Small Numbers Quotes - Page 2

• My table seats eight, so that's my maximum. Having a small number of guests is the only way to generate good conversation. Besides, your whole house doesn't get wrecked that way.

  Paul Lynde

  Eight, House, Guests

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• A pure democracy is a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person.

  James Madison

  Patriotic, Government, Democracy

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (1852). “The Federalist, on the New Constitution: Written in 1788”, p.53

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• I don't let people use me. That's why I like a small number of people in my life. The more people in my life, the more complex it becomes, so I just try to keep it at a minimum.

  Anita Baker

  People, Trying, Use

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• There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

  James Surowiecki

  Corporations, Reason, Owners

  "Private Lies". www.newyorker.com. August 28, 2006.

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• I think that there is a relatively small number of people who are pushing for independence in Taiwan.

  Fred Thompson

  Thinking, People, Independence

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• We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.

  Timothy Leary

  Clouds, Together, Elements

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• An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again.

  James Fenton

  Ideas, Example, Variation

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• She respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed: and though she knew the small number of his talents she appreciated his abstract value as a male.

  James Joyce

  Husband, Office, Males

  James Joyce (2015). “Dubliners: Top 100 Classic Novels”, p.101, 谷月社

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• Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.

  Mary Doria Russell

  Dog, Years, Multiple Choice

  Mary Doria Russell (1996). “The Sparrow”, Random House

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• I never had any frustration about writing uncredited. I always felt that the satisfaction of doing it was in the doing of it, really, and getting recognised by the small number of people that know what you did.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Frustration, People

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• Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

  Paul Bowles

  Life, Death, Time

  "The Sheltering Sky". Book by Paul Bowles, 1949.

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• It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.

  Voltaire

  Book, Men, Play

  Voltaire (2016). “VOLTAIRE – Premium Collection: Novels, Philosophical Writings, Historical Works, Plays, Poems & Letters (60+ Works in One Volume) - Illustrated: Candide, A Philosophical Dictionary, A Treatise on Toleration, Plato's Dream, The Princess of Babylon, Zadig, The Huron, Socrates, The Sage and the Atheist, Dialogues, Oedipus, Caesar…”, p.2849, e-artnow

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• A science only advances with certainty, when the plan of inquiry and the object of our researches have been clearly defined; otherwise a small number of truths are loosely laid hold of, without their connexion being perceived, and numerous errors, without being enabled to detect their fallacy.

  Jean-Baptiste Say

  Numbers, Errors, Research

  Jean Baptiste Say, Charles Robert Prinsep (1857). “A Treatise on Political Economy; Or, The Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth”, p.15

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• The descendants of those who crucified Christ... have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands.

  Hugo Chavez

  Taken, Hands, Land

  Hugo Chavez's Christmas speech at a rehabilitation center, December 24, 2005.

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• It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

  Howard Zinn

  Men, Humanity, Resilience

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• It's actually a relatively small number of people that really are those risk takers, and a relatively small number of people that end up really having an impact on the world, and it doesn't take a lot of people. We said, 'Well, rather than just sit by and wait, or fold our tent and go do something else, let's keep at it. Maybe we can be the ones who can figure this out,' and eventually we were.

  Steve Case

  Numbers, Impact, People

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• The masses in any given place are generally composed of three parts, the relatively active, the intermediate and the relatively backward. The leaders must therefore be skilled in uniting the small number of active elements around the leadership and must rely on them to raise the level of the intermediate elements and to win over the backward elements.

  Mao Zedong

  Winning, Leader, Three

  Mao Zedong (2017). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (The Little Red Book) & Other Works”, p.70, Lulu.com

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• We've had risk assessments performed by Harvard University, which said that even if we did have a small number of cases in this country that the likelihood of it spreading or getting into any kind of human health problem is very, very small.

  Ann Veneman

  Country, Assessment, Risk

  "Agriculture chief: U.S. learned from British mad cow epidemic". www.cnn.com. December 31, 2003.

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• A life is made up of a great number of small incidents, and a small number of great ones.

  Roald Dahl

  Life Is, Incidents, Made

  Roald Dahl (2009). “Going Solo”, p.10, Penguin

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• There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

  Anton Chekhov

  Numbers, People, Trying

  "The Man in a Case". Short story by Anton Chekhov, 1898.

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• Modern novels have become part of the do-it-yourself business, and they come in a very small number of standard kits. (...) In this wilderness cries the voice of Patrick White, Australian extraordinary, who has quite other, more austere and indeed prophetic ambitions. (...) (H)is failures are certainly the equivalent, and perhaps the measure, of other men's success.

  David Pryce-Jones

  Ambition, Men, Modern Novel

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• Whenever you see a sweeping statement that a tremendous amount can come from a very small number of assumptions, you always find that it is false. There are usually a large number of implied assumptions that are far from obvious if you think about them sufficiently carefully.

  Richard P. Feynman

  Thinking, Assumption, Obvious

  "The Feynman Lectures on Physics". Book by Richard P. Feynman, 1964.

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• While [Plato] affirmed with emphasis that the place of the individual in society should not be determined by birth or wealth or any conventional status, but by his own nature as discovered in the process of education, he had no perception of the uniqueness of individuals. For him they fall by nature into classes, and into a very small number of classes at that.

  John Dewey

  Plato, Fall, Class

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.68, 谷月社

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• My temperament and habit had always kept me rather in the middle of the road; in politics as well as in social reform I had been for "the best possible." But now I was pushed far toward the left on the subject of the war and I became gradually convinced that in order to make the position of the pacifist clear it was perhaps necessary that at least a small number of us should be forced into an unequivocal position.

  Jane Addams

  War, Order, Reform

  Jane Addams, Jean Bethke Elshtain (2002). “The Jane Addams Reader”, p.317, Basic Books

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• Much research in psychology has been more concerned with how large groups of people behave than about the particular ways in which each individual person thinks... too statistical. I find this disappointing because, in my view of the history of psychology, far more was learned, for example, when Jean Piaget spent several years observing the ways that three children developed, or when Sigmund Freud took several years to examine the thinking of a rather small number of patients.

  Jean Piaget

  Children, Thinking, Views

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