Precision Quotes - Page 9

Is it not amazing that at a time when the rights of humanity are defined and understood with precision, in a country, above all others, fond of liberty-that in such an age and in such a country we find men professing a religion the most humane, mild, gentle and generous, adopting a principle as repugnant to humanity as it is inconsistent with the Bible, and destructive to liberty?

Patrick Henry

Country, Men, Rights

Patrick Henry (2007). “Patrick Henry in his speeches and writings and in the words of his contemporaries”, Warwick House Publishing

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I'm filled with admiration, delight, and gratitude at discovering James Lasdun's poems in A Jump Start. He has wit, speed, intelligence, a keen eye, precision, and imagination of a high order.

Anthony Hecht

Gratitude, Eye, Order

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The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

Hippolyte Taine

Art, Science, History

Hippolyte Taine (1908). “Life and Letters of H. Taine: 1870-1892”

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If today's arts love the machine, technology and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times.

Oskar Schlemmer

Art, Technology, Organization

Oskar Schlemmer, Tut Schlemmer (1990). “The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer”

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Sometimes I think my whole professional life has been based on this hunch I had, early on, that many people feel just as muddled as I do, and might be happy to tag along with me on this search for clarity, for precision. I love that aspect of writing. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a reader say: that’s just what I’ve always felt, but you said it clearly.

Zadie Smith

Writing, Thinking, Feels Just

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While I don't script and I don't use other performers, I think my taste for underlying precision gives me something in common with Allan and George Brecht.

David Antin

Thinking, Giving, Use

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He had fought back with every weapon in his arsenal, being alternatively obtuse, evasive and pedantic, for it was wonderful how you could obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.

J. K. Rowling

Emotional, Issues, Weapons

J.K. Rowling (2012). “The Casual Vacancy”, p.99, Hachette UK

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To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.

Steve Almond

Kindness, Mistake, Peers

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That's what Glocks are. High-precision killing machines that scream "Daddy Issues.

Richard Kadrey

Issues, Daddy, Machines

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Time has a different quality in a forest, a different kind of flow. Time moves in circles, and events are linked, even if it's not obvious that they are linked. Events in a forest occur with precision in the flow of tree time, like the motions of an endless dance. (p. 12)

Richard Preston

Moving, Circles, Tree

Richard Preston (2007). “The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring”, p.12, Random House

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Washington had performed his role to perfection. It was no enough that a leader look the part; by Washington's rules, he must know how to act it with self-command and precision.

David McCullough

Self, Perfect, Leader

David McCullough (2011). “David McCullough American History E-book Box Set: John Adams, 1776, Truman, The Course of Human Events”, p.562, Simon and Schuster

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Mere numbers cannot bring out ... the intimate essence of the experiment. This conviction comes naturally when one watches a subject at work. ... What things can happen! What reflections, what remarks, what feelings, or, on the other hand, what blind automatism, what absence of ideas! ... The experimenter judges what may be going on in [the subject's] mind, and certainly feels difficulty in expressing all the oscillations of a thought in a simple, brutal number, which can have only a deceptive precision. How, in fact, could it sum up what would need several pages of description!

Alfred Binet

Science, Reflection, Simple

"La suggestibilite". Book by Alfred Binet, p. 119-120, 1900.

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All I had to do was go out and perform. One of the hardest things was doing those back flips, where you had to jump up and land on the top rope. It's precision movement.

Owen Hart

Land, Rope, Movement

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For the better part of my last semester at Garden City High, I constructed a physical pendulum and used it to make a "precision" measurement of gravity. The years of experience building things taught me skills that were directly applicable to the construction of the pendulum. Twenty-five years later, I was to develop a refined version of this measurement using laser-cooled atoms in an atomic fountain interferometer.

Steven Chu

Education, Science, Garden

"Steven Chu - Biographical". www.nobelprize.org. 1997.

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A scientist with a poet's command of language, Cristina Eisenberg writes with precision and passion . . . takes her reader on a breathtaking, sometimes heartbreaking tour of the planet from the Gulf of Maine to the Amazonian rain forests, the tropical coral reefs to old growth forests of the Northwest as well as rivers, lakes, and wetlands. I found the wealth of information not only accessible but riveting . . . Eisenberg's powerful, beautifully written book . . . has the potential to open many people's eyes, minds, and hearts.

Elizabeth Cunningham

Powerful, Rain, Book

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Everything changed in Bosnia, when General Wesley Clark proved that you could fight a war with high- level precision air strikes and a bare minimum of ground action.

Joe Bob Briggs

War, Fighting, Air

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No one attacks loose-thinking and folly with half the precision and zest of Thomas Szasz.

John Leo

Thinking, Zest, Half

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The development of mathematics toward greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules... One might therefore conjecture that these axioms and rules of inference are sufficient to decide any mathematical question that can at all be formally expressed in these systems. It will be shown below that this is not the case, that on the contrary there are in the two systems mentioned relatively simple problems in the theory of integers that cannot be decided on the basis of the axioms.

Kurt Gödel

Simple, Two, Development

"Kurt Gödel: Collected Works: Volume I: Publications 1929-1936".

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What makes iPhone 5 so unique is how it feels in your hand. The materials… the remarkable precision. Never before have we built a product with this extraordinarily level of fit and finish.

Phil Schiller

Unique, Iphone, Hands

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To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

Don DeLillo

Order, Design, Funeral

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All nature has come to expect from God a sense of orderliness. Whatever God does carries with it His fingerprint. And in the world around us His fingerprint of orderliness is evident to anybody who is honest with the facts. If you look at nature, you will discover a mathematical exactness. Without this precision, the entire world would be in utter confusion. One plus one always equals two no matter what part of the universe you happen to be in. And the laws of nature operate in beautiful harmony, a harmony that is ordered by God Himself.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

Beautiful, Law, Two

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Gryffindor leads by eighty points to zero, and look at that Firebolt go! Potter’s really putting it through its paces now, see it turn — Chang’s Comet is just no match for it, the Firebolt’s precision-balance is really noticeable in these long —” “JORDAN! ARE YOU BEING PAID TO ADVERTISE FIREBOLTS? GET ON WITH THE COMMENTARY!

J. K. Rowling

Zero, Long, Balance

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Projections are put together by people who have an interest in a particular outcome, have a subconscious bias, and its apparent precision makes it fallacious. They remind me of Mark Twain's saying, 'A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.' Projections in America are often a lie, although not an intentional one, but the worst kind because the forecaster often believes them himself.

Charlie Munger

Liars, Lying, Believe

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No skill, no special aptitude, no vividness of imagination or precision of thinking would go unrecognized because the child who possessed it was of one sex rather than the other. No child would be relentlessly shaped to one pattern of behavior, but instead there should be many patterns, in a world that had learned to allow to each individual the pattern which was most congenial to his gifts.

Margaret Mead

Sex, Children, Thinking

"Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies". Book by Margaret Mead, 1935.

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The development of mathematics towards greater precision has led, as is well known, to the formalization of large tracts of it, so that one can prove any theorem using nothing but a few mechanical rules.

Kurt Gödel

Development, Well Known, Mathematics

Kurt Gödel, S. Feferman (1986). “Kurt Gödel: Collected Works: Volume I: Publications 1929-1936”, p.145, Oxford University Press

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