Efficiency Quotes - Page 6

• Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.

  Jacques Ellul

  Taken, Civilization, Technique

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• Speed and efficiency do not always increase the quality of life.

  Robert Fulghum

  Quality, Speed, Increase

  Robert Fulghum (2004). “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things”, p.78, Ballantine Books

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• Uber is efficiency with elegance on top. That’s why I buy an iPhone instead of an average cell phone, why I go to a nice restaurant and pay a little bit more. It’s for the experience.

  Travis Kalanick

  Nice, Iphone, Phones

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• The worst, the hardest, the most disagreeable thing that you may have to do may be the thing that counts most, because it is the hard discipline, and it alone, that makes possible the highest efficiency.

  Elihu Root

  Discipline, May, Worst

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• Efficiency may curtail [energy] demand in the short term, for the specific task at hand. But its long-term impact is just the opposite...efficiency fails to curb demand because it lets more people do more, and do it faster-and more/more/faster invariably swamps all the efficiency gains.

  Peter W. Huber

  Impact, Hands, Opposites

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• Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.

  Maria Popova

  Art, Joy, Culture

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• I knew I could control one thing, and that is my time and my hours and my effort and my efficiency.

  Ryan Seacrest

  Effort, Hours, My Time

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• Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. the internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Ideas, Connections, Information

  "Small Change". www.newyorker.com. October 4, 2010.

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• The whole famous Reign of Terror [of the 1790s] in fifteen months guillotined 2,596 aristos. The Versaillists [the anti-Communards of 1871] executed 20,000 before their firing squads in one week. Do these figures represent the comparative efficiency of guillotine and modern rifle or the comparative cruelty of upper and lower class mobs?

  Guy Endore

  Squad, Class, Rifles

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• My politics are: I'm a trustbuster. Very focused. And yeah, I'm pro-efficiency. I want the most economic activity at the lowest price possible. It's good for everybody, it's not red or blue.

  Travis Kalanick

  Blue, Want, Red

  "Travis Kalanick: The Transportation Trustbuster" by Andy Kessler, www.wsj.com. January 25, 2013.

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• Single cells analyze thousands of stimuli from the microenvironment they inhabit. The more awareness an organism has of its environment, the better its chances for survival. When cells band together they increase their awareness exponentially. Division of labor among the cells in the community offers an additional survival advantage. The efficiency it enables more cells to live on less. Evolution is based on an instructive, cooperative interaction among organisms and their environment enables life forms to survive and evolve in a dynamic world.

  Bruce H. Lipton

  Teamwork, Cells, Division Of Labor

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• Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.

  Michael Foley

  Multitasking, Management, Excitement

  Michael Foley (2010). “The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

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• Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

  Douglass North

  Mean, Errors, Keys

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• Home-making today should have a background of scientific training because only in this way can real efficiency be achieved. The average girl wants to be able to keep her house with the least possible strain, and in order to do this she must have good training. This can best be achieved by taking a good course in home economics.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Girl, Real, Home

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• I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investments.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Philosophy, Responsibility, Views

  John Maynard Keynes (1988). “Keynes and Public Policy After Fifty Years: Theories and method”, Edward Elgar Pub

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• It should be possible to emphasize to students that the level of employment is a macroeconomic issue, depending in the short run on aggregate demand and depending in the long run on the natural rate of unemployment, with microeconomic policies like tariffs having little net effect. Trade policy should be debated in terms of its impact on efficiency, not in terms of phoney numbers about jobs created or lost.

  Paul Krugman

  Running, Jobs, Philosophy

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• We have to shift our emphasis from economic efficiency and materialism towards a sustainable quality of life and to healing of our society, of our people and our ecological systems.

  Janet Holmes a Court

  Life, Business, Healing

  "Visions: Turkish Earthquake - an Islamic apocalyptic sign? The dream of Janet Holmes a' Court and a republican prophet - John Dunmore Lang". Interview with John Cleary, www.abc.net.au. August 25, 1999.

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• First, we must stop wasting energy. A quarter of the UK's carbon emissions come from the home. Our housing stock - the oldest in Europe - is costing us the earth... After transport, heating is the second biggest driver of energy demand in Britain. British Gas research suggests that householders who put in energy efficiency measures cut their gas consumption by 44%. Better insulated buildings will do much of the work for us.

  Chris Huhne

  Home, Cutting, Europe

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• The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Corporations, Bigs, Remarkable

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• Anticipate the difficult by managing the easy.

  Laozi

  Difficult And Easy, Effectiveness, Risk

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• We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem

  William McDonough

  Nature, Fall, Effectiveness

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• The amount of electricity that has been saved in spite of Vice President Cheney saying that efficiency is only a moral virtue ... and that you need increased supply like ANWR-is two ANWRs worth of energy.

  Stephen Schneider

  Two, President, Anwr

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• Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.

  Joe Abercrombie

  Fear, Men, Air

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• I fast for greater physical and mental efficiency

  Plato

  Fasting, Greater

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• Traditional corporations, particularly large-scale service and manufacturing businesses are organized for efficiency. Or consistency. But not joy. Joy comes from surprise and connection and humanity and transparency and new...If you fear special requests, if you staff with cogs, if you have to put it all in a manual, then the chances of amazing someone are really quite low.

  Seth Godin

  Joy, Consistency, Humanity

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