Function Quotes - Page 20

• In my case, if one out of five opportunities is interesting enough to work on, maybe one in five of those ends up being worth doing. That might be a function of risk. That might be a function of price. There are all the variables. But you have to be constantly sorting and choosing and prioritizing.

  Sam Zell

  Opportunity, Interesting, Risk

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• The trouble with science fiction is that you can write about everything: time, space, all the future, all the past, all of the universe, any kind of creature imaginable. That's too big. It provides no focus for the artist. An artist needs, in order to function, some narrowing of focus. Usually, in the history of art, the narrower the focus in which the artist is forced to work, the greater the art.

  Philip J. Klass

  Art, Writing, Past

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• When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I'm trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It's a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. "I was attacked by a bear!" to "Goddamn bear tried to kill me!" to "That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person!" and so on.

  David Foster Wallace

  Writing, Trying, Juggernaut

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• The function of the photographer is to help people understand the world around them.

  Sid Grossman

  Photography, People, World

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• Good photography is not about Zone Printing or any other Ansel Adams nonsense. It's just about seeing. You either see or you don't see. The rest is academic. Photography is simply a function of noticing things. Nothing more.

  Elliott Erwitt

  Photography, Photographer, Nonsense

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• The function of football, soccer, basketball and other passion-sports in modern industrial society is the transference of boredom, frustration, anger and rage into socially acceptable forms of combat. A temporary substitute for war; for nationalism; identification with something bigger than the self.

  Edward Abbey

  Basketball, Soccer, Sports

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• It is the mission of the pedagogue, not to make his pupils think, but to make them think right, and the more nearly his own mind pulsates with the great ebbs and flows of popular delusion and emotion, the more admirably he performs his function. He may be an ass, but that is surely no demerit in a man paid to make asses of his customers.

  H. L. Mencken

  Teaching, Men, Thinking

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.316, Vintage

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• Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.

  B. F. Skinner

  Teacher, Teaching, Tasks

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• The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple.

  Grady Booch

  Simple, Simplicity, Computer

  "Qt for Symbian". Book by Frank H. P. Fitzek et al., 2010.

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• The Library is an open sanctuary. It is devoted to individual intellectual inquiry and contemplation. Its function is to provide free access to ideas and information. It is a haven of privacy, a source of both cultural and intellectual sustenance for the individual reader. Since it is thus committed to free and open inquiry on a personal basis, the Library must remain open, with access to it always guaranteed.

  Robert G. Vosper

  Ideas, Intellectual, Library

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• The Holy Ghost, a personage of spirit, is their minister, who has been given the power and assigned the functions of bearing record of the Father and the Son, of revealing the truths of salvation to men on earth, and in due course, of revealing to them, all truth.

  Bruce R. McConkie

  Father, Son, Men

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• The death penalty fulfills a preventive function, but it is also very clearly a form of revenge. It is an especially severe form of punishment because it is so final. The human life is ended and the executed person is deprived of the opportunity to change, to restore the harm done or compensate for it.

  Dalai Lama

  Revenge, Opportunity, Punishment

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• One function of the librarian, as he saw it, was to blunt the edge of these differences and to provide a means whereby the rich and poor could live happily side by side. The public library was a great leveler, supplying a literature by which the ordinary man could experience some of the pleasures of the rich, and providing a common ground where employer and employee could meet on equal terms.

  Lewis Henry Steiner

  Mean, Men, Differences

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• Contemporary political theorists continue this type of thinking about democracy by arguing that the development of "public judgment" among regular citizens should be made the central concern of modern politics. Public judgment, in the words of Benjamin Barber, is a function of commonality that can be exercised only by citizens interacting with one another in the context of mutual deliberation and decision.

  Kevin Mattson

  Thinking, Decision, Political

  Kevin Mattson (1994). “Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era”, p.4, Penn State Press

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• When the function of libraries is put in terms of their contributions to the community, people see their centrality. The challenge to us is to continue to help them see it in those terms to describe our larger purposes. We must assert that libraries are central to the quality of life in our society; that libraries have a direct role in preserving democratic freedoms. Free access to information and the opportunity of every individual to improve his or her mind, employment prospects, and lifestyle are fundamental rights in our society.

  Arthur Curley

  Opportunity, Rights, People

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• ...quantity is not necessarily synonymous with quality and brilliant ideas are not a function of the number of titles printed.

  Carlo M. Cipolla

  Ideas, Numbers, Quality

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• A colleague saw the same model-calibrating the elasticity of demand facing a Cournot oligopolist as a function of the number of firms in the industry--described at the University of Chicago and at M.I.T. A Chicago economist derived the formula and said, "Look at how few firms you need to get close to infinite elasticities and perfect competition." An M.I.T. economist derived the same formula and said, "Look at how large n has to be before you get anywhere close to an infinite elasticity and perfect competition."

  Matthew Rabin

  Numbers, Perfect, Competition

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• The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

  Walter Lippmann

  Men, Age, Problem

  Walter Lippmann, Clinton Rossiter, James Lare (1982). “The Essential Lippmann: A Political Philosophy for Liberal Democracy”, p.483, Harvard University Press

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• The principle of the Constitution is that of a separation of legislative, Executive and Judiciary functions, except in cases specified. If this principle be not expressed in direct terms, it is clearly the spirit of the Constitution, and it ought to be so commented and acted on by every friend of free government.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Government, Principles, Spirit

  Thomas Jefferson, Barbara B. Oberg (1950). “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 29: 1 March 1796 to 31 December 1797”, p.271, Princeton University Press

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• Leadership produces change. That is its primary function

  John P. Kotter

  Business, Management, Economics

  John P. Kotter (2008). “Force For Change: How Leadership Differs from Management”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

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• Analogue. A part or organ in one animal which has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal.

  Richard Owen

  Science, Animal, Differences

  Richard Owen (1848). “On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton”, p.7

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• Homologue. The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.

  Richard Owen

  Science, Animal, Differences

  Richard Owen (1848). “On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton”, p.7

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• I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no parallel, nor even any near approximation, is sufficient to account for.

  Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet

  Animal, Men, Organization

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• Plants, again, inasmuch as they are without locomotion, present no great variety in their heterogeneous pacts. For, when the functions are but few, few also are the organs required to effect them. ... Animals, however, that not only live but perceive, present a great multiformity of pacts, and this diversity is greater in some animals than in others, being most varied in those to whose share has fallen not mere life but life of high degree. Now such an animal is man.

  Aristotle

  Animal, Men, Diversity

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• Mark the babe not long accustomed to this breathing world; One that hath barely learned to shape a smile, though yet irrational of soul, to grasp with tiny finger - to let fall a tear; And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves, To stretch his limbs, becoming, as might seem. The outward functions of intelligent man.

  William Wordsworth

  Baby, Fall, Sleep

  William Wordsworth (1847). “The Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.491

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