Measuring Quotes

• If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

  Lord Kelvin

  Measurement, Measure For Measure, Can Not

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• In physical science a first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.

  Lord Kelvin

  Numbers, Quality, Principles

  Popular Lectures and Addresses "Electrical Units of Measurement" (1889).

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• If you can't measure it, you can't change it.

  Peter Drucker

  Measurement, Measure For Measure, Can't Change

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• If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it.

  DJ Patil

  Measurement, Measure For Measure, Ifs

  DJ Patil (2011). “Building Data Science Teams”, p.9, "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

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• In God we trust; all others bring data.

  W. Edwards Deming

  Funny Good Morning, Data, Measurement

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• We cannot use a double standard for measuring our own and other people's policies. Our demands for democratic practices in other lands will be no more effective than the guarantees of those practiced in our own country.

  Hubert H. Humphrey

  Wisdom, Country, Land

  1948 Democratic National Convention Address, delivered 14 July 1948, Philadelphia, PA

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• Man is the measure of all things.

  Protagoras

  Philosophical, Men, Greek

  Quoted in Plato, Theaetetus

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  Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.

  Bill Gates

  Success, Trust, Leadership

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• If someone separated the art of counting and measuring and weighing from all the other arts, what was left of each (of the others) would be, so to speak, insignificant.

  Plato

  Art, Science, Would Be

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• When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it.

  Niels Bohr

  Creating, World, Assuming

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• What you need to do is get that tape measure out, and start measuring that gut. Then you start working out and you start eating properly till that gut gets down close to it was when you were in your 20's. Then you'll find out what your weight should be.

  Jack LaLanne

  Work Out, Needs, Tape

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• I think it's going to be a very important, unique data set in terms of measuring the behavior of your lower body in space and trying to figure out what we can do to preserve bone and muscle density.

  John L. Phillips

  Unique, Thinking, Data

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• You just try to do everything that comes up. Get up an hour earlier, stay up an hour later, make the time. Then you look back and say, ‘Well, that was a neat piece of juggling there -- school, marriage, babies, career.’ The enthusiasms took me through the action, not the measuring of it or the reasonableness.

  Ruby Dee

  Marriage, Baby, Children

  "Breaking: Legendary Actress Ruby Dee Has Died at Age 91, Family Says" by Tambay A. Obenson, www.indiewire.com. June 12, 2014.

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• Money is not real.
  It is a conscious agreement on measuring value.

  John Ralston Saul

  Real, Agreement, Conscious

  John Ralston Saul (2012). “The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”, p.91, Simon and Schuster

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• If the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

  Abdelaziz Bouteflika

  Men, Civilization, Years

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• You feel the music needs something but you don't know what. So you start searching, fitting, measuring, trying. Every time you try another angle. And sometimes that's frustrating, especially if you don't come up with something for three days.

  Beth Gibbons

  Trying, Three, Needs

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• Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Running, Distance, Sea

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.729, Library of America

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• We shall probably never attain the power of measuring the velocity of nervous action; for we have not the opportunity of comparing its propagation through immense space, as we have in the case of light.

  Johannes Peter Muller

  Opportunity, Space, Light

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• Some artists claim praise is irrelevant in measuring the success of art, but I think it's quite relevant. Besides, it makes me feel great.

  Chris Van Allsburg

  Art, Thinking, Praise

  Caldecott Medal acceptance speech for Jumanji, polarexpress.com. 1982.

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• There's always the tendency to transform the Church into an ethical agency, and of measuring the Church by the yardstick of social and cultural utility.

  Karl Lehmann

  Agency, Church, Yardsticks

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• Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs.

  Jonathan Kozol

  Children, Blessing, Needs

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• It is now possible to quantify people's levels of happiness pretty accurately by asking them, by observation, and by measuring electrical activity in the brain, in degrees from terrible pain to sublime joy.

  Polly Toynbee

  Happiness, Pain, People

  "It is not fanciful to make the pursuit of happiness a political imperative" by Polly Toynbee, www.theguardian.com. June 15, 2006.

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• It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Eye, Self, Soul

  "Strivings of the Negro People" (1897)

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• A measuring jug is also vital when cooking rice, as this is always measured by volume rather than by weight

  Delia Smith

  Cooking, Jugs, Weight

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• There's something wrong with a mother who washes out a measuring cup with soap and water after she's only measured water in it.

  Erma Bombeck

  Mother, Fun, Water

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