Scale And Proportion Quotes & Sayings

If the international response to natural disasters was rational, we would expect a greater amount of funding to be provided to larger disasters and to disasters that occur in poorer countries, which are less able to cope. But that's not what happens. Funding seems to be allocated in proportion with how evocative and widely publicized the disaster is, rather than on the basis of its scale and severity. — William MacAskill

Sometimes shooting on a smaller scale, as long as things don't blow out of proportion, is very liberating. — Daniel Craig

Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem. It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced - in a word, insane. — Frank Herbert

Self-conceit is a weighty quality, and will sometimes bring down the scale when there is nothing else in it. It magnifies a fault beyond proportion, and swells every omission into an outrage. — Jeremy Collier

There are two aspects to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free in proportion as its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which a man must inevitably follow the laws laid down for him.
Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of will, but he serves as an unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once committed is irrevocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others, has an historical value. The higher a man's place in the social scale, the more connections has with others, and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the inevitability and predestination of every act he commits. "The hearts of kings are in the hand of God." The king is the slave of history. — Leo Tolstoy

The political reputation of Servius rests upon his organization of society according to a fixed scale of rank and fortune. He originated the census, a measure of the highest utility to a state destined, as Rome was, to future preeminence; for by means of its public service, in peace as well as in war, could thence forward be regularly organized on the basis of property; every man's contribution could be in proportion to his means. — Livy

I think scale is about, in a way, the apprehension of proportion, and all the proportions that mean things to us as human beings are related to the body. — Antony Gormley

There are more microbes per person than the entire population of the world. Imagine that. Per person. This means that if the time scale is diminished in proportion to that of space it would be quite possible for the whole story of Greece and Rome to be played out between farts. — Alan Bennett

The swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no ... when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart ... and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape ... or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth - then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth. — Walt Whitman

[The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy. — Albert Einstein

But just in proportion as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory. The explanation lies, as I believe, in the extreme imperfection of the geological record. — Charles Darwin