Improvement Quotes - Page 16

• When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

  Linus Torvalds

  Knowing, Want, Kind

  Source: www.linuxfocus.org

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• The pupil's imagination is 'schooled' to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work.

  Ivan Illich

  Military, Race, Productive Work

  Ivan Illich (1970). “The Dawn of Epimethean Man, and Other Essays”

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• Process improvement is most valuable in raising the floor of a community's practice.

  Fred Brooks

  Practice, Community, Process

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• Never be afraid to fail. Failure is only a stepping stone to improvement. Never be overconfident because that will block your improvement.

  Tatchakorn Yeerum

  Block, Stones, Failing

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• Mathematics does not grow through a monotonous increase of the number of indubitably established theorems but through the incessant improvement of guesses by speculation and criticism, by the logic of proofs and refutations.

  Imre Lakatos

  Numbers, Criticism, Doe

  Imre Lakatos (1976). “Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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• I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don't hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.

  Margaret Thatcher

  Country, Pride, Grandmother

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• The things that happen are an earthquake, another bomb in Iraq, some big jolt on Wall Street in oil prices, and then you have some new study on drought patterns from climate change. Or another little incremental improvement in photovoltaics. Where do those fit in to the daily stream? They don't.

  Andrew Revkin

  Wall, Earthquakes, Oil

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• Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.

  George Orwell

  Jobs, Leader, Revolution

  George Orwell, Peter Davison (2013). “George Orwell: A Life in Letters”, p.334, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Once you break someone of the habit of up-talking, they can start to see immediate improvement in their careers.

  Dana Perino

  Talking, Careers, Habit

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• If there were more women heads of state in the world, the world would be more peaceful and better focused on the improvement of the overall quality of life and welfare.

  Dalia Grybauskaite

  Peaceful, Quality, World

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• There are systems that use failure as fuel for improvement, where the cost of failure is small.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Cost, Use, Fuel

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The scope for improvement is infinite, precisely because perfection is unattainable.

  George Soros

  Perfection, Unattainable, Infinite

  George Soros (2007). “Open Society Reforming Global Capitalism Reconsidered”, p.26, PublicAffairs

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• Nobody can be saved from anything, unless they save themselves. It is hopeless doing things for people - it is often very dangerous to do things at all - and the only thing worth doing for the race is to increase its stock of ideas. Then, if you make available a larger stock, people are at liberty to help themselves from out of it. By this process the means of improvement is offered, to be accepted or rejected freely, and there is a faint hope of progress in the course of millennia. Such is the business of the philosopher, to open new ideas. It is not his business to impose them on people.

  T. H. White

  Mean, Race, Ideas

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• The problem is to extract the desirable traits of forms of community life which actually exist, and employ them to criticize undesirable features and suggest improvement

  John Dewey

  Community, Problem, Form

  John Dewey (2015). “Democracy and Education: Top American Authors”, p.64, 谷月社

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• The highest reward for our toil is not what we get for it but what we become by it. ... Mistakes are not failures. They are proof that we are making an effort. When we understand that, we can more easily move out of our comfort zone, try something new, and improve. ... Improvement demands a commitment to grow long after the mood in which it was made has passed.

  John C. Maxwell

  Mistake, Moving, Commitment

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• There is nothing more harmful to you than improving only your material, animal side of life. There is nothing more beneficial, both for you and for others, than activity directed to the improvement of your soul.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Animal, Soul, Sides

  Leo Tolstoy (2010). “A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Se”, p.50, Simon and Schuster

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• In a world where routine production is footloose...competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away.

  Robert Reich

  Lying, Technology, Routine

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• The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace.

  Paul Theroux

  Self, Vanishing, Disappear

  Paul Theroux (2004). “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town”, p.4, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions.

  Sergei Prokofiev

  Years, Important, Quality

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• I don't think my playing style has really changed over the years; it's just gotten better. I can hear the improvement in comparing older records and later records. I'm referring to soloing ability, to having a better sound, to knowing chords better, and getting rhythmically stronger. It also has to do with ideas - learning how to edit your ideas and being better able to follow ideas out to a logical conclusion.

  Gary Bartz

  Thinking, Years, Ideas

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• I want incremental improvements. There's the record of all the revolutionary and violent change and extremism in general - it's dreadful.

  Martin Amis

  Records, Want, Revolutionary

  "New New Yorker Martin Amis Talks Terrorism, Pornography, Idyllic Brooklyn and American Decline". Interview with David Wallace-Wells, www.vulture.com. July 22, 2012.

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• During the current period of health care development in our country, improvement of the management quality is becoming increasingly important. This is due to many processes, including new ones, such as increase in the number of financial resources used to implement the state guarantees program, the need for more efficient spending of funds, rearrangement of cash flows, single-channel financing

  Veronika Skvortsova

  Country, Numbers, Cash Flow

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• Even happiness itself may become habitual. There is a habit of looking at the bright side of things, and also of looking at the dark side. Dr. Johnson has said that the habit of looking at the best side of a thing is worth more to a man than a thousand pounds a year. And we possess the power, to a great extent, of so exercising the will as to direct the thoughts upon objects calculated to yield happiness and improvement rather than their opposites.

  Samuel Smiles

  Exercise, Dark, Men

  Samuel Smiles (1868). “Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance by Samuel Smiles”, p.391

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• The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing practical to alter or deflect the impulse to destroy the enemy, which is central to the very idea of war.

  Carl von Clausewitz

  War, Civilization, Ideas

  Carl von Clausewitz (2008). “On War”, p.76, Princeton University Press

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• The big divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, or women and men, but between talkers and doers. Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century - medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer. The people who created these things - the doers - are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers.

  Thomas Sowell

  Country, Hero, Past

  Thomas Sowell (2013). “Ever Wonder Why?: and Other Controversial Essays”, p.204, Hoover Press

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