Standards Quotes - Page 40

• In the sacred fact of obligation you touch the immutable, and lay hold, as it were, on the eternities. At the very center of your being, there is a fixed element, and that of a kind or degree essentially sovereign. A standard is set up in your very thought, by which a great part of your questions are determined, and about which your otherwise random thoughts may settle into order and law.

  Horace Bushnell

  Order, Law, Degrees

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• With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.

  Dervla Murphy

  Country, Years, Two

  Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.76, The Overlook Press

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• Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything; height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.

  Dervla Murphy

  People, World, Height

  Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.69, The Overlook Press

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• In 1975, Congress passed a law requiring fuel efficiency standards to double over 10 years, with incremental targets that auto manufacturers were required to meet. That was the responsible approach, and it worked. But since 1985, we've done nothing - even as technology has moved at light speed.

  Michael Bloomberg

  Technology, Light, Years

  "Bloomberg Calls for National Energy Reforms" by Ray Rivera, query.nytimes.com. May 12, 2007.

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• That's the one thing a politician mustn't have - political opinions or principles. He can have prejudices - indeed he must have prejudices and share all the popular political superstitions of the moment as ardently as he can. But he must not have principles. He must never let the people suspect that they cannot eat their cake and have it. He must promise them a defense program and a higher standard of living. He must never use that dreadful little word or.

  Helen McCloy

  Political Opinions, Cake, People

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• Half of our sorrows come from setting exalted standards for people and then breaking our hearts when they fail to live up to them.

  Alice Hegan Rice

  Heart, People, Expectations

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• We often tend to think that the executive wishes to maintain standard, wishes to reach a certain quality of production, and that the worker has to be goaded in some way to do this. Again and again we forget that the worker is often, usually I think, equally interested, that his greatest pleasure in his work comes from the satisfaction of worthwhile accomplishment, of having done the best of which he was capable.

  Mary Parker Follett

  Leadership, Thinking, Accomplishment

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• It is neither necessary nor desirable that national boundaries should mark sharp differences in standards of living, that membership of a national group should entitle to a share in a cake altogether different from that in which members of other groups share.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Cake, Differences, Membership

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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• The problems raised by a conscious direction of economic affairs on a national scale inevitably assume even greater dimensions when the same is attempted internationally. The conflict between planning and freedom cannot but become more serious as the similarity of standards and values among those submitted to a unitary plan diminishes.

  Friedrich August von Hayek

  Dimensions, Serious, Planning

  "The Road to Serfdom". Book by Friedrich Hayek, Ch. 15 : The Prospects of International Order, 1940 - 1943.

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• Remember that you will never reach a higher standard than you yourself set. Then set your mark high, and step by step, even though it be by painful effort, by self-denial and sacrifice, ascend the whole length of the ladder of progress.

  Ellen G. White

  Ambition, Sacrifice, Self

  Ellen G. White (2013). “Christ's Object Lessons - Illustrated”, p.264, Lulu Press, Inc

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• Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it. Thus if, for any reason whatsoever, moral standards are conspicuously and unprecedentedly breached in one area of society, such as the political, it will follow as the night the day that those standards will start collapsing all down the line-in sports, entertainment, education, the armed forces, business and government.

  Margaret Halsey

  Sports, Night, Government

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• People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Jobs, Mean, Pride

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• It is the curse of minorities in this power-worshipping world that either from fear or from an uncertain policy of expedience they distrust their own standards and hesitate to give voice to their deeper convictions, submitting supinely to estimates and characterizations of themselves as handed down by a not unprejudiced dominant majority.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Voice, Giving, Majority

  Anna Julia Cooper (1988). “A Voice From the South”, p.43, Oxford University Press

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• to the Indian, politics are what the weather is to an Englishman. Politics are an introduction to a stranger on a train, they are the standard filler for embarrassing silences in conversation, they are the inevitable small talk at any social gathering.

  Santha Rama Rau

  Weather, Silence, India

  Santha Rama Rau (1945). “Home to India”

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• There appears to be a disturbing trend in this nation to try to force single moms to choose between their children and their careers. If they take their careers seriously, they are labeled as bad mothers. If they spend time with their children, they are labeled as people who can't be serious about careers outside the home. This is a sexist double standard. No such guilt trip is imposed on men, who are generally not forced to choose between their children and their jobs.

  Gloria Allred

  Mom, Mother, Jobs

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• People can live up to high standards, but they can't live up to perfection.

  Temple Grandin

  People, Perfection, High Standards

  Temple Grandin, Catherine Johnson (2009). “Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior”, p.29, SUNY Press

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• There is no reason why anyone in this country should be lacking health care when America has the resources right now. It would not cost much more than what we are paying right now. As a matter of fact, Americans are paying for a universal standard of care. They are just not getting it because it is all about corporations making a profit. It is not about people. Support Medicare for all.

  Dennis Kucinich

  Country, America, People

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• The best places to live, work, and visit are those places that are willing to uphold their standards in the face of pressure to allow lowest common denominator development... Successful communities understand that when they say no to development that is contrary to the long-term health of their community, they will almost always get better development in its place.

  Ed McMahon

  Nature, Smart, Successful

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• The Chinese, whom it might be well to disparage less and imitate more, seem almost the only people among whom learning and merit have the ascendency, and wealth is not the standard of estimation.

  William Benton Clulow

  Learning, People, Chinese

  William Benton Clulow (1843). “Aphorisms and Reflections: A Miscellany of Thought and Opinion”, p.434

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• consumption can be very harmful to the world. I'm not a big proponent of the idea that consumption makes you morally bad, but there are consequences to our acts, and those consequences are environmental degradation and the huge social inequalities that make our standard of living in the United States possible.

  Judith Levine

  Ideas, Environmental, Degradation

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• If we will measure other people's corn in our own bushel, let us first take it to the Divine standard, and have it sealed.

  J. G. Holland

  People, Corn, Firsts

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 357, 1895.

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• Companies like Nike already use Graffiti as a standard variety in their marketing campaigns and the first people who read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' were marketing gurus who wanted to know what they shouldn't do.

  Johannes Grenzfurthner

  Nike, People, Marketing

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• Unlike any other player on the board, the press has no oversight, no mandate, few penalties, and even fewer consequences. Because there are not enough reporters on the ground, too many bureaus have outsourced both their reporting and standards to third party stringers whose spectacular videos of explosions and inflated body counts have shown up on both jihadist recruiting sites and American television screens, simultaneously.

  Matt Sanchez

  Party, Player, Boards

  "AP Reports on the Wrong Massacre" by Jack Kelly, www.realclearpolitics.com. July 6, 2007.

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• The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pathetic powerlessness that comes with that need. The inability to risk new lives, new work, new styles of thought and experience, is more often than not tied to the bourgeois fear of reducing one's material standard of living. That is, indeed, to be owned by possessions, to be governed by a sense of property rather than by a sense of self.

  Vivian Gornick

  Money, Self, Ideas

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• moral codes and standards in our societies very rarely apply to all people equally. This is the most damning proof of how immoral such codes and standards really are.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  People, Our Society, Morality

  Nawal El Saadawi (2007). “The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, Second Edition”, p.41, Zed Books

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