Distinctions such as large and small
Have relevance for you no more.
~
-The largest is the smallest too-
+The largest is the smallest too;
Here limitations have no place.
~
-What is is not, what is not is-
+What is is not, what is not is;
If this is not yet clear to you,
You're still far from the inner truth.
~
just do this and I'll get back to killing you with beer.
-- Homer Simpson
~
-You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline --
+You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline;
it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear
weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.
-- Frank Zappa
boiled sweet on a rush hour train. They were crushing everybody in the
carriage until a passenger stabbed them with a pencil."
~
-Kindness cannot be taught by harshness --
+Kindness cannot be taught by harshness--
not by any amount of harshness.
-- Raymond M. Smullyan / The Tao is Silent
~
of finding pattern in creative activity, that few would even seek it. If
one looks not at science and art, but at scientists and artists, one finds a
reflection of this divide. Two populations that overlap only a little,
-convergent thinkers and divergent thinkers, specialists and generalists --
+convergent thinkers and divergent thinkers, specialists and generalists--
these labels reflect the differences of which we speak...
While science has enlarged its past horizons beyond order and symmetry
to embrace diversity and unpredictability, the humanities have yet to
-- Colin Powell's autobiography, "My American Journey" (Ballantine, 1996)
~
In the past fifteen years one big American company after another has
-done this [i.e., downsized itself] -- among them IBM, Sears, and GM. Each
+done this [i.e., downsized itself]--among them IBM, Sears, and GM. Each
first announced that laying off 10,000 or 20,000 or even 50,000 people would
lead to an immediate turnaround. A year later there had, of course, been no
-turnaround, and the company laid off another 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 --
+turnaround, and the company laid off another 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000--
again without results. In many if not most cases, downsizing has turned out
to be something that surgeons have warned against: 'amputation before
diagnosis.' The result is always a casualty.
- But there have been a few organizations -- some large companies (GE,
-for instance) and a few hospitals (Beth Israel in Boston, for instance) --
+ But there have been a few organizations--some large companies (GE,
+for instance) and a few hospitals (Beth Israel in Boston, for instance)--
that quietly, and without fanfare, did turn themselves around, by rethinking
themselves. They did not start out by downsizing. If fact, they knew that
to start by reducing expenditures is not the way to get control of costs.
every program, every activity should be confronted with these questions:
'What is your mission?' 'Is it still the right mission?' 'Is it still
worth doing?' 'If we were not already doing this, would we go into it now?'
-This questioning has been done often enough in all kinds of organizations --
-businesses, hospitals, churches, an even local governments -- that we know
+This questioning has been done often enough in all kinds of organizations--
+businesses, hospitals, churches, an even local governments--that we know
it works.
The overall answer is almost never 'This is fine as it stands; let's
-keep on.' But in some -- indeed, a good many -- areas, the answer to the
+keep on.' But in some--indeed, a good many--areas, the answer to the
last question is 'Yes, we should go into this again, but with some changes.
We have learned a few things.'
-- Peter F. Drucker, from "Managing in a Time of Great Change,"
~
A most nerve-wracking confirmation of this came some time ago during
an interview with the producer and the writer of the TV mini-series 'Peter
-the Great.' Defending the historical inaccuracies in the drama -- which
-included a fabricated meeting between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton -- the
+the Great.' Defending the historical inaccuracies in the drama--which
+included a fabricated meeting between Peter and Sir Isaac Newton--the
producer said that no one would watch a dry, historically faithful
biography. The writer added that it is better for audiences to learn
something that is untrue, if it is entertaining, than not to learn anything
-- LinuxToday
~
Even if something new does not require a disruption of the old, there
-is no space. People, time and resources are fully stretched -- in many
+is no space. People, time and resources are fully stretched--in many
cases there is actually a cutting-back in resources.
The paradox is that as we advance into the future the need for change
gets greater and greater (to cope with changes in population, pollution,
The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted.
Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy
disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a
-hundred -- one percent of an education. He regarded himself as the
+hundred--one percent of an education. He regarded himself as the
only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole
of it. He got barely half of an average.
Long afterwards, when the devious path of life led him back to
[medieval history], he diverted some dreary hours of faculty meetings
by looking up his record in the class-lists, and found himself graded
precisely in the middle. In the one branch he most needed --
-mathematics -- barring the few first scholars, failure was so nearly
+mathematics--barring the few first scholars, failure was so nearly
universal that no attempt at grading could have had value, and
whether he stood fortieth or ninetieth must have been an accident or
the personal favor of the professor. Here his education failed
projects / feisty_meow.git / commitdiff