Quotes about Efficiency

If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.

The revolution needs revolutionaries. Today’s investors, boardrooms and entrepreneurs are looking for value in all the wrong places. Facebook's game of musical chairs won't solve big economic problems - and neither will making token investments in greentech.

Where is the next industrial revolution crying out for revolutionaries? Simple: in industries dominated by clear, durable, structural barriers to efficiency and productivity.

Naked, not veiled, agendas will turbo-boost your productivity and efficiency.

Technologies of the soul tend to be simple, bodily, slow and related to the heart as much as the mind.  Everything around us tells us we should be mechanically sophisticated, electronic, quick, and informational in our expressiveness - an exact antipode to the virtues of the soul.  It is no wonder, then, that in an age of telecommunications - which, by the way, literally means "distant connections" - we suffer symptoms of the loss of soul.  We are being urged from everyside to become efficient rather than intimate.

The physical symptoms of fight or flight are what the human body has learned over thousands of years to operate efficiently and at the highest level…anxiety is a cognitive interpretation of that physical response.

Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

The higher your energy level, the more efficient your body. The more efficient your body, the better you feel and the more you will use your talent to produce outstanding results.

Herein lies the real value of education. Advanced education may or may not make men and women more efficient; but it enriches personality, increases the wealth of the mind, and hence brings happiness. It is the finest insurance against old age, against the growth of physical disability, against the lack and loss of animal delights. How essential it is, then, in youth to acquire some intellectual or artistic tastes, in order to furnish the mind, to be able to live inside a mind with attractive and interesting pictures on the walls.

It is July 15, 1903. Cockran is speaking to the Liberal Club in London, England, and "liberal" at the turn of the century means what "conservative" means today - freedom. Your free trade system makes the whole industrial life of the world one vast scheme of cooperation for your benefit. At this moment, in every quarter of the globe, forces are at work to supply your necessities and improve your condition. As I speak, men are tending flocks on Australian fields and shearing wool which will clothe you during the coming winter. On western lands, men are reaping grain to supply your daily bread. In mines deep underground, men are swinging pickaxes and shovels to wrest from the bosom of the Earth the ores essential to the efficiency of your industry. Under tropical skies, hands are gathering, from bending boughs, luscious fruits which in a few days will be offered for your consumption in the streets of London. Over shining rails, locomotives are drawing trains, on heaving surges, sailors are piloting barks, through arid deserts Arabs are guiding caravans, all charged with the fruits of industry to be placed here freely at your feet. You alone, among all the peoples of the Earth, encourage this gracious tribute and enjoy its full benefit, for here alone it is received freely, without imposition, restriction or tax, while everywhere else, barriers are raised against it by stupidity and folly.

If you would be a better teacher, teach by the spirit. That is the thing that gives strength and power, meaning and life, to our otherwise weak efforts... remember, you cannot give away that which you do not possess. Study the life of the master. You do not have to have a college degree to be an efficient teacher. But you do have to become acquainted with the life and teachings of the master to be an effective teacher in the church.

There is a homely adage which runs, "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far." If the American nation will speak softly and yet build and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.

The peak efficiency of knowledge and strategy is to make conflict unnecessary.

Once I was at the Atlanta airport. I was taking the train between terminals. Its a smooth, quiet train, and it was jammed when I walked in. But it was absolutely quiet except for a mechanical voice calling out the stops. The doors were about to close, a couple rushes in and the mechanical voice says, Because of late entry, the train will be delayed for 30 seconds. People were staring at the couple, they were angry, and I yelled out, George Orwell, your time has come and gone, things are so efficient we're losing our humanity and our sense of humor. Now there are three miscreants: The crowd is staring at me and at the young couple. Sitting nearby was a baby on a mothers lap. I asked the baby, What do you think about this? She laughs, and I say, A human voice at last! There's still hope!

Few things in life are less efficient than a group of people trying to write a sentence. The advantage of this method is that you end up with something for which you will not be personally blamed.

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.

Secrecy is the enemy of efficiency, but don't let anyone know it.

We lift ourselves by our thought, we climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always, everywhere - your ideal of what you long to attain - the ideal of health, efficiency, success.

Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient method of deciding which ones were worth his attention: Upon receiving a new book, he immediately checked the index to see if his name was cited, and how often. The more Malinowski the more compelling the book. No Malinowski, and he doubted the subject of the book was anthropology at all.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.

Humanity needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research.

There are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency; and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient.

Washington [D.C.] is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.

Faced with the admitted difficulty of managing the creative process, we are doubling our efforts to do so. Is this because science has failed to deliver, having given us nothing more than nuclear power, penicillin, space travel, genetic engineering, transistors, and superconductors? Or is it because governments everywhere regard as a reproach activities they cannot advantageously control? They felt that way about the marketplace for goods, but trillions of wasted dollars later, they have come to recognize the efficiency of this self-regulating system. Not so, however, with the marketplace for ideas.

Remember the parable of talents-the story of the three servants who had received talents, five, two and one respectively? When their master returned they all gave account of their stewardship. The first two had doubled their capital. Each of them said so in sixteen words and their work was pronounced, "Well done, good and faithful servant." The third servant had accomplished absolutely nothing but his report took forty-three words, three times as long as each of the other two reports. Don't be like servant number three. Make good! Don't explain your failure! Do the thing you are expected to do! Then you won't have to explain why you didn't, couldn't, wouldn't, or shouldn't. Efficiency! That is the soul-satisfying joy of making good. Doing your work just a little better than anyone else gives you the margin of success. Making good required no explanation. Failure required forty-three words.

The fact that a human brain of high amperage, otherwise highly efficient, may have a hole in it is surely not a secret.

The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves.

The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

I don't like a man to be too efficient. He's likely to be not human enough.

An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.