test quotes

Habit with him was all the test of truth, 'It must be right: I've done it from my youth.'

- George Crabbe
  The Borough, letter 3,'The Vicar', l.138^9.

   You define your own horror journey, according to your taste. My definition of what makes a journey wholly or partially horrible is boredom. Add discomfort, fatigue, strain in large amounts to get the purest-quality horror, but the kernel is boredom. I offer that as a universal test of travel; boredom, called byanyother name, iswhy you yearn for the first available transport out.But what bores whom?† The threshold of boredom must be like the threshold of pain, different in all of us.

- Martha Ellis Gellhorn
  Travels with Myself and  Another.

Efficiency†is measured at the extremities.You do not find the efficiency of an army at headquarters, nor of a firminhead office.It isattheremotest pointtheprivate soldier or humble legionary on the distant frontier, the girl at the counter or the branch-office junior salesman that the really decisive test of an army or a firm is made.It istherethat all theinstructionand knowledge of relevant facts and procedural disciplines bear fruitor wither on the tree.

- SirAntony Rupert Jay
  Management and Machiavelli.

Every man has a right to utter what he thinks truth, and every other man has a right to knock him down for it. Martyrdom is the test.

- Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
  Quoted in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.4.

Space-ships and time machines are no escape from the human condition. Let Othello subject Desdemona to a lie-detector test; his jealousy will still blind him to the evidence. Let Oedipus triumph over gravity; he won't triumph over his fate.

- Arthur Koestler
  'The Boredom of Fantasy', collected in The Trail of the Dinosaur (1955), pt.2.

War alone can carry to the maximum tension all human energies and imprint with the seal of nobility those people who have the courage to confront it; every other test is a mere substitute.

- Benito also called Il Duce [the Leader] Mussolini
c.1930  Quoted in Denis Mack-Smith Mussolini's Roman Empire (1976), p.47.

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

- GeorgeJean Nathan
Quoted in  American Mercury, Sep1929.

First follow Nature, and your judgement frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged, and universal light, Life, force and beauty must to all impart, At once the source and end and test of art.

- Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism, l.68^73.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

-Tom (Thomas Kennerley) Wolfe
  Title of book.