Quotes & Sayings About Collective Effort

A book is almost always a collective effort, even if it has only a single author. — Raghuram G. Rajan

Memory is the basis of individual personality," Miguel de Unamuno writes, "just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. — Christian Wiman

The market, if it can be kept honest and competitive, does provide very strong incentives for work effort and productive contributions. In their absence, society would thrash about for alternative incentives-some unreliable, like altruism; some perilous like collective loyalty; some intolerable, like coercion or oppression. — Arthur Melvin Okun

Russia would prefer to rebuild trust rather than allow it to further corrode. That's why, in July 2007, President Putin, in the spirit of strategic openness, proposed a truly collective effort at missile defense for Europe. — Sergei Lavrov

Individual efforts can bring excellence but only collective efforts can deliver effectively. — Narendra Modi

Individual effort is good but collective effort is better. We need a NETWORK of nation builders — Fela Durotoye

So there is more to their stance than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made. Their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ballgame and they know it. Unlike the campus rebels, who with a minimum amount of effort will emerge from their struggle with a validated ticket to status, the outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all. In a world increasingly geared to specialists, technicians and fantastically complicated machinery, the Hell's Angels are obvious losers and it bugs them. But instead of submitting quietly to their collective fate, they have made it the basis of a full-time social vendetta. They don't expect to win anything, but on the other hand, they have nothing to lose. If — Hunter S. Thompson

I have a problem,' said Nikolai Nikolaivitch Asterinov, getting to his feet. 'I have a problem, that I wish to share with this, our science fiction writers' collective. We are to concoct a race of aliens against which humanity can unite. Spacefaring aliens, no?' 'Yes, of course.' 'Then this is my problem. We know the party line. The philosophy of the party has always been that capitalistic Western fantasies of launching rockets to other planets will always be doomed by the internal contradictions of the competitive inefficiency of capitalism itself. Only the combined and unified effort of a whole people would be able to achieve so monumental an achievement as interstellar flight. No capitalist race could ever achieve something as sophisticated as interstellar flight; only communists could do this. Now, how can it be that these evil aliens are able to build spaceships and fly across the void? Surely they are not communists? — Adam Roberts

The fact is that life has become a sweepstake. Millions of people who have lost the sense of being able to make anything of the collective effort of shaping their economic society, now expect fortune to descend like pie from the sky. — Max Lerner

Women's progress has been a collective effort. — Gloria Steinem

In spite of my great admiration for individual splendid talents I do not accept the star system. Collective creative effort is the root of our kind of art. That requires ensemble acting and whoever mars that ensemble is committing a crime not only against his comrades but also against the very art of which he is the servant. — Constantin Stanislavski

Researchers determined that a variety of forces affected the lack of change. First, the people in the community had been socialized not to disagree publicly, so it was hard to have a meaningful discussion. Second, in the past, any suggestions of change had been met with strong private criticism, so people were hesitant to bring creative ideas to the table. Finally, there was such a strong tradition of individualism in the community that members could not openly discuss problems, because they did not believe in collective effort as a way to solve problems. (Hibbard, 1986) — Paul Mattessich

Our collective information regarding his death was still limited, which brought forward the sadder fact that, at the end of it all, none of us had actually known Rob as well as we thought we did, as well as we should have, as well as - with just a little more effort - we could have. — Jeff Hobbs

After Obama became president, I realized that black people could not have put him in the White House - it had to be a collective effort of everybody in the country. — Tyler Perry

Scientists contribute in a variety of ways and I don't think I can singular one even including [Albert] Einstein, that I can say that he's the best. We don't work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort. — Ahmed H. Zewail

The socialism I believe in isn't really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it's the way I see football and the way I see life. — Bill Shankly

We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct. — Roxane Gay

The road to success in life is never an individual battle but a collective effort. — Abdulazeez Henry Musa

Those who have the most, who earn the most, must give an example, because that is important for Spain's collective effort. — Luis De Guindos

The era of the Single Savior is over. What is needed now is joint action, combined effort, collective co-creation. — Neale Donald Walsch

We no longer have political movement. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals - fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers - are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this. — Tony Judt

Unions are for 'collective bargaining,' not individual bargaining. It follows that most of the achievements of a union, even if they were more impressive than the staunchest unionist claims, could offer the rational worker no incentive to join; his individual efforts would not have a noticeable effect on the outcome, and whether he supported the union or not he would still get the benefits of its achievements. — Mancur Olson

Emotions and thoughts are not who we are, they are merely emotions and thoughts, collective waves of energy moving through the web of life. They never stay as they are or hold the same intensity. They are provisional. Hence no matter how beautiful or horrible they are, they will change, with or without any effort. Just acknowledge and let them go, regardless of what they are, and you will know who you are. — Franco Santoro

The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as "a collective effort to live a private life." In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction - the tragedy of American domestic — Morris Berman

I am completely honest and truthful when I say I don't want a gold for myself. I want a gold for the team. You go up there and do it as a collective group and it's so much more satisfying, I mean you look around and you see the faces and just wow, this was a team effort and we did this together. It's incredible and that's my dream. I wanna win a gold medal and see the flag go up, hear the national anthem and just know that I did it with my brothers standing next to me. — Jonathan Horton

More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort. — Nancy Isenberg

In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines. — Werner Heisenberg

To narrate is to give oneself: it seems obvious that literature, as an effort to communicate fully, will continue to be blocked so long as misery and illiteracy exist, and so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy of collective imbecilization through the mass media. — Eduardo Galeano

Theatre is very much concerned with the society, with the social situation ... A theatre piece of itself, demands a confrontation with the audience. It demands that you connect with people; it demands a collective and social effort with the company and later with the audience. — Griselda Gambaro

Romanticism embodied a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals. — Isaiah Berlin

I'm a big believer in the value of labor unions and with what collective effort gets people. — John Wells

The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights — Gloria Steinem

In this interconnected universe, every improvement we make in our private world improves the world at large for everyone. We all float on the collective level of consciousness of mankind, so that any increment we add comes back to us. We all add to our common buoyancy by our efforts to benefit life. It is a scientific fact that what is good for you is good for me. — David R. Hawkins

What is missing from the policy analyst's tool kit
and from the set of accepted, well-developed theories of human organization
is an adequately specified theory of collective action whereby a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts. — Elinor Ostrom

He liked too the specific and unexpected companionability of the place. There were times on the weekends when everyone was there at the same time, and at moments, he would emerge from the fog of his painting and sense that all of them were breathing in rhythm, panting almost, from the effort of concentrating. He could feel, then, the collective energy they were expending filling the air like gas, flammable and sweet, and would wish he could bottle it so that he might be able to draw from it when he was feeling uninspired, for the days in which he would sit in front of the canvas for literally hours, as though if he stared long enough, it might explode into something brilliant and charged. — Hanya Yanagihara

This past year - if you'd have tried, you'd have seen even more clearly the futility of trying to change the world without the efforts of everybody else on Earth. You saw and smelled and drank the evidence of six billion disasters that can only be mended by six billion people. || A thousands years ago this wouldn't have been the case. If human beings had suddenly vanished a thousand years ago, the planet would have healed overnight with no damage. Maybe a few lumps where the pyramids sand. One hundred years ago - or even fifty years ago - the world would have healed itself just fine in the absence of people. But not now. We crossed the line. the only thing that can keep the planet turning smoothly now is human free will forged into effort. Nothing else. That's why the world has seemed so large in the past few years, and time so screwy. It's because Earth is now totally ours. — Douglas Coupland

For a patrimonial state to be stable over time, it is best ruled with consent, at least with consent from the largest minority, if not from the majority. Instinctive obedience must be the norm, otherwise too much effort needs to be put into suppressing disaffection for the regime's wider aims to be achievable. Consent is, however, not always easy to obtain. The collective view of most societies is rather conservative: in the main people prefer to see the social arrangements of their youth perpetuated into their old age; they prefer that things be done in the time-honoured way; they are suspicious of novelty and resistant to change. Thus when radical action must be taken, for whatever reason, a great burden falls on the ruler, the father-figure, who has to overcome this social inertia and persuade his subjects to follow his lead. In order that his will shall prevail, he needs to generate huge respect, preferably adulation, and if at all possible sheer awe among his people. — Paul Kriwaczek

The imagination is the goal of history. I see culture as an effort to literally realize our collective dreams. — Terence McKenna

The first arrival of earthly life on another celestial body ranks as an epochal event not only for our generation, but in the history of our planet. Neil Armstrong was at the cusp of the Apollo programme. This was a collective technological effort of epic scale, but his is the one name sure to be remembered centuries hence. — Martin Rees

Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases. Our revolution is not simply for spouting slogans that are no more than signals used by manipulators trying to use them as catchwords, as codewords, as a foil for their own display. Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses of our country. — Thomas Sankara

Our national myths often exaggerate the role of the individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort. — Robert D. Putnam