Standards Quotes - Page 31

• In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb.

  Miroslav Volf

  People, Infidelity, Different

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• You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization - including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain - without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

  Thomas Sowell

  Clever, Responsibility, Color

  "What Ails Baltimore? Liberalism, Corruption & Incompetence" by Jack Kelly, www.realclearpolitics.com. May 10, 2015.

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• A gold standard is the ideal monetary system for those who create wealth through ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and hard work. Gold standards are disfavored by those who do not create wealth but instead seek to extract wealth from others through inflation, inside information, and market manipulation.

  James Rickards

  Hard Work, Gold, Information

  James Rickards (2014). “The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System”, p.156, Penguin

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• Some things are so silly they have a certain brilliance to them. Other things, set as standards for brilliance and therefore exalted by many who don't know why, become tarnished because of it.

  Criss Jami

  Silly, Certain, Brilliance

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.6, Criss Jami

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• It turns out that the men who ultimately, who unpretentiously value peace are willing to sacrifice their own peace of mind in order to render it. The question is, 'Who, between opposing forces, would do such a thing?' It seems only theoretical albeit true that men who accept an objective rather than subjective moral standard are, in a general sense, more capable of making such sacrifices for the sake of peace.

  Criss Jami

  Sacrifice, Men, Order

  Criss Jami (2015). “Killosophy”, p.85, Criss Jami

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• Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.

  Winston Churchill

  War, Judging, Political

  "Boothby: Recollections of a Rebel". Book by Robert Boothby, pp. 183-84, October, 1978.

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• America today is a confused society, caught up in a terror war, a culture war, and a media war, where honesty and professional standards have vanished.

  Bill O'Reilly

  Honesty, Confused, War

  "The O'Reilly Factor" with Bill O'Reilly, March 23, 2007.

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• Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.

  William Hazlitt

  Character, Conceited, Ignorant

  William Hazlitt (1841). “Lectures on the English Comic Writers. By William Hazlitt. Third edition. Edited by his son [William Hazlitt the Younger].”, p.49

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• Money appears as measure (in Homer, e.g. oxen) earlier than as medium of exchange, because in barter each commodity is still its own medium of exchange. But it cannot be its own or its own standard of comparison.

  Karl Marx

  Oxen, Commodity, Mediums

  Karl Marx (1973). “Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy”, Vintage Books USA

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• As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you can lower them.

  Robin Williams

  Drinking, Alcohol, Alcoholism

  "Robin Williams: Weapons of Self Destruction". TV Special, www.imdb.com. December 6, 2009.

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• Equity is a roguish thing. For Law we have a measure, know what to trust to; Equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is Equity. 'T is all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a "foot" a Chancellor's foot; what an uncertain measure would this be! One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot. 'T is the same thing in the Chancellor's conscience.

  John Selden

  Law, Feet, Long

  "Table Talk: Being the Discourses of John Selden (Equity)". Book by John Selden and Richard Milward, 1689.

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• There are many well-meaning people today who work at placing an economic floor beneath all of us so that no one shall exist below a certain level or standard of living, and certainly we don't quarrel with this. But look more closely and you may find that all too often these well-meaning people are building a ceiling above which no one shall be permitted to climb and between the two are pressing us all into conformity, into a mold of standardized mediocrity.

  Ronald Reagan

  Two, People, Ceilings

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• There still remains one effort of magnanimity, one sacrifice of prejudice and passion, to be made by the individuals throughout the nation who have heretofore followed the standards of political party. It is that of discarding every remnant of rancor against each other, of embracing as countrymen and friends, and of yielding to talents and virtue alone that confidence which in times of contention for principle was bestowed only upon those who bore the badge of party communion.

  John Quincy Adams

  Party, Passion, Sacrifice

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• Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Real, Wine, Oil

  Ernest Hemingway (2014). “The Hemingway Collection”, p.2243, Simon and Schuster

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• Inflation is not a Robin Hood, taking from the rich to give to the poor. Rather, it deals most cruelly with those who can least protect themselves. It strikes hardest those millions of our citizens whose incomes do not quickly rise with the cost of living. When prices soar, the pensioner and the widow see their security undermined, the man of thrift sees his savings melt away; the white collar worker, the minister, and the teacher see their standards of living dragged down.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  Teacher, Men, White

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• To an extent that undermines classical standards of science, some purported scientific results concerning 'HIV' and 'AIDS' have been handled by press releases, by disinformation, by low-quality studies, and by some suppression of information, manipulating the media and people at large. When the official scientific press does not report correctly, or obstructs views dissenting from those of the scientific establishment, it loses credibility and leaves no alternative but to find information elsewhere.

  Serge Lang

  Views, Media, People

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• I hold myself to a very high standard, and I hold my contributions to that same high standard. I will not accept any contributions that are illegal, inappropriate or tainted.

  Kevin Shelley

  High Standards, Inappropriate, Accepting

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• Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man. That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Dream, Men, Style

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• Libertarians are not the brightest lights in the candelabra, a fact that is evident from the alternatives they tend to offer to public prevention of private abuses. For example: if you don’t like working a hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents a day, then find another employer! It is obvious to intelligent people, if not libertarians, that more generous employers will price themselves out of a market whose standards are set by the most rapacious.

  Michael Lind

  Intelligent, Light, People

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• By leveraging the Unicode Standard, Progress Software is enabling its ASPs (Application Service Providers) and ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to quickly and efficiently deliver their business applications to the Internet and to users around the world.

  Joseph Alsop

  Independent, Progress, Around The World

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• IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators.

  Paul Thurrott

  Web Content, Ends, Creator

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• Although he reputedly hated the label of 'guru', Peter Drucker was, by any standards, the greatest management guru the world has yet seen. In 1996, the McKinsey Quarterly journal described him as the 'the one guru to whom other gurus kowtow' and Robert Heller described him as 'the greatest man in the history of management', praise indeed for a man who described himself as 'just an old journalist'.

  Peter Drucker

  Men, Labels, World

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• When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Silly, Law

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• The theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge and myself, is not, as so often misunderstood, a radical claim for truly sudden change, but a recognition that ordinary processes of speciation, properly conceived as glacially slow by the standard of our own life-span, do not resolve into geological time as long sequences of insensibly graded intermediates (the traditional, or gradualistic, view), but as geologically "sudden" origins at single bedding planes.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Views, Long, Misunderstood

  "Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time". Book by Stephen Jay Gould, pp. 2 - 3, 1987.

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• When I arrived at Harvard, I wanted to design a course in political theory that would have interested me, back when I was started out, in a way that the standard things didn't.

  Michael Sandel

  Design, Political, Back When

  "'Whether we are arguing about MPs' expenses or assisted suicide, we need to engage with the moral ideals underlying our political debates'". Interview with Oliver Burkeman, www.theguardian.com. October 30, 2009.

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