918)

Love, Death, Travel

“Who among American heroes could meet their tests, who would be cleared by their committees? Not Washington, who was a rebel. Not Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal and whose motto was "rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." Not Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution; or Wendell Phillips, who spoke for the underprivileged everywhere and counted himself a philosophical anarchist; not Seward of the Higher Law or Sumner of racial equality. Not Lincoln, who admonished us to have malice toward none, charity for all; or Wilson, who warned that our flag was "a flag of liberty of opinion as well as of political liberty"; or Justice Holmes, who said that our Constitution is an experiment and that while that experiment is being made "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death."”

Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998) American historian

Who is Loyal to America? (1947)

Death, Men, God, Justice

“How can great minds be produced in a country where the test of a great mind is agreeing in the opinions of small minds?”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

As quoted in Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) by James Huneker, p. 367

Country

“Blatant idiocies had been tried by early men and women—foolishness that would never have been considered by species aware of the laws of nature. Desperate superstitions had bred during the savage centuries. Styles of government, intrigues, philosophies were tested with abandon. It was almost as if Orphan Earth had been a planetary laboratory, upon which a series of senseless and bizarre experiments were tried.”

David Brin book Startide Rising

Source: Startide Rising (1983), Chapter 23 (p. 141)

Women, Men, Law, Nature

“Osgood's semantic space as determined by subjects' ratings of words on the semantic differential test.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969)

“In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.”

Edward Bernays book Propaganda

Source: Propaganda (1928), p. 39

Life

“Men are the dominant sign-using animals. Animals other than man do, of course, respond to certain things as signs of something else, but such signs do not attain the complexity and elaboration which is found in human speech, writing, art, testing devices, medical diagnosis, and signaling instruments. Science and signs are inseparably interconnected, since science both presents men with more reliable signs and embodies its results is systems of signs. Human civilization is dependent upon signs and systems of signs, and the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs - if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning.”

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 1 (1971:17), Lead paragraph first chapter

Men, Art, Science, Animals

“I think that the Virat Kohli era has dawned over the last year or so. It's been there ever since he took over the Test captaincy and because he is now going to create a completely different niche as far as Indian cricket is concerned. I think this era of India cricket is going to be a highly entertaining era.”

Sunil Gavaskar (1949) Indian cricket player.

Before the match, former India captain Sunil Gavaskar told NDTV that the Kohli era has started, quoted on sports.ndtv, "Virat Kohli Proves His Era Has Begun, After Guiding India Into World T20 Semifinals" http://sports.ndtv.com/icc-world-twenty20-2016/news/256920-virat-kohli-proves-his-era-has-begun-after-guiding-india-into-world-t20-semifinals, March 27, 2016.

Thinking

“Neither quarks nor leptons exhibit any structure on a scale of about 10-16 cm, the currently attained resolution. We thus have no experimental reason but tradition to suspect that they are not the ultimate elementary particles. Accordingly, we idealize the quarks and leptons as pointlike particles, remembering that elementarity is subject to experimental test.”

Chris Quigg (1944) American physicist

[Gauge theories of the strong, weak, and electromagnetic interactions, Princeton University Press, 2013, 2, https://books.google.com/books?id=Lt6thfc1gAgC&pg=PA2]

“I dont want to lose any of the emotion or energy. We are just testing how far we can bend pop in our direction.”

Paul Smith (musician) (1979) English rock singer

About plans for the third album. MTV http://www.mtv.co.uk/artists/maximo-park/news/40306-maximo-park-interview

“It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.”

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

Abraham Lincoln http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/1lncn10h.htm (1864)

“I'm sorry, 'herbal medicine', "Oh, herbal medicine's been around for thousands of years!" Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became 'medicine'. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri, so knock yourselves out.”

Dara Ó Briain (1972) Irish comedian and television presenter

Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny: Live in London (2008)

“To proceed from assumptions about an abstract theoretical set-up and from them to draw conclusions about the observable world and to test - by rough or more refined means - whether the conformity with observations is "good" enough, is indeed the time honoured procedure that all empirical sciences, including the natural sciences, have used. I shall therefore not plead guilty of heresy even if I do work with choice-theory concepts that are not invariant under a general monotonic transformation of the utility indicator.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Ragnar Frisch. " A complete scheme for computing all direct and cross demand elasticities in a model with many sectors http://econ.ucdenver.edu/beckman/Research/readings/frisch-demand-econometrica.pdf." Econometrica 27.2 (1959), p. 178; Cited in: Chipman, John S. " http://www.sv.uio.no/econ/om/tall-og-fakta/nobelprisvinnere/ragnar-frisch/Chipman%20paper[1.pdf The contributions of Ragnar Frisch to economics and econometrics]." ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY MONOGRAPHS 31 (1998): 58-110. 1940-60s

World, Nature, Science, Time

“The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?”

Eugene Kennedy (1928–2015) American psychologist

Eugene Kennedy, cited in: Kathy Wagoner (2002) The Promise of Friendship. p. 284

Deep, Friendship, Relationship, Cute

“Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower book Mandate for Change

The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude...
The White House Years: Mandate for Change: 1953–1956: A Personal Account (1963), pp. 312-313
1960s

Wisdom, War, World, Way

“However, he had a particular bent for mythology and carried his researches in it to such a ridiculous point that he would test professors of Greek literature – whose society, as I have already mentioned, he cultivated above all others – by asking them questions like: "Who was Hecuba's mother?" – "What name did Achilles assume when he was among the girls?" – "What song did the Sirens sing?"”
Maxime tamen curavit notitiam historiae fabularis usque ad ineptias atque derisum; nam et grammaticos, quod genus hominum praecipue, ut diximus, appetebat, eius modi fere quaestionibus experiebatur: "Quae mater Hecubae, quod Achilli nomen inter virgines fuisset, quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae."

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Cf. Thomas Browne, Urn Burial, Ch. V
Source: The Twelve Caesars, Tiberius, Ch. 70

Girl, Literature, Question, Singing

“It was good to be back in the wilderness again, where everything seems as peace. I was alone - just me and the animals. It was a great feeling - free once more to plan and do as I pleased. Beyond was all around me. My dream was a dream no longer. I suppose I was here because this was something I had to do - not just dream about it but do it. I suppose too I was here to test myself - not that I had never done it before but this time it was to be a more thorough and lasting examination. What was I capable of that I didn't know yet? Could I truly enjoy my own company for an entire year? And was I equal to everything this wild land could throw at me? I had seen its moods in late spring, summer, and early fall but what about the winter? Would I love the isolation then, with its bone-stabbing cold, its ghostly silence? At age 51, I intended to find out.”

Richard Proenneke (1916–2003) American hermit

Alone in the Wilderness DVD, Bob Swerer Productions
Paraphrase by Sam Keith for One Man's Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey Dick's exact words are not known.

Love, Age, Peace, Dreams

“A friend cannot be considered a friend unless he is tested on three occasions: in time of need, behind your back and after your death.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Death, Time

“I realise that 2008 will be an important test for Russia, and not an easy one. At the same time, the Constitution of the Russian Federation states that the President, the head of state, is elected for four years through direct secret ballot and cannot stay in office for more than two consecutive terms.
I am not indifferent of course to the question of who will take in their hands the destiny of the country I have devoted my life to serving. But if each successive head of state were to change the Constitution to suit them, we would soon find ourselves without a state at all. I think that Russia's different political forces are sufficiently mature to realise their responsibility to the people of the Russian Federation. In any case, the person who receives the votes of the majority of Russian citizens will become the President of the country.”

Vladimir Putin (1952) President of Russia, former Prime Minister

Answering the question of Dutch TV station "Nederland 1" and Dutch newspaper "NRC Handelsblad", "Can you imagine a situation in which you would decide to remain in office for a third term?", Putin said: http://web.archive.org/web/20061013003243/http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/speeches/2005/10/31/1955_type82914type82916_96455.shtml 2006- 2010

Life, People, Secret, Question

“Men may be natural risk-takers, but the increased confidence and surefootedness that we are recognizing as manly courage is the product of constant testing. The chest-thumping of untested men is hardly courage; Hobbes called it "vain-glory", because "a well grounded confidence begetteth attempt; whereas the supposing of power does not." Or to put it in the words of Tyler Durden, "How much can yo know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?" Modern men are not merely lacking initiation into manhood, as some have suggested, they are lacking meaningful traits of strength and courage. Few modern men will truly "know themselves," as men, in the way that their forefathers did.”

Jack Donovan (1974) American activist, editor and writer

Pg 136
The Way of Men (2012)

Men, Way, Confidence, Courage

“The Grand Inquisitor explains that you have to create mysteries because otherwise the common people will be able to understand things. They have to be subordinated so you have to make things look mysterious and complicated. That's the test of the intellectual. It's also good for them: then you're an important person, talking big words which nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish. But it's very inflated, a lot of television cameras, a lot of posturing. They try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves, power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

In Chomsky on Anarchism, 2005.
Quotes 2000s, 2005

People, Way, Understanding, Personality

“I've done my best, but the boy is unteachable. He doubts everything, and contests each point of theology as if it were required to meet the same tests of logic and consistency that prevail in the world of science.”
“In other words, he expects your doctrines to make sense.”
“He is unwilling to accept the idea that some things remain mysteries, comprehensible only to the mind of God. Ambiguity makes him saucy, and paradox causes open rebellion.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

“An obnoxious child.”
Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Seventh Son (1987), Chapter 13.

God, World, Boy, Idea

“If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.”

Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) English writer and sociologist

Women, vol. 3, Society in America (1837).

“Science in fact has a lot to say about the supernatural. It can and has tested it, and so far has found no evidence for it…. Indeed, over its history science has repeatedly investigated supernatural claims and, in principle, could find strong evidence for them. But that evidence hasn’t appeared.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 113

History, Strong, Appearance, Science

“Those incentives have made the legacy of this Courts public purpose test an unhappy one. In the 1950s, no doubt emboldened in part by the expansive understanding of public use this Court adopted in Berman, cities rushed to draw plans for downtown development. Of all the families displaced by urban renewal from 1949 through 1963, 63 percent of those whose race was known were nonwhite, and of these families, 56 percent of nonwhites and 38 percent of whites had incomes low enough to qualify for public housing, which, however, was seldom available to them. Public works projects in the 1950s and 1960s destroyed predominantly minority communities in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Baltimore, Maryland. In 1981, urban planners in Detroit, Michigan, uprooted the largely lower-income and elderly Poletown neighborhood for the benefit of the General Motors Corporation. Urban renewal projects have long been associated with the displacement of blacks; [i]n cities across the country, urban renewal came to be known as Negro removal. Over 97 percent of the individuals forcibly removed from their homes by the slum-clearance project upheld by this Court in Berman were black. Regrettably, the predictable consequence of the Court’s decision will be to exacerbate these effects.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting Kelo v. New London http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=US&navby=case&vol=000&invol=04-108. 2000s, Kelo v. New London (2005)

Family, Home, Communication, Understanding

“We have tested, in matters where ordinary intelligence and knowledge are competent to judge, the logical methods and intellectual honesty of the foremost of those who in the name of science eliminate God and degrade man, taking from human life its highest dignity and deepest hope. Now, if in simple matters we find such confusion, such credulity, such violation of every canon of sound reasoning as we have found here, shall we blindly trust in deeper matters — in those matters which always have and always must perplex the intellect of man?
Let us rather, as I said in the beginning, not too much underrate our own powers in what is concerned with common facts and general relations. While we may not be scientists or philosophers we too are men. And as to things which the telescope cannot resolve, nor the microscope reveal, nor the spectrum analysis throw light on, nor the tests of the chemist discover, it is as irrational to accept blindly the dictum of those who say, "Thus saith science!"”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

as it is in things that are the proper field of the natural sciences to bow before the dictum of those who say, "Thus saith religion!"
Conclusion : The Moral of this Examination
A Perplexed Philosopher (1892)

Life, Men, God, Religion

“In the end, theistic evolution is not a useful compromise between science and religion. Insofar as it makes testable predictions, it has been falsified, and insofar as it makes claims that can’t be tested, it can be ignored.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 147

Religion, Science

“The material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background. This material is always contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

Pg. 66.
Against Method (1975)

Law, Way, Mathematics

“Usability is not often thought of as a criterion during the purchasing process. Moreover, unless you actually test a number of units in a realistic environment doing typical tasks, you are not likely to notice the ease or difficulty of use. […] Do it right there in the store. Do not be afraid to make mistakes or ask stupid questions. Remember, any problems you have are probably the design's fault, not yours.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 3, p. 78.

Stupidity, Question, Problem

“When mons. Descartes's philosophical Romance, by the Elegance of its Style and the plausible Accounts of natural Phænomena, had overthrown the Aristotelian Physics, the World received but little Advantage by the Change: For instead of a few Pedants, who, most of them, being conscious of their Ignorance, concealed it with hard Words and pompous Terms; a new Set of Philosophers started up, whose lazy Disposition easily fell in with a Philosophy, that required no Mathematicks to understand it, and who taking a few Principles for granted, without examining their Reality or Consistence with each other, fancied they could solve all Appearances mechanically by Matter and Motion; and, in their smattering Way, pretended to demonstrate such things, as perhaps Cartesius himself never believed; his Philosophy (if he bad been in earnest) being unable to stand the test of the Geometry which he was Master of.”

John Theophilus Desaguliers (1683–1744) French-born British natural philosopher and clergyman

Source: Course of Experimental Philosophy, 1745, p. vi-v: Preface

World, Way, Understanding, Nature

“While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.”

Thorstein Veblen book The Theory of the Leisure Class

Source: The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 51

Time

“My parents believed that if you couldn't put it in a test tube, it didn't exist.”

Steven M. Greer (1955) American ufologist

Undated

Parent

“In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it.
We are testing the candidates for self-confidence, for "Presidentiality" in statistical bombardment. It doesn't really matter if their statistics be homemade. What settles the business is the cool with which they are dropped.
And so, as the second half hour treads the decimaled path toward the third hour, we become aware of being locked in a tacit conspiracy with the candidates. We know their statistics go to nothing of importance, and they know we know, and we know they know we know.
There is total but unspoken agreement that the "debate," the arguments which are being mustered here, are of only the slightest importance.
As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?
This accounts for the curious lack of passion in both performers. Even when Ford accuses Carter of inconsistency, it is done in a flat, emotionless, game-playing style. The delivery has the tuneless ring of an old press release from the Republican National Committee. Just so, when Carter has an opportunity to set pulses pounding by denouncing the Nixon pardon, he dances delicately around the invitation like a maiden skirting a bog.
We judge that both men judge us to be drained of desire for passion in public life, to be looking for Presidents who are cool and noninflammable. They present themselves as passionless technocrats using an English singularly devoid of poetry, metaphor and even coherent forthright declaration.
Caught up in the conspiracy, we watch their coolness with fine technical understanding and, in the final half hour, begin asking each other for technical judgments. How well is Carter exploiting the event to improve our image of him? Is Ford's television manner sufficiently self-confident to make us sense him as "Presidential"?
It is quite extraordinary. Here we are, fully aware that we are being manipulated by image projectionists, yet happily asking ourselves how obligingly we are submitting to the manipulation. It is as though a rat running a maze were more interested in the psychologist's charts on his behavior than in getting the cheese at the goal line.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"And All of Us So Cool" (p.340)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Life, Men, Behavior, Exercises

“And because this Experimental Science is wholly ignored by the general run of students, for that reason I can not convince people of its utility unless I show at the same time its excellence and its property. This science alone, then, knows how to test perfectly by experience what can be done by nature, what by the industry of art, what by imposture; what the incantations, conjurations, invocations, deprecations, sacrifices (which are magical devices) seek and dream of; and what is done in them, so that all falsity may be removed and that only the truth of art and nature be retained. This science alone teaches one to consider all the insanities of magicians, not that they may be confirmed but that they may be avoided, just as logic considers sophistical argument.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

People, Truth, Dreams, Art

“During the war of the Revolution, and in 1788, the date of the adoption of our national Constitution, there was but one State among the thirteen whose constitution refused the right of suffrage to the negro. That State was South Carolina. Some, it is true, established a property qualification; all made freedom a prerequisite; but none save South Carolina made color a condition of suffrage. The Federal Constitution makes no such distinction, nor did the Articles of Confederation. In the Congress of the Confederation, on the 25th of June, 1778, the fourth article was under discussion. It provided that 'the free inhabitants of each of these States — paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted — shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States.' The delegates from South Carolina moved to insert between the words 'free inhabitants' the word 'white', thus denying the privileges and immunities of citizenship to the colored man. According to the rules of the convention, each State had but one vote. Eleven States voted on the question. One was divided; two voted aye; and eight voted no. It was thus early, and almost unanimously, decided that freedom, not color, should be the test of citizenship.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1860s, Oration at Ravenna, Ohio (1865)

War, Justice, Color, Question

“Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find his right road.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

“We are placing burdens on the broadest shoulders. Why should I put burdens on the people? I am one of the children of the people. I was brought up amongst them. I know their trials; and God forbid that I should add one grain of trouble to the anxieties which they bear with such patience and fortitude. When the Prime Minister did me the honour of inviting me to take charge of the National Exchequer at a time of great difficulty, I made up my mind, in framing the Budget which was in front of me, that at any rate no cupboard should be barer, no lot would be harder. By that test I challenge you to judge the Budget.”

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

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 156.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

God, Children, People, Time