Insufficient Quotes

• Individual learning is a necessary but insufficient condition for organizational learning.

  Chris Argyris

  Individual, Organizational, Conditions

  Chris Argyris, Donald A. Schön (1978). “Organizational learning: a theory of action perspective”, Addison-Wesley

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• 

  If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.

  Terry Pratchett

  Funny, Motivational, Trust

  FaceBook post by Terry Pratchett from Aug 28, 2015

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• Sacrifice today for tomorrows betterment, you are willing to pay those payments with pain, because pain is just a message when you are fixing something that’s insufficient in your life.

  Greg Plitt

  Pain, Sacrifice, Messages

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• It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Color, America, People

  I Have a Dream, delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

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• Complaint is often the result of an insufficient ability to live within the obvious restrictions of this god damned cage.

  Charles Bukowski

  Cages, Restriction, Results

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• And yet my, not only my faith, but my experience has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism.

  Terence McKenna

  Art, Believe, Space

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• The true secret of natural goodness lies in the recognition of the contending rights of the Pairs of Opposites; there is no such antimony as between Good and Evil, but only balance between two extremes, each of which is evil when carried to excess, both of which give rise to evil if insufficient for equipoise.

  Dion Fortune

  Lying, Rights, Opposites

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• A conditioned mind may be inventive; it may think up new ideas, new phrases, new gadgets; it may build a dam, plan a new society, and all the rest of it; but that is not creativity. Creativity is something much more than the mere capacity to acquire a technique. It is because this extraordinary thing called creativity is not in most of us that we are so shallow, empty, insufficient. And only the mind that is free can be creative.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Creativity, Thinking, Ideas

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• Time is in itself [not] a difficulty, but a time-rate, assumed on very insufficient grounds, is used as a master-key, whether or not it fits, to unravel all difficulties. What if it were suggested that the brick-built Pyramid of Hawara had been laid brick by brick by a single workman? Given time, this would not be beyond the bounds of possibility. But Nature, like the Pharaohs, had greater forces at her command to do the work better and more expeditiously than is admitted by Uniformitarians.

  Joseph Prestwich

  Nature, Science, Keys

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• A scientist strives to understand the work of Nature. But with our insufficient talents as scientists, we do not hit upon the truth all at once. We must content ourselves with tracking it down, enveloped in considerable darkness, which leads us to make new mistakes and errors. By diligent examination, we may at length little by little peel off the thickest layers, but we seldom get the core quite free, so that finally we have to be satisfied with a little incomplete knowledge.

  Torbern Bergman

  Mistake, Knowledge, Science

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• They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.

  Eric Hoffer

  Failure, Inspiration, Persistence

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• It is possible that these may all be insufficient to control the caprice and wickedness of man. But are they not all that government will admit, and all that human prudence can devise?

  James Madison

  Men, Wickedness, May

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, Henry Barton Dawson (1864). “The Fœderalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favor of the New Constitution, as Agreed Upon by the Fœderal Convention, September 17, 1787. Reprinted from the Original Text. With an Historical Introduction and Notes”, p.399, New York : C. Scribner ; London : Sampson Low

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• A total spiritual direction given to the whole life and the whole nature can alone lift humanity beyond itself. . . It is only the full emergence of the soul, the full descent of the native light and power of the Spirit and the consequent replacement or transformation and uplifting of our insufficient mental and vital nature by a spiritual and supramental Supernature that can effect this evolutionary miracle.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Uplifting, Spiritual, Light

  Sri Aurobindo (2016). “The Future Evolution of Man: The Divine Life on Earth”, p.39, editionNEXT.com

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• You have heard of the new chemical nomenclature endeavored to be introduced by Lavoisier, Fourcroy, &c. Other chemists of this country, of equal note, reject it, and prove in my opinion that it is premature, insufficient and false. These latter are joined by the British chemists; and upon the whole, I think the new nomenclature will be rejected, after doing more harm than good. There are some good publications in it, which must be translated into the ordinary chemical language before they will be useful.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Country, Science, Thinking

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• Courage is the human virtue that counts most-courage to act on limited knowledge and insufficient evidence. That's all any of us have.

  Robert Frost

  Courage, Knowledge, Challenges

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• [Sherlock Holmes:] The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Data, Temptation, Form

  Arthur Conan Doyle (1993). “The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes”, p.852, Wordsworth Editions

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• Whoever aims publicly at great things and at length perceives secretly that he is too weak to achieve them, has usually also insufficient strength to renounce his aims publicly, and then inevitably becomes a hypocrite.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Hypocrite, Hypocrisy, Achieve

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2012). “Human, All-Too-Human: Parts One and Two”, p.217, Courier Corporation

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• Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature, inpregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children.

  David Hume

  Nature, Children, Science

  David Hume (1874). “A Treatise on Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects; and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, p.452

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• If the supply of virtue is insufficient in a free society like America, it is almost nonexistent in an unfree society like Iran's. The reason is that coerced virtues are not virtues at all.

  Dinesh D'Souza

  Islamic, America, Virtue

  "10 things to celebrate / Why I'm an anti-anti-American" by Dinesh D'Souza, www.sfgate.com. June 29, 2003.

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• Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy (how else do they keep absurdities seeming credible?), insufficient numbers of Catholics have been able to be sensible.

  A.C. Grayling

  Religious, Men, Views

  A.C. Grayling (2012). “Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness”, p.12, Oberon Books

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• When morals are sufficient, law is unnecessary; when morals are insufficient, law is unenforceable.

  Emile Durkheim

  Law, Moral, Unnecessary

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• The hard struggle which the Pan-Germans fought with the Catholic Church can be accounted for only by their insufficient understanding of the spiritual nature of the people.

  Adolf Hitler

  Spiritual, Struggle, People

  Adolf Hitler (1998). “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Knowledge is one of our direst needs. But it is insufficient on its own. If knowledge was stripped from true up-bringing, it would increase man's strength, but not his morals.

  Ameen Rihani

  Men, Needs, Moral

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• The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the black power movement. The black power movement was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuation of this whole process of democratization.

  Danny Glover

  War, Cities, Issues

  Interview with Ed Rampell, progressive.org. February 8, 2012.

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• You know the John Lennon song 'Imagine'? 'Imagine no possessions, no religion'? That's what it was like in Cambodia. The only thing people had was a spoon, for eating the daily pourridge. And that pourridge was grossly insufficient for the work they were made to do in the fields.

  Sophal Ear

  Song, People, Spoons

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