Quotes about testing
page 8

“In 1957, James Vicary, a market researcher, conducted a six week test in a New Jersey movie theatre. A high-speed projector repeatedly and subliminally flashed the slogans ‘drink Coke’ and ‘eat popcorn’ over the film. I thought I’d make my own cinema ad to try something similar. According to Vicary, popcorn sales went up by 57.5% and Coke sales by 18.1%… Whether Vicary’s results were due to the subliminals can never be shown and the experiment has become shrouded in urban myth. This is the Genesis Cinema in East London, which kindly agreed to include our ad amongst the trailers for a screening of Ocean's Twelve, a carefully chosen film which, if the ad works, the audience will not be able to remember. Not a bad thing.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Trick of the Mind (2004–2006)

Drink, Speed

“This they do in the service of an imaginary science; and, like the astrologers and soothsayers whom they have succeeded, cast up their eyes to the clouds, and speak in immense, unsubstantiated images and similes, in deeply misleading metaphors and allegories, and make use of hypnotic formulae with little regard for experience, or rational argument, or tests of proven reliability. Thereby they throw dust in their own eyes as well as in ours, obstruct our vision of the real world, and further confuse an already sufficiently bewildered public about the relations of morality to politics, and about the nature and methods of the natural sciences and historical studies alike.”

Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) Russo-British Jewish social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas

Five Essays on Liberty (2002), Historical Inevitability (1954)

World, Nature, Study, Science

“The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops - no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

1870s, Society and Solitude (1870), Civilization

Country

“The third aspect of my subject is that of science as a method of finding things out. This method is based on the principle that observation is the judge of whether something is so or not. All other aspects and characteristics of science can be understood directly when we understand that observation is the ultimate and final judge of the truth of an idea. But "prove" used in this way really means "test," in the same way that a hundred-proof alcohol is a test of the alcohol, and for people today the idea really should be translated as, "The exception tests the rule." Or, put another way, "The exception proves that the rule is wrong."”

Richard Feynman book The Meaning of It All

That is the principle of science. If there is an exception to any rule, and if it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong.
lecture I: "The Uncertainty of Science"
The Meaning of It All (1999)

People, Alcohol, Truth, Way

“As I get older the urge to write gets less and less; I've pretty much spewed out everything I have to say, none of which has been particularly monumental; nothing that will stand the test of time. Good writing like wine has to age well, and my stuff has been momentarily adequate.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Rod Serling: American Masters.
Other

Age, Wine, Time

“Many Christians have been misled for centuries about the nature of God’s kingdom by the well-known mistranslation of Luke 17:21: “The kingdom of God is within you.” Today all serious scholars and translators would agree that the test should read: “The kingdom of God is among you or in your midst.””

Albert Nolan (1934) South African priest and activist

The Greek word entos can means “within” or “among.”
Source: Jesus Before Christianity: The Gospel of Liberation (1976), p. 46.

God, Nature, Reading

“Although a century and a half measured in comparison with the length of human experience is but a short time, yet measured in the life of governments and nations it ranks as a very respectable period. Certainly enough time has elapsed to demonstrate with a great deal of thoroughness the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization. They have been in existence long enough to become very well seasoned. They have met, and met successfully, the test of experience.”

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

1920s, Speech on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (1926)

Life, Time, Dependency, Season

“There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of Milton is that he functions as a Milton.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Source: 1920s, Prejudices, Third Series (1922), Ch. 3

“The difficulty of determining whether a man is or is not good has now become a commonplace of moralists and satirists. It is almost impossible to discover any test which is satisfactory, and the test which is actually applied by society is known to be unsatisfactory in the extreme.”

John Robert Seeley (1834–1895) British historian

pp. 57–58 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433068235500;view=1up;seq=87 Ecce Homo (1866)

“One of the most powerful engines of development and prosperity is trade and investment, which create new opportunities for entrepreneurs, and help people rise out of poverty, and reinforce fundamental values like transparency and rule of law. For all these reasons, many in these chambers have conducted free trade agreements at bilateral and regional levels. The most effective step of all would be an agreement that tears down trade barriers at the global level. The recent impasse in the Doha round is disappointing, but that does not have to be the final word. I urge every nation to seize this opportunity to lift up economies around the world and reach a successful Doha agreement as soon as possible. Beyond Doha, our nations must renew our commitment to open economies, and stand firm against economic isolationism. These objectives are being tested by turbulence in the global financial markets. Our economies are more closely connected than ever before, and I know that many of you here are watching how the United States government will address the problems in our financial system.”

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

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People, World, Law, Disappointment

“The current cosmological paradigm, the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, requires that the mass-energy of the Universe be dominated by invisible components: dark matter and dark energy. An alternative to these dark components is that the law of gravity be modified on the relevant scales. A test of these ideas is provided by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR), an empirical relation between the observed mass of a galaxy and its rotation velocity. Here, I report a test using gas rich galaxies for which both axes of the BTFR can be measured independently of the theories being tested and without the systematic uncertainty in stellar mass that affects the same test with star dominated spirals. The data fall precisely where predicted a priori by the modified Newtonian dynamics.”

Stacy McGaugh Novel Test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics with Gas Rich Galaxies

[21 March 2011, Novel test of modified Newtonian dynamics with gas rich galaxies, Physical Review Letters, 106, 12, 121303, 10.1103/PhysRevLett.106.121303]

Law, Star, Idea, Universe

“The final test of painting, theirs, mine, any other, is; does the painter’s emotion comes across?.... Procedure is the keyword.... The difference is that we don't begin with a definite sense of procedure. It's free association from the start to the finished state. The old idea was to make use of your talent. This, we feel, is often to take the line of least resistance.... painters like Rothko, Pollock, Still, perhaps in reaction to the tendency to analyze which has dominated painting from Seurat to Albers, associate with very little analysis. A new form of expressionism inevitably followed. With De Kooning the procedure is continual change, and the immediacy of the change. With Jackson, it's the confidence you feel from the concentration of his energy in a given picture..”

Franz Kline (1910–1962) American painter

1958
Quote from Kline, in Conversations with Artists, Seldon Rothman, New York Capricorn Books, 1961, p. 106 - 109: Talk ing about the Abstract expressionists
1960's

Feeling, Confidence, Idea, Sense

“The English Channel is the perfect stretch of water to truly test the human mind.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

25 November 2011, Twitter
Speaking & Features

Water, Perfection

“Many of you share the burden of this knowledge tonight with me. But there is a difference. For finally I must be the one to order our guns to fire, against all the most inward pulls of my desire. For we have children to teach, and we have sick to be cured, and we have men to be freed. There are poor to be lifted up, and there are cities to be built, and there is a world to be helped. Yet we do what we must. I am hopeful, and I will try as best I can, with everything I have got, to end this battle and to return our sons to their desires. Yet as long as others will challenge America's security and test the clearness of our beliefs with fire and steel, then we must stand or see the promise of two centuries tremble. I believe tonight that you do not want me to try that risk. And from that belief your President summons his strength for the trials that lie ahead in the days to come. The work must be our work now. Scarred by the weaknesses of man, with whatever guidance God may offer us, we must nevertheless and alone with our mortality, strive to ennoble the life of man on earth. Thank you, and goodnight.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Life, Men, God, Children

“The Gran Sasso results could be seen as tentatively offering support for the big bang theory – if we could find a way to test that they are indeed travelling backwards in time.”

Jayant Narlikar (1938) Indian physicist

Neutrino misbehaviour suggested 50 years ago

Way, Travel, Support, Time

“The Insubordinate Ritual:
The Candidate hands a previously prepared necklace to the person who will be the Recipient of the insubordination.
The Recipient places the necklace about his or her neck and kneeling before the candidate asks:
R: Will you test me as my Fool, so that all may understand?
C: I will.
R: Will you test me as my Jester, if none else will criticize?
C: I will.
R: Will you test me as my Chaplain, that no fault lie unremedied?
C: I will.
R: Will you test me as my Confessor, lest I neglect my own progress?
C: I will.
R: Will you test me as my Inquisitor. if I exceed my authority?
C: I will.
R: Then how ill you be known?
C: As your ______ ______
R: Then take this necklace my ______ ______, to remind us of your duties.”

Peter J. Carroll (1953) British occultist

The Recipient then give the necklace to the Candidate. The Ritual is concluded by a brief barrage of insulting noises directed by all at the recipient.
p 212-213
Liber Kaos (1992)

Lie, Fools, Understanding, Personality

“Watching NASCAR with my wife is like taking a test. Every single turn, she has a question. Now, here's the problem. Sometimes her questions actually make sense. I don't have an answer for them. So, I have to that guy thing and go Pfft! You ever hear your man do that, ladies? That means he doesn't know the answer, but he's thinking.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Blue Collar Comedy Tour, Blue Collar Comedy Tour: One For the Road (2006)

Guy, Question, Problem, Thinking

“Do you know, sir, it is God who has planted such doubts in you. That is His way of putting you to the test”

Masti Venkatesha Iyengar (1891–1986) Indian writer

To the author Ramachandra Sharma of this book who had said that he was incapable of total surrender to God as Masti had great faith in God page [Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Masti, http://books.google.com/books?id=e6VqgWouUmUC, 2004, Katha, 978-81-87649-50-2, 26]
Quote

God, Way

“In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States. I dissent.”

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Dissenting, Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)

“The test of a true myth is that each time you return to it, new insights and interpretations arise.”

Starhawk (1951) American author, activist and Neopagan

The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979)

Time

“According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority.”

Alain Finkielkraut (1949) French essayist, born 1949

Source: The Undoing of Thought (1988), pp. 25-26.

Men, Age, Soul, Intelligence

“Why, gentlemen, humor is one of the most valuable things in the human brain. It is the torch of the mind -- it sheds light. Humor is the readiest test of truth -- of the natural, of the sensible -- and when you take from a man all sense of humor, there will only be enough left to make a bigot.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Truth, Nature, Sense, Light

“I think of it all as a test. This is a moral examination that one has to pass… to stand up against such social evils.”

Kailash Satyarthi (1954) Indian children's rights activist

Kailash Satyarthi’s crusade to save childhood continues… (2014)

Thinking, Evil

“Interviewer: You and Australia have had quite a relationship over the years. This will be your first trip there in eight years.
Singh: There are lots of memories, and they are all quite fresh. Good and bad. I will start with the good. Winning the Perth Test was probably the key point of my Test career, even though I didn’t play that match. But in the context of the series, we fought really hard and won a match in which Australia were favourites. And of course winning the CB series by beating Australia was very satisfying. It is like winning a mini World Cup. The bad memories include the Sydney spat, of course. It should have been handled better. It should have been stopped. Whatever happened there didn’t help anyone, neither Australian cricket nor us. We (Andrew Symonds & I) should have just sat like two mature people and spoken about it and sorted it.
Interviewer: This realisation that you should stop rushing through things has come about recently?
Singh: It’s not that I have just started doing this now. I have been told by a lot of my senior bowlers, “Take your time. Don’t rush.” Maybe I was not getting the idea sometimes. That was missing in between. Sometimes I was heeding to that advice, sometimes I was not. Then you make mistakes. Then you come back to the same thing, “Ok, take your time, boss. Relax.” It’s been there, but lately it’s come to the fore more because I have become calmer.
Interviewer: When you see guys like Virender Sehwag and Zaheer Khan, who came into international cricket after you, retire, what kind of effect does it have on you?
Singh: That was up to them. They know what’s going on with their body and mind. They need to plan their lives. Their decision should not put anyone else under pressure. Till I’m playing with my full energy, I will continue to play. Aisa toh nahi ho sakta bhai ki ek ka raasta doosre ke liye theek hai. I am enjoying what I’m doing.”

Harbhajan Singh (1980) Indian cricketer

Interview with Indian Express http://indianexpress.com/article/sports/cricket/i-always-say-i-am-the-best-harbhajan-singh/, January 25, 2016.

People, World, Guy, Idea

“The cookbook gives a detailed description of ingredients and procedures but no proofs for its prescriptions or reasons for its recipes; the proof of the pudding is in the eating. … Mathematics cannot be tested in exactly the same manner as a pudding; if all sorts of reasoning are debarred, a course of calculus may easily become an incoherent inventory of indigestible information.”

George Pólya book How to Solve It

Source: How to Solve It (1945), p. 219

Mathematics

“Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, "I am not a crook." Jimmy Carter says, "I have lusted after women in my heart." President Reagan says, "I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope."”

Art Buchwald (1925–2007) journalist, humorist, United States Marine

Time magazine (29 September 1986).

Women, Thinking, Heart

“It seems to me that in understanding MOND and its fundamentals we have only scratched the surface. If the developments of quantum mechanics and relativity are any lesson here, departures of such magnitude from long- and well-tested physics may bring with them completely new concepts, not summarized by mere modifications of the governing actions or the equations of motion. MOND may also turn out to bring in concepts that are presently beyond our ken”

Mordehai Milgrom (1946) Israeli physicist

as hinted perhaps by the cosmological connotations of a0 MOND Theory, p. 5, Mordehai Milgrom, 30 Apr 2014, updated 31 Aug 2014 http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.7661,

Departure, Understanding

“In 1990 as a teenager I took my first step in cricket and was eager for some kind words in the cricketing world and I then I came across a comment from an accomplished Indian cricket. I quote 'This lad I don't see him winning Test match for India either at home or abroad. He rarely turns the ball, at best he can be restrictive'. The assessment came from Mr Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi. Two decades of international cricket and 619 Test wicket later, it is indeed a great honour to address this lecture.”

Anil Kumble (1970) Former Indian cricketer

India became a sporting nation in the last decade: Kumble

World, Quotes, Home

“When God says to us, "Give me your load, trust me, what you cannot do, I will do for you,"He puts our faith to one of the strongest tests. He never consents to carry our burdens unless we give them to Him.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 598.

God, Faith

“There is a division within the neo-conservative movement, which is, by the way, one of the tests of its authenticity as a tendency. I would say I was a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz.”

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

"Tariq Ali v. Christopher Hitchens: A Debate on the U.S. War on Iraq, the Bush-Kerry Race and the Neo-Conservative Movement" http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/12/1347208&mode=thread&tid=25, Democracy Now (2004-10-12). 2000s, 2004

Way, Support

“Any loss of identity prompts people to seek reassurance and rediscovery of themselves by testing, and even by violence. Today, the electric revolution, the wired planet, and the information environment involve everybody in everybody to the point of individual extinction.”

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

Letter to Clare Westcott, November 26 1975. Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p. 514
1970s

People, Loss

“… I'm a Christian, and as a Christian, I can't prove it to you, but God has definitely shown me very clearly through His word, and He has shown Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, that the Bible is the word of God. I admit that that is where I start from. I can challenge people that you can go and test that, you can make predictions based on that, you can check the prophecies in the Bible, you can check the statements in Genesis. I did a little bit of that tonight. I can't ultimately prove that to you, all I can do is to say to someone look, if the Bible really is what it claims to be, if it really is the word of God, (and that's what it claims), then, check it out, and the Bible says that if you come to God believing that He is, He will reveal Himself to you and you will know. As Christians we can say we know, and so, as far as the word of God is concerned… No, one is ever going to convince me that the word of God is not true.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Bill Nye, " Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham (video - 165:32) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kgvhG3AkI&hd=1", YouTube, (February 4, 2014) "Bill Nye Debates Ken Ham" (February 4, 2014)

God, People, Christ, Personality

“The sense of shame that the Chancellor should have felt is far more personal. It is a sense of shame for having taken over an economy with a £1,000 million surplus and running it to a £2,000 million deficit. It is a sense of shame for having conducted our internal financial affairs with such profligacy that our public accounts are out of balance as never before. It is a sense of shame for having presided over the greatest depreciation of the currency, both at home and abroad, in our history. It is a sense of shame for having left us at a moment of test far weaker than most of our neighbours…There is, I believe, a greater threat to the effective working of our democratic institutions than most of us have seen in our adult lifetimes. I do not believe that it springs primarily from the machinations of subversively-minded men, although no doubt they are there and are anxious to exploit exploitable situations. It comes much more dangerously from a widespread cynicism with the processes of our political system. I believe that the Chancellor contributed to that on Monday. I believe that it poses a serious challenge to us all…None of us should seek salvation through chaos. There is a duty too to recognise that we could slip into a still worse rate of inflation and a world spiral-ling downwards towards slump, unemployment and falling standards, with our selves, temporarily at least, well in the vanguard. What is required is neither an imposed solution nor an open hand at the till. The alternative to reaching a settlement with the miners is paralysis…The task of statesmanship is to reach a settlement but to do it in a way which opens no floodgates for if they were opened, it would not only damage everyone but it would undermine the differential which the miners deserve and which the nation now needs them to have.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1973/dec/19/economic-and-energy-situation in the House of Commons (19 December 1973) 1970s

Men, World, Way, Home

“Why don't we write code that just works? Or absent a "just works" set of patches, why don't we revert to code that has years of testing? This kind of "I broke things, so now I will jiggle things randomly until they unbreak" is not acceptable. […] Don't just make random changes. There really are only two acceptable models of development: "think and analyze" or "years and years of testing on thousands of machines."”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Those two really do work. Torvalds, Linus, 2011-04-13, Linux 2.6.39-rc3, 2011-04-21 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1126136, 2010s, 2011

Thinking, Change

“Graphology is another in a long list of quack substitutes for hard work. It is appealing to those who are impatient with such troublesome matters as research, evidence analysis, reasoning, logic, and hypothesis testing.”

Robert Todd Carroll book The Skeptic's Dictionary

"Graphology" http://skepdic.com/graphol.html, The Skeptic's Dictionary

“Microsoft must be testing the outer limits of what a customer will put up with before bolting to Linux, certainly a valuable scientific study from my point of view.”

Pamela Jones Computer law scholar

A Brave New Modular World - Another MS Patent Application http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=2007012808444146, retrieved 1 September 2010.

Study

“Everyone sits in the prison of his own ideas; he must burst it open, and that in his youth, and so try to test his ideas on reality.”

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

Miscellaneous http://books.google.com/books?id=cvlOAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Everyone+sits+in+the+prison+of+his+own+ideas+he+must+burst+it+open+and+that+in+his+youth+and+so+try+to+test+his+ideas+on+reality%22&pg=PA104#v=onepage, Cosmic Religion, p. 104 (1931) 1930s

Youth, Idea, Reality

“I think that's wrong… I actually believe that people of faith make better leaders… Whether they are Christians, as I am. My faith has sustained me through some very bad times. I've battled cancer, I've lost a child, I've been tested. But whether it's a person of Christian faith or Jewish faith or Muslim faith or other faiths, I think faith gives us humility, and empathy and optimism, and I think those are important things… Yes, I would be fine with that…”

Carly Fiorina (1954) American corporate executive and politician

The Tonight Show Featuring Jimmy Fallon http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/carly-fiorina-talks-trump-religion-rocks-fallon-tonight-show-n431346 (21 September 2015). 2010s, 2015, The Tonight Show Featuring Jimmy Fallon (September 2015)

People, Faith, Optimism, Thinking

“Let us bring the question to the test of experience and fact; and ask ourselves, considering our nature in its entire extent, what light we derive from a sustained and comprehensive view of its component parts, which may enable us to assert with certainty that we do or do not live after death.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death, Question, Nature, Light

“We have oftener than once endeavoured to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury, which however we can find nowhere in his works, that "ridicule is the test of truth."”

Thomas Carlyle book Characteristics

Voltaire, Foreign Review, (1829); compare: "How comes it to pass, then, that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?", Shaftesbury, Characteristics. A Letter concerning Enthusiasm, sect. 2.; "Truth, 't is supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights or natural mediums by which things are to be viewed in order to a thorough recognition is ridicule itself", Shaftesbury, Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, sect. 1.; "'T was the saying of an ancient sage [Gorgias Leontinus, apud Aristotle's "Rhetoric," lib. iii. c. 18], that humour was the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery was suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination was certainly false wit", ibid. sect. 5.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)

Truth

“How comes it to pass then, that we appear such Cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the Test of Ridicule?”

Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) English politician and Earl

Vol. 1, p. 11; "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm".
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711)

Appearance

“The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 5, The Magical Control of the Weather.

Truth, Time

“Every decade or so, the world is tested by a crisis so grave that it breaks the mould: one so horrific and inhumane that the response of politicians to it becomes emblematic of their generation —their moral leadership or cowardice, their resolution or incompetence. It is how history judges us.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Don’t leave Syria to become a graveyard — this generation’s responsibility to the world (13 October 2015)

World, History

“Prayer is the pulse of the renewed soul; and the constancy of its beat is the test and measure of the spiritual life.”

Octavius Winslow (1808–1878) English theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 458.

Life, Soul

“For the educational establishment… test scores are treated as indications of the extent to which the required ground covering has been done. …as educationally significant. However, while they may be prognostic of a child's ability to get through school… they do not provide us with an appraisal of the child's progress in the long process of becoming a generally educated human being -- the advance made toward a more skillful, thoughtful, and cultivated mind.”

Mortimer J. Adler (1902–2001) American philosopher and educator

Source: Reforming Education: The Opening of the American Mind (1990), p. 312

Education, School

“• Hazing is both testing and training to subordinate self to the team.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 295.

Training

“The validity of usefulness, adequacy of popular standards can be tested only by research that violates them.”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Science in a Free Society

pg 35.
Science in a Free Society (1978)

“Why does a man refuse to believe? Because he has confidence in himself; because he has not a sense of his own sins; because he has not love in his heart to his Lord and Saviour. Unbelief men are responsible for. Unbelief is criminal because it is a moral act — an act of the whole nature. Belief or unbelief is a test of a man's whole spiritual condition, just because it is the whole being, affections, will, conscience, and all, as well as the understanding, which are concerned in it.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 608.

Love, Men, Confidence, Understanding

“After being the CM for two consecutive terms, I had two desires. One was to unearth my childhood friends with whom I had completely lost touch. One day, I sat up and listed all the names I could remember. I remembered them all but had lost track of their whereabouts. Some 35 names popped up. I wanted to invite them to the Chief Minister's residence and share my childhood with them and also because I wanted to remind myself about the real Modi lest I lose sight of him. So, I spent time with my friends getting down-to-earth. They too felt that if I remembered and spent time with them after having reached where I have then I must be fine. So, that was my test. The other desire was to get together all the teachers in my lifetime and honour them. One of them was 93-years-old. I invited them here and organised a big function to honour them. It gave me immense happiness that I was able to honour and say thanks to those who have contributed their might in shaping me. So, I fulfilled both my desires and I am happy about it.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2011, Interview with C. S. S. Latha, 2011

Teachers, Time, Childhood, Happiness

“In the years after 1936, whilst Hayek was working on The Pure Theory of Capital, most economists were convinced by Keynes, whose theory had an elegance and simplicity that Hayek’s did not. Keynes’ theory lacked Hayek’s theoretical rigor in that it was not based on equilibrium (on individual rationality), and there were places in the argument where Keynes relied on loose, informal arguments, preferring to put his trust in intuition rather than formal theory. Keynesians did not solve the problems with capital theory that Hayek had identified: they just bypassed or ignored them. According to Hayek’s methodological criteria, Keynes’ theory was decidedly inferior. Against this, Keynes’ theory provided opportunities for mathematical and statistical analysis that Hayek’s did not. Indeed, though Hayek paid some attention to data, he did so only minimally: he certainly made no attempt to test his theory against statistical data. The choice of Keynesian theory was, at least in part, a methodological one.”

Roger Backhouse (economist) (1951) British economist

"Hayek on money and the business cycle", 2006

Mathematics, Problem, Parting

“My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous. Into the Honeywell programs, which formed a little system for an extremely complex payroll, I wrote some assertions, with run-time tests that halted program execution during production runs. Time constraints didn't allow restarting a run from the beginning of the tape. So for the first few weeks I had the frightening task on several payroll runs of repairing an erroneous program at the operator’s keyboard ¾ correcting an error in the suspended program text, adjusting the local state of the program, and sometimes modifying the current and previous tape records before resuming execution. On the Honeywell 400, all this could be done directly from the console typewriter. After several weeks without halts, there seemed to be no more errors. Before leaving the organisation, I replaced the run-time halts by brief diagnostic messages: not because I was sure all the errors had been found, but simply because there would be no-one to handle a halt if one occurred. An uncorrected error might be repaired by clerical adjustments; a halt in a production run would certainly be disastrous.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson (2000), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection", in: IEEE Annals of Software Engineering, Volume 22 Number 2, pages 61-63, 66, April-June 2000.

Error, Time, Drawing

“That nature acts differently upon the sexes is proved by the test case of modern male and female homosexuality, illustrating how the sexes function separately outside social conventions. The results, according to statistics of sexual frequency: male satyriasis and female nesting. The male homosexual has more sex than his heterosexual counterpart; the female homosexual less often than hers, a radical polarization of the sexes along a single continuum of shared sexual nonconformity. Male aggression and lust are the energizing factors in culture. They are men’s tools of survival in the pagan vastness of female nature.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 26

Men, Sex, Nature

“Despite the high relevance of, the authors develop and empirically test a framework of the influence of a supplier's CSR engagement on organizational customer outcomes. Findings from an examination of 200 cross-industry supplier-customer dyads reveal positive effects of two facets of a supplier's CSR efforts on customer loyalty through distinct mechanisms. Business practice GSR fosters customers' trust, whereas philanthropic CSR strengthens customer-company identification. The authors distinguish a supplier's actual GSR engagement and customers' perception of these GSR activities. In addition, they consider central contingency factors reflecting uncertainty and dependence in business-to-business relationships that determine the effectiveness of GSR.”

Christian Homburg (1962) German academic

Source: "Corporate social responsibility in business-to-business markets", 2013, p. 54; Article abstract

Business, Effort, Dependency, Loyalty

“You have to have the courage to stand up for what you believe in – no matter how hard it is – as your beliefs make you who you are amid all the celeb madness. I'm a vegetarian and never wear leather or use products tested on animals. When I was just starting out I'd get a gazillion freebies thrown at me, so it was hard to know what contained what. Now, I've made sure that before I get to a photoshoot people know my stance on that.”

Leona Lewis (1985) British singer-songwriter

Sugar magazine, April 2008

People, Courage, Animals, Madness

“Belief may be either rational, or assumed on faith. But in either case, it doesn’t matter how convinced you are; belief does not equal knowledge. The difference is that knowledge can always be tested for accuracy where mere beliefs often can not be. No matter how positively you think you know it, if you can’t show it, then you don’t know it, and you shouldn’t say that you do. Nor would you if you really cared about the truth. Knowledge is demonstrable, measurable. But faith is often a matter of pretending to know what you know you really don't know, and that no one even can know, and which you merely believe -often for no good reason at all.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"4th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80nhqGfN6t8, Youtube (December 25, 2007) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Truth, Faith, Knowledge, Thinking

“We have to adjust ourselves, and every radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem: we undergo a test, we have to prove ourselves.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Ch. 1: "Drastic Change" http://books.google.com/books?id=7Y-NoJ8yNIkC&q=%22every+radical+adjustment+is+a+crisis+in+self-esteem%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage The Ordeal of Change (1963)

“There is a proper role for referendums in constitutional change, but only if done properly. If it is not done properly, it can be a dangerous tool. The Chairman of the Public Administration Committee, who is no longer in the Chamber, said that Clement Attlee—who is, I think, one of the Deputy Prime Minister's heroes—famously described the referendum as the device of demagogues and dictators. We may not always go as far as he did, but what is certain is that pre-legislative referendums of the type the Deputy Prime Minister is proposing are the worst type of all. ¶ Referendums should be held when the electorate are in the best possible position to make a judgment. They should be held when people can view all the arguments for and against and when those arguments have been rigorously tested. In short, referendums should be held when people know exactly what they are getting. So legislation should be debated by Members of Parliament on the Floor of the House, and then put to the electorate for the voters to judge. ¶ We should not ask people to vote on a blank sheet of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards. For referendums to be fair and compatible with our parliamentary process, we need the electors to be as well informed as possible and to know exactly what they are voting for. Referendums need to be treated as an addition to the parliamentary process, not as a substitute for it.”

David Davis (1948) British Conservative Party politician and former businessman

House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 26 November 2002, column 201 https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2002-11-26.201.7 On democracy and referendums

People, Thinking, Change, Housing

“But if the same tests, the same foods are examined by an independent scientist, then it turns out that in almost every case there are quite serious harms done to the rats, the mice or the other poor unfortunate animals, particularly internal organs like liver and kidneys and things of that sort.”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

Jane Goodall Godall Says Animals Suffer From Genetically Modified Foods http://www.marketwatch.com/story/goodall-says-animals-suffer-from-genetically-modified-foods-2015-04-28?siteid=yhoof2 (2015-04-28)

Food, Animals

“It's universally wrong to steal from your neighbor, but once you get beyond the-one-to-one level and pit the individual against the multinational conglomerate, the federal bureaucracy, the modern plantation of agro-buinsess, or the utility company, it becomes strictly a value judgement to decide exactly who is stealing from whom. One person's crime is another person's profit. Capitalism is license to steal; the government simply regulates who steals an how much. I always wanted to put together an outlaw handbook that would help raise consciousness on these points while doing something about evening the score. There was also the challenge of testing the limits of free speech.”

Abbie Hoffman book Steal This Book

Introduction
Steal This Book (1971)

Universe, Help, Personality

“Let me give you an example that encapsulates the whole difference between America and Singapore. America has a vicious drug problem. How does it solve it? It goes around the world helping other anti-narcotic agencies to try and stop the suppliers… Singapore does not have that option. What we can do is to pass a law which says that any customs officer or policeman who sees anybody in Singapore behaving suspiciously… can require that man to have his urine tested. If the sample is found to contain drugs, the man immediately goes for treatment. In America if you did that it would be an invasion of the individual's rights and you would be sued.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

Lee Kuan Yew, Interview with Fareed Zakaria of Foreign Policy, 1994 https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1994-03-01/conversation-lee-kuan-yew 1990s

World, Law, Problem, Help

“There are fans of Twenty20 cricket, and we need to ensure that we give them the cricket they want to see. We need to keep Test cricket alive, because there is a section of fans who love and worship Test cricket and have basically helped this game grow, and they are as important as anybody else.”

Rahul Dravid (1973) Indian cricketer

Love, Game, Help

“We are testing popular government's capacity for self-defense. We are resolved to liberate the soul of American life and prove ourselves an American people in fact, spirit, and purpose, and consecrate ourselves anew and everlastingly to human freedom and humanity's justice. Realizing our new relationship with the world, we want to make it fit to live in, and with might and fright and wrathfulness and barbarity crushed by the conscience of a real civilization. Ours is a small concern about the kind of government any people may choose, but we do mean to outlaw the nation which violates the sacred compacts of international relationships. The decision is to be final.”

Warren G. Harding (1865–1923) American politician, 29th president of the United States (in office from 1921 to 1923)

1910s, The Republic Must Awaken (1917)

Life, People, World, Justice

“The creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumours to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 8, p. 49

Intelligence, Baby

“Philosophy is any culture’s pole of maximum abstraction, or intrinsically experimental intelligence, expressing the liberation of cognitive capabilities from immediate practical application, and their testing against ‘ultimate’ problems at the horizon of understanding.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"What is Philosophy? (Part 1)" http://www.xenosystems.net/what-is-philosophy/ (2013)

Intelligence, Understanding, Problem

“The applications of science are inevitable and unquotable for all countries and people today. But something more than its application is necessary. It is the scientific approach, the adventurous, and critical temper of science, the search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on pre-conceived theory, the hard discipline of the mind – all this is necessary, not merely for the too many scientists today, who swear by science, forget all about it outside their particular sphere. The scientific approach and temper or should be a way of life, a process of thinking, a method of acting, associating, with our fellow men. That is a large order and undoubtedly very few if any at all can function in this way with even partial success. But his [Nehru] criticism applies in equal or even greater measure to all the injunctions which philosophy and religion have laid upon us. The scientific temper points out the way along which man should travel. It is the temper of a free man. We live in a scientific age, so we are told but there is little evidence of this temper in the people anywhere or even in their leaders.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Quoted from his book “In Nehru and His Vision 1999" in: K.K. Sinha, Social And Cultural Ethos Of India http://books.google.co.in/books?id=Jb-fO2R1CQUC&pg=PA183, Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 1 January 2008, p. 183

Life, Men, People, Truth

“Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

The judge
Blood Meridian (1985)

Law, Error, Dead

“We are an enemy of the nuclear threat and we are an enemy of testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. New Zealand did not buy into this fight. France put agents into New Zealand. France put spies into New Zealand. France lets off bombs in the Pacific. France puts its President in the Pacific to crow about it.”

David Lange (1942–2005) New Zealand politician and 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand

Referring to the Bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.
Source: M. King, Death of the Rainbow Warrior (1986), p. 200.

Fight

“Intelligence has two parts, which we shall call the epistemological and the heuristic. The epistemological part is the representation of the world in such a form that the solution of problems follows from the facts expressed in the representation. The heuristic part is the mechanism that on the basis of the information solves the problem and decides what to do.
[…]
The right way to think about the general problems of metaphysics and epistemology is not to attempt to clear one's own mind of all knowledge and start with 'Cogito ergo sum' and build up from there. Instead, we propose to use all of our knowledge to construct a computer program that knows. The correctness of our philosophical system will be tested by numerous comparisons between the beliefs of the program and our own observations and knowledge.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

John McCarthy and Patrick J. Hayes. " Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcchay69.html", Sect. 2.1, Machine Intelligence 4, ed. Donald Michie (Elsevier, 1969), p. 463 ff., ISBN 0444197443 1960s

World, Way, Intelligence, Knowledge

“I’m really interested in male and female brains and whether female brains or male brains are better at maths. You sit men and women down and give them a maths test and they will do fairly equally. Then you set up the same test, but with different people, and make them tick a box to say whether they are a man or a woman, and the women do significantly worse in the maths test than they did previously in a group set.”

Rachel Riley (1986) television presenter

Interview, The Observer, 12 Oct 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2014/oct/12/rachel-riley-countdown-stop-saying-girls-arent-good-at-maths

Women, Men, People, Box

““Are we in a dream?” Lebret asked. “Might we actually be dead and in some afterlife?”
“How could we test either supposition?” the scientist asked, with characteristic practical-mindedness. “What conceivable experiment could we design to falsify such a claim?””

Adam Roberts book Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 14, “Confinement” (p. 133)

Dreams, Dead

“The records I end up liking I don't like right off the bat. I want to call our next record Tenth Listen. That's the test.”

Blake Schwarzenbach (1967) American singer

[Parker, Jeff, http://www.hypertxt.com/parker/clips/jawbreak/jawbrk4.html, "Interview with Blake Schumacher", p. 4, Jawbreaker http://www.hypertxt.com/parker/clips/jawbreak/jawbrk.html, Hypertext.com, 2006-09-06] Interviews

“We have among us a class of mammon worshippers, whose one test of conservatism, or radicalism, is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what, they call socialism.”

Richard T. Ely (1854–1943) United States economist and author

Richard T. Ely, Socialism : an examination of its nature, its strength and its weakness, with suggestions for social reform http://archive.org/details/socialismanexam02goog (1894) As quoted in: Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, basic history of the United States http://books.google.gr/books?id=vaQsAAAAMAAJ&q=A, Doubleday, Doran & company, 1944, p. 395.

Wealth

“If I were to be asked what two of the root principles are which we should always keep in view in trying to decide on a political issue, in judging of legislation, in judging of political action, I think I should say common sense and the preservation of what always has been the most precious thing in this country—individual freedom. If you apply these tests, you will seldom go far wrong. There are many people to-day who think you can cure the ills of the world by legislation: but you must examine the legislation they propose to see whether it is adapted to the practical experience of daily life, whether the freedom of the individual is affected by it. And if you cannot be satisfied on those points, you may be quite sure that that legislation in the long run will do more harm than it will do good.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the thirtieth anniversary of the Junior Imperial League in Kingsway Hall (19 June 1926), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 18-19.
1926

Life, People, World, Thinking

“What makes the Nightmares on Elm Street universal and forever in their attraction, I think, is simply the dream. The landscape of the mind, the subconscious, the nightmare. Everybody has a nightmare, and everybody apparently has falling dreams, and everybody has the drowning dream, and everybody has certain kinds of sexual manifestation dreams, as well as our stress dreams; I didn’t study for the algebra test, I didn’t study for my driving test, you know, all those dreams. I still have those dreams, and it’s just such an interesting thing that our mind can turn against us, our own mind, you know we all have.”

Robert Englund (1947) American actor, voice-actor, singer, and director

Robert Englund On El Rey’s 45 Hour ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ Marathon, the Passing of Wes Craven, and the Current State of the Slasher Genre http://bloody-disgusting.com/interviews/3379567/3379567/ (February 12, 2016)

Dreams, Thinking, Study, Universe

“Back then (in 1985) the issue of the day was nuclear testing, now we are faced with problems such as climate change, overfishing, deforestation, shipments of radioactive materials through Pacific waters and nuclear proliferation. We need to remain vigilant so that we won't become victims again.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Address to Greenpeace, Suva, 10 July 2005.

Problem, Water, Change

“… well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you – if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers – the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.”

Fred Brooks (1931) American computer scientist

As quoted [paraphrased] from * http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-07-1999/jw-07-toolbox.html
Java World
1999
July
Toolbox

Hope, Way, Thinking, Change

“… it's time for the opening lecture in Test Design 101: Consider: a woman claims to be a musician. You seat her at a piano and demand that she prove her claim. She cannot play the piano, and you conclude that her claim has been invalidated. Hardly. You see, the lady is a cellist….
You cannot challenge a claimant to do something they've never claimed they can do. That's why, at the JREF, we design a protocol only after the applicant has clearly stated (a) what they can do, (b) under what conditions, and (c) with what expected degree of success. And, the applicant must find the protocol appropriate, fair, agreeable, and adequate to prove their claim.”

James Randi (1928) Canadian-American stage magician and scientific skeptic

Swift, 21 October 2005, "Good Intentions" http://www.randi.org/jr/200510/102105herbs.html#11; about testing paranormal claims.

Time, Success

“No one of good character leaves behind a wasted life — whether they die in obscurity or renown. "Character," wrote the 19th Century evangelist, Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark." Your character is not tested on occasions of public scrutiny or acclaim. It is not tested in moments when the object of your actions is the regard of another. Your character is what you are to yourself, not what you pretend to be to yourself or others. Although human beings often attempt self-delusion, we cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves. It will make itself known to us by means of our conscience despite our most strenuous effort to suppress it.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

1990s, Speech at Ohio Wesleyan University (1997)

Life, Truth, Effort

“It is difficult to analyse the motive that induced me to make those journeys, or the satisfaction I derived from such a life. There was of course the lure of the unknown; there was the constant test of resolution and endurance. Yet those travels in the Empty Quarter would have been for me a pointless penance but for the comradeship of my Bedu companions. All they possessed were their camels and saddlery, their rifles and daggers, some waterskins and cooking pots and bowls, and the very clothes they wore; few of them even owned a blanket. They possessed, however, a freedom which we, with all our craving for possessions, cannot experience. Any of them could have found a job in the towns and villages of the Hadhramaut; but all would have rejected that easier life of lesser men. They met every challenge, every hardship, with the proud boast: 'We are Bedu.”

Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) British explorer

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 398.

Life, Men, Travel, Motivation

“Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Mind and Nature, a necessary unity, 1988, p. 25

Religion, Art, Sleep, Science

“Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 1 (p. 16)

Understanding, Time

“The fact that human intuition is ill suited to situations involving uncertainty was known as early as the 1930's, when researchers noted that people could neither make up a sequence of numbers that passed mathematical tests for randomness nor recognize reliably whether a given string was randomly generated.”

Leonard Mlodinow book The Drunkard's Walk

Prologue, p. ix
The Drunkard's Walk

People, Mathematics

“A system composed of 100,000 lines of C++ is not be sneezed at, but we don't have that much trouble developing 100,000 lines of COBOL today. The real test of OOP will come when systems of 1 to 10 million lines of code are developed.”

Ed Yourdon (1944–2016) American software engineer and pioneer in the software engineering methodology

Yourdon (1990) cited in: Andreas Paepcke (1991) Object-oriented Programming Systems, Languages and Applications. p. 166.

“It is characteristic of the design of scientific research that exquisite attention is devoted to methodological problems that can be solved, while the pretense is made that the ones that cannot be solved are really nothing to worry about. On the one hand, biologists will apply the most critical and demanding canons of evidence in the design of measuring instruments or in the procedure for taking an unbiased samples of organisms to be tested, but when asked whether the conditions in the laboratory are likely to be relevant to the situation in nature, they will provide a hand-waving intuitive argument filled with unsubstantiated guesses and prejudices because, in the end, that is all they can do.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Sex, Lies, and Social Science (1995)

Nature, Problem

“I cannot believe that the gentry of England will be made mere drumheads to be sounded upon by a Prime Minister to give forth unmeaning and empty sounds, and to have no articulate voice of their own. No! You are the gentry of England who represent the counties. You are the aristocracy of England. Your fathers led our fathers: you may lead us if you will go the right way. But, although you have retained your influence with this country longer than any other aristocracy, it has not been by opposing popular opinion, or by setting yourselves against the spirit of the age. In other days, when the battle and the hunting-fields were the tests of manly vigour, why, your fathers were first and foremost there. The aristocracy of England were not like the noblesse of France, the mere minions of a court; nor were they like the hidalgoes of Madrid, who dwindled into pigmies. You have been Englishmen. You have not shown a want of courage and firmness when any call has been made upon you. This is a new era. It is the age of improvement, it is the age of social advancement, not the age for war or for feudal sports. You live in a mercantile age, when the whole wealth of the world is poured into your lap. You cannot have the advantages of commercial rents and feudal privileges; but you may be what you always have been, if you will identify yourselves with the spirit of the age. The English people look to the gentry and aristocracy of their country as their leaders. I, who am not one of you, have no hesitation in telling you, that there is a deep-rooted, an hereditary prejudice, if I may so call it, in your favour in this country. But you never got it, and you will not keep it, by obstructing the spirit of the age.”

Richard Cobden (1804–1865) English manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman

Speech in the House of Commons http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1845/mar/13/effects-of-corn-laws-on-agriculturists (13 March 1845). 1840s

War, People, Age, World

“If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility.”

James Frazer book The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion.

Truth

“If we are to project our power against the vital areas of any enemy across the ocean before beachheads on enemy territory are captured, it must be by air-sea power; by aircraft launched from carriers; and by heavy surface ships and submarines projecting guided missiles and rockets. If present promise is developed by research, test and production, these three types of air-sea power operating in concert will be able within the next ten years critically to damage enemy vital areas many hundreds of miles inland.
Naval task forces including these types are capable of remaining at sea for months. This capability has raised to a high point the art of concentrating air power within effective range of enemy objectives.”

Chester W. Nimitz (1885–1966) United States Navy fleet admiral

Employment of Naval Forces (1948)

Art, Sea

“Writing in 1944, the year of the Bretton Woods Conference, Polanyi suggested that the extension of the institutions of the market over the course of the nineteenth century aroused a political reaction in the form of associations and lobbies that ultimately undermined the stability of the market system. He gave the gold standard a place of prominence among the institutions of laissez faire in response to which this reaction had taken place. And he suggested that the opening of national economic decision making to parties representing working-class interests had contributed to the downfall of that international monetary system. In a sense, this book asks whether Polanyi’s thesis stands the test of time. Can the international monetary history of the second half of the twentieth century be understood as the further unfolding of Polanyian dynamics, in which democratization again came into conflict with economic liberalization in the form of free capital mobility and fixed exchange rates? Or do recent trends toward floating rates and monetary unification point to ways of reconciling freedom and stability in the two domains?”

Barry Eichengreen Introduction

Source: Globalizing Capital (2008), Chapter 1. Introduction

Books, Way, History, Decision

“Statistical criteria should (1) be sensitive to change in the specific factors tested, (2) be insensitive to changes, of a magnitude likely to occur in practice, in extraneous factors.”

George E. P. Box (1919–2013) British statistician

G.E.P Box (1955); cited in: JOC/EFR (2006) " George Edward Pelham Box http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Box.html" at history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk, Nov 2006.

Change

“Paul Laurence Dunbar High School was established in 1870 in Washington, D. C., as the nation's first black public high school. From 1870 to 1955, most of its graduates went off to college, earning degrees from Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Wesleyan and others. As early as 1899, Dunbar students scored higher on citywide tests than students at any of the district's [three] white [high] schools. Its attendance and tardiness records were generally better than those of white schools. During this era of high achievement, there was no school violence. It wasn't racially integrated. It didn't have a big budget. It didn't even have a lunchroom or all those other things that today's education establishment says are necessary for black academic excellence.”

Walter E. Williams (1936) American economist, commentator, and academic

"Educational excellence initiative" (15 August 2012)
2010s

Education, School

“If ever they are put to the test, they shy away, affirming that nationalism is 'practical', cosmopolitanism but a remote ideal. Though they see it intellectually, their hearts are not capable of responding to it. If ever the nation is in danger, their cosmopolitanism evaporates, and they stand for the nation in the good old style. Yet intellectually they know that in their modem world this way leads to disaster.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter V: Origins of the European war

World, Way, Heart

“The war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941, I think. And I believe it was two months later, or maybe three, that Heydrich sent for me. I reported. He said to me: "The Führer has ordered physical extermination." These were his words. And as though wanting to test their effect on me, he made a long pause, which was not at all his way. I can still remember that. In the first moment, I didn't grasp the implications, because he chose his words so carefully. But then I understood. I didn't say anything, what could I say? Because I'd never thought of a … of such a thing, of that sort of violent solution. … Anyway, Heydrich said: "Go and see Globocnik, the Führer has already given him instructions. Take a look and see how he's getting on with his program. I believe he's using Russian anti-tank trenches for exterminating the Jews." As ordered, I went to Lublin, located the headquarters of SS and Police Commander Globocnik, and reported to the Gruppenführer. I told him Heydrich had sent me, because the Führer had ordered the physical extermination of the Jews. … Globocnik sent for a certain Sturmbannführer Höfle, who must have been a member of his staff. We went from Lublin to, I don't remember what the place was called, I get them mixed up, I couldn't say if it was Treblinka or some other place. There were patches of woods, sort of, and the road passed through — a Polish highway. On the right side of the road there was an ordinary house, that's where the men who worked there lived. A captain of the Ordnungspolizei welcomed us. A few workmen were still there. The captain, which surprised me, had taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, somehow he seemed to have joined in the work. They were building little wooden shacks, two, maybe three of them; they looked like two- or three-room cottages. Höfle told the police captain to explain the installation to me. And then he started in. He had a, well, let's say, a vulgar, uncultivated voice. Maybe he drank. He spoke some dialect from the southwestern corner of Germany, and he told me how he had made everything airtight. It seems they were going to hook up a Russian submarine engine and pipe the exhaust into the houses and the Jews inside would be poisoned.
I was horrified. My nerves aren't strong enough … I can't listen to such things… such things, without their affecting me. Even today, if I see someone with a deep cut, I have to look away. I could never have been a doctor. I still remember how I visualized the scene and began to tremble, as if I'd been through something, some terrible experience. The kind of thing that happens sometimes and afterwards you start to shake. Then I went to Berlin and reported to the head of the Security Police.”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Source: Eichmann Interrogated (1983), p. 75 - 76.

Men, War, Way, Thinking

“As I mentioned in my previous homosexual video, never overlook the influence that can be caused by a single person. Everyone in the world, despite how much you score in a test, what job you’re in or how intelligent you are, has influence.”

Amos Yee (1998) blogger

Tumblr postings

World, Intelligence, Personality

“People accuse me of being a single-issue writer, a single-issue thinker, and a single-issue voter, but it isn't true. What I've chosen, in a world where there's never enough time and energy, is to focus on the one political issue which most clearly and unmistakably demonstrates what any politician — or political philosophy — is made of, right down to the creamy liquid center.
Make no mistake: all politicians — even those ostensibly on the side of guns and gun ownership — hate the issue and anyone, like me, who insists on bringing it up. They hate it because it's an X-ray machine. It's a Vulcan mind-meld. It's the ultimate test to which any politician — or political philosophy — can be put.
If a politician isn't perfectly comfortable with the idea of his average constituent, any man, woman, or responsible child, walking into a hardware store and paying cash — for any rifle, shotgun, handgun, machinegun, anything”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

without producing ID or signing one scrap of paper, he isn't your friend no matter what he tells you. "Why Did it Have to be ... Guns?" (3 August 1999) http://www.lneilsmith.org/.

Hate, People, World, Idea

“The thing about happiness is that it doesnt help you to grow; only unhappiness does that. So I'm grateful that my bed of roses was made up equally of blossoms and thorns. I've had a privileged, creative, exciting life, and I think that the parts that were less joyous were preparing me, testing me, strengthening me.”

Lana Turner (1921–1995) American actress

On strength, p. 307.
Autobiography

Life, Thinking, Help, Parting

“If we accept values as given and consistent, if we postulate an objective description of the world as it really is, and if we assume that the decision maker's computational powers are unlimited, then two important consequences follow. First, we do not need to distinguish between the real world and the decision maker's perception of it: he or she perceives the world as it really is. Second, we can predict the choices that will be made by a rational decision maker entirely from our knowledge of the real world and without a knowledge of the decision maker's perceptions or modes of calculation. (We do, of course, have to know his or her utility function.)
If, on the other hand, we accept the proposition that both the knowledge and the computational power of the decision maker are severely limited, then we must distinguish between the real world and the actor's perception of it and reasoning about it. That is to say, we must construct a theory (and test it empirically) of the processes of decision. Our theory must include not only the reasoning processes but also the processes that generate the actor's subjective representation of the decision problem, his or her frame.”

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

H.A. Simon (1986), " Rationality in psychology and economics http://www.kgt.bme.hu/targyak/msc/ng/BMEGT30MN40/data/JoBus-86-rationality-HSimon.pdf," Journal of Business, p. 210-11” 1980s and later

World, Knowledge, Problem, Decision

“With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so.
It was not obedience.
It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son.
Abraham was testing God.
By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham.”

Dan Simmons book The Fall of Hyperion

Source: The Fall of Hyperion (1990), Chapter 45 (p. 491)

Love, God, Pain, Heart

“I don't believe in coincidences. I believe that if you're doing the right thing, you are handed back pieces of yourself. It's like something goes right for you and this will keep you going for six weeks, and then your next test is going to be designed for you.”

Liza Tarbuck (1964) English actress and television and radio presenter

Asked whether things are meant, while been interviewed by The Independent on Sunday, May 25, 2003 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4159/is_20030525/ai_n12738402

“Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion; it is the acid test of entropic order to test the system for yield. If it consumes energy beyond product, it is in disoder. If it produces energy to or beyond consumption, it is ordered.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 2.9

Lie

“Ascending modern rationalism, in its speculative as well as empirical form, shows a striking contrast between extreme critical radicalism in scientific and philosophic method on the one hand, and an uncritical quietism in the attitude toward established and functioning social institutions. Thus Descartes' ego cogitans was to leave the “great public bodies” untouched, and Hobbes held that “the present ought always to be preferred, maintained, and accounted best.” Kant agreed with Locke in justifying revolution if and when it has succeeded in organizing the whole and in preventing subversion. However, these accommodating concepts of Reason were always contradicted by the evident misery and injustice of the “great public bodies” and the effective, more or less conscious rebellion against them. Societal conditions existed which provoked and permitted real dissociation. from the established state of affairs; a private as well as political dimension was present in which dissociation could develop into effective opposition, testing its strength and the validity of its objectives. With the gradual closing of this dimension by the society, the self-limitation of thought assumes a larger significance. The interrelation between scientific-philosophical and societal processes, between theoretical and practical Reason, asserts itself "behind the back” of the scientists and philosophers. The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless. Historical transcendence appears as metaphysical transcendence, not acceptable to science and scientific thought. The operational and behavioral point of view, practiced as a “habit of thought” at large, becomes the view of the established universe of discourse and action, needs and aspirations. The “cunning of Reason” works, as it so often did, in the interest of the powers that be. The insistence on operational and behavioral concepts turns against the efforts to free thought and behavior from the given reality and for the suppressed alternatives.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 15-16

Behavior, Reality, Effort, Universe

Quotes about testing page 8

Quotes about testing
page 8