Insufficient Quotes
More Insufficient Quotes
The unfair composition of the Security Council is largely acknowledged. The principal defects are the anachronistic privileges of the five permanent members of the Council and the Council’s insufficient representativeness.
alfred de zayas— United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order [17]
Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are cheques drawn on insufficient funds.
rené daumal— Foreword (A Night of Serious Drinking (1938))
In many cases, a jig borer is a "jig eliminator." In other words, such a machine may be used instead of a jig either when the quantity of work is not large enough to warrant making a jig or when there is insufficient time for jig making.
— Machine Shop Training Course, 5th ed. (New York: Industrial Press, 1964), Volume 1 (p. 358).
To make a fortune some assistance from fate is essential. Ability alone is insufficient.
ihara saikaku— Book III, ch. 4
To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.
Isaac Asimov— Part V, The Merchant Princes, section 3
A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has the more willing he is to give a firm opinion; and man prefers some answer, even a wrong one, to the requirement that he dig deeper and find out the facts.
mark clifton— p. 49 (They'd Rather Be Right (1954))
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
learned hand— "On Receiving an Honorary Degree" (1939).
The idea of dependence is an explanation, whereas self-sufficiency is an unprecedented, nonanalogous concept in terms of what we know about life within nature. Is not self-sufficiency itself insufficient to explain self-sufficiency?
abraham joshua heschel— Ch. 5 (Who Is Man? (1965))
The Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.
David Hume— Section 10 : Of Miracles Pt. 2
The error of the ignorant goes so far as to say that God's power is insufficient, because he has given to this Universe the properties which they imagine cause these great evils, and which do not help all evil-disposed persons to obtain the evil which they seek, and to bring their evil souls to the aim of their desires, though these, as we have shown, are really without limit.
maimonides— Ch.12 (Part III)
My opinion is this: the cause of the error of all these schools is their belief that God's knowledge is like ours; each school points to something withheld from our knowledge, and either assumes that the same must be the case in God's knowledge, or at least finds some difficulty how to explain it. ...they likewise demonstrated... that our intellect and our knowledge are insufficient to comprehend the true idea of His essence. ...they came to the absurd conclusion that that which is required for our knowledge is also required for God's knowledge.
maimonides— Ch.20 (Part III)
Decisions are always made with insufficient information. If you really knew what was going on, the decision would make itself.
jack mcdevitt— Chapter 39 (p. 370)
Feminists had an astoundingly naive view of the mutual exclusiveness of sex and aggression, which, Freud demonstrates, are fused in the amoral unconscious, as revealed to us through dreams. That rape is simply what used to be called “unbridled lust,” like gluttony a sin of insufficient self-restraint, seems to be beyond the feminist ken.
camille paglia— p. 41 ("No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality")
With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.
carl sagan— Cosmos (1980, p. 94)
We accepted a definition of ourselves which confined the self to the source and to the limitations of conscious attention. This definition is miserably insufficient, for in fact we know how to grow brains and eyes, ears and fingers, hearts and bones, in just the same way that we know how to walk and breathe, talk and think only we can't put it into words. Words are too slow and too clumsy for describing such things, and conscious attention is too narrow for keeping track of all their details.
alan watts— (page 112) (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966))
Industry in art is a necessity not a virtue and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof , not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work , for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.
Whistler— Propositions, 2
Every man has at times in his mind the ideal of what he should be, but is not. This ideal may be high and complete, or it may be quite low and insufficient; yet in all men that really seek to improve, it is better than the actual character. * * * Man never falls so low that he can see nothing higher than himself.
theodore parker— Theodore Parker, Critical and Miscellaneous Writings, Essay I, A Lesson for the Day.
A human being is seldom bothered with insufficient data; often the less he has the more willing he is to give a firm opinion; and man prefers some answer, even a wrong one, to the requirement that he dig deeper and find out the facts.
— p. 49 (They'd Rather Be Right (1954))
The unfair composition of the Security Council is largely acknowledged. The principal defects are the anachronistic privileges of the five permanent members of the Council and the Council’s insufficient representativeness.
— United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order [17]
Hankel refers this Method of Exhaustion back to Hippocrates of Chios but the reasons for assigning it to this early writer rather than to Eudoxus seem insufficient.
— p. 28 (The Greeks)
...if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence , there may be no great harm done by the mere belief ; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
— William Kingdon Clifford in: Kelly James Clark Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, second edition, Broadview Press, 14-Feb-2008, p.194
I share the confidence of those who feel that America is working to care for its unwanted as well as wanted children, protecting particularly those who cannot protect themselves. I also share the opinions of those who do not accept abortion as a response to our society's problems -- an inadequate welfare system, unsatisfactory job training programs, and insufficient financial support for all its citizens.
— Edward “Ted” Kennedy, U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate, now in favor of legalized abortion, in a letter to a constituent (August 3, 1971)[27][28][29] [30].
My opinion is this: the cause of the error of all these schools is their belief that God 's knowledge is like ours; each school points to something withheld from our knowledge, and either assumes that the same must be the case in God's knowledge, or at least finds some difficulty how to explain it. ...they likewise demonstrated... that our intellect and our knowledge are insufficient to comprehend the true idea of His essence. ...they came to the absurd conclusion that that which is required for our knowledge is also required for God's knowledge.
— Maimonides], in Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Ch. 20
In fact, the wage-price spiral is the functional counterpart of unemployment. The latter occurs when there is insufficient demand; the spiral operates when there is too much and also,unfortunately, when there is just enough.
john kenneth galbraith— Chapter XXII, Section 4, p. 255
The lesson here is that it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments.
bruce schneier— Bruce Schneier (1996). "Applied Cryptography 2nd edition Source Code in C". John Wiley & Sons.
Lip service to disarmament is insufficient; the goal is to find ways to redirect the resources used for the military and reduce the danger of war while liberating funds to finance development and all-inclusive growth.
alfred de zayas— Interim report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order, 2012.
I have been driven many times to my knees, by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go. My own wisdom, and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.
Abraham Lincoln— Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895, p. 468)
Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
willa cather— Ch. 4 (16 July 1902)
