Qualitative Quotes

• Formal symbolic representation of qualitative entities is doomed to its rightful place of minor significance in a world where flowers and beautiful women abound.

  Albert Einstein

  Beautiful, Women, Flower

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• It has been my experience that competency in mathematics, both in numerical manipulations and in understanding its conceptual foundations, enhances a person's ability to handle the more ambiguous and qualitative relationships that dominate our day-to-day financial decision-making

  Alan Greenspan

  Success, Business, Decision

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• Quantitative methods are no more synonymous with objectivity than qualitative methods are synonymous with subjectivity.

  Mike Patton

  Objectivity, Subjectivity, Method

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• Man is more than his environment. It is from the innate quality of the Spirit in him, his inner storehouse, that he draws those ideas, his intuitions, which unify his perceptions of the external world instantaneously with a value which is qualitative and not quantitative, and which he embodies in the works of his culture - those achievements which belong not only to one particular time but to all times, and mark the path of his upward progress.

  Nilakanta Sri Ram

  Men, Ideas, Perception

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• Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the frontlines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakable commitment to Israel's security. That starts with insuring Israel's qualitative military advantage. I will insure that Israel can defend itself from any threat - from Gaza to Tehran.

  Barack Obama

  Military, Commitment, Israel

  Obama's speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), www.npr.org. June 4, 2008.

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• As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful.

  Hans Christian von Baeyer

  Numbers, Reliability, Information

  "Information, The New Language of Science". Book by Hans Christian von Baeyer, 2003.

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• If Darwinism is true, then there is no purpose or meaning to life, there is no morality, there's no qualitative difference between humans and animals, there's no life after death, and there's no purpose to human history. Now, are you trying to tell me that it doesn't really matter if people believe we evolved or not?

  Greg Koukl

  Believe, Animal, Differences

  "Does It Matter If We Evolved?". str.typepad.com. April 21, 2010.

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• The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.

  Neil Postman

  Knowing, Perspective, Priorities

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.70, Penguin

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• I am definitively qualitative about work.

  Rashida Jones

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• Such highly qualitative leadership is demanded especially in the realm of the fostering of right international relations. Here the demand is simply irresistible.

  John Mott

  Leadership, Demand, Relation

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• Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.

  Michael Polanyi

  Coherence, Judgment, Criteria

  Michael Polanyi, Harry Prosch (2008). “Meaning”, p.100, University of Chicago Press

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• You need to marry the qualitative with the quantitative. It better informs us so we can decide what to do. We can't be afraid of data and analysis. We have to use that lens.

  Nathan Shedroff

  Data, Lenses, Needs

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• I mean, I do actually think there is a qualitative difference between aborting in the early part of the first trimester and in, you know, the middle or later part of the second trimester, in a way that you feel about it in that you grow attached.

  Ayelet Waldman

  Mean, Thinking, Differences

  "Ayelet Waldman: On Feeling Like A 'Bad Mother'". "Fresh Air" with David Bianculli, www.npr.org. June 4, 2010.

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• We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with, and we think that people are basically tool users. So if we can just get lots of computers to lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference to the world.

  Steve Jobs

  Thinking, Differences, People

  "Playboy Interview: Steve Jobs". Interview With David Sheff, reprints.longform.org. February 1985.

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• The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

  Elliot W. Eisner

  Art, Children, Answers

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• I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference.

  Cornel West

  Successful, Years, Differences

  "Democracy Matters". Speech in San Francisco, October 01, 2004.

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• The reason I fight for the arts as well as against hunger is because the arts are the qualitative way, are the effective way, are the traditional way we learn to make value decisions about who and what we are.

  Harry Chapin

  Art, Fighting, Decision

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• A painstaking course in qualitative and quantitative analysis by John Wing gave me an appreciation of the need for, and beauty of, accurate measurement.

  Paul D. Boyer

  Appreciation, Wings, Needs

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• The merit of Marx is that he suddenly produces a qualitative change in the history of social thought. He interprets history, understands its dynamic, predicts the future, but in addition to predicting it (which would satisfy his scientific obligation), he expresses a revolutionary concept: the world must not only be interpreted, it must be transformed. Man ceases to be the slave and tool of his environment and converts himself into the architect of his own destiny.

  Che Guevara

  Destiny, Men, Tools

  "Notes for the Study of the Ideology of the Cuban Revolution". www.marxists.org. October 08, 1960.

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• The creative destruction that social media is currently unleashing will change more than technology or the leader board of the Fortune 100. It is driving a qualitative shift in the nature of relationships between brands and their customers.

  Simon Mainwaring

  Technology, Media, Creative

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• We forget that, although each of the liberties which have been won must be defended with utmost vigour, the problem of freedom is not only a quantitative one, but a qualitative one; that we not only have to preserve and increase the traditional freedom, but that we have to gain a new kind of freedom, one which enables us to realize our own individual self; to have faith in this self and in life.

  Erich Fromm

  Self, Liberty, Have Faith

  Erich Fromm (2017). “Fascism, Power, and Individual Rights: Escape from Freedom, To Have or To Be?, and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness”, p.103, Open Road Media

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• Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.

  Theodor Adorno

  Categories, Modernity

  Theodor W. Adorno, E. F. N. Jephcott (2005). “Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life”, p.218, Verso

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• No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data

  John Sculley

  Business, Data, Decision

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• Merely quantitative differences,
  beyond a certain point,
  pass into qualitative changes.

  Karl Marx

  Knowledge, Differences, Certain

  Karl Marx (1999). “Capital: An Abridged Edition”, p.322, OUP Oxford

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• Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.

  Lev S. Vygotsky

  Children, Philosophy, Educational

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