Quotes & Sayings About Systematic Work

Systematic theology will ask questions like "What are the attributes of God? What is sin? What does the cross achieve?" Biblical theology tends to ask questions such as "What is the theology of the prophecy of Isaiah? What do we learn from John's Gospel? How does the theme of the temple work itself out across the entire Bible?" Both approaches are legitimate; both are important. They are mutually complementary. — D. A. Carson

One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of - and hence be able to control - the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker. — C. Wright Mills

[About a conference on Systematic Biology] Many interesting statements were made that apply directly to the work of taxonomists. In some cases the interest lay in the value of the suggestion and sometimes in the obvious need for rebuttal. — Richard E. Blackwelder

The behavioral programme of the post-social society during the post-capitalism interregnum is governed by a neoliberal ethos of competetive self-improvement, of untiring cultivation of one's marketable human capital, enthusiastic dedication to work, and cheerfully optimistic, playful acceptance of the risks inherent in a world that has outgrown government. That this programme is dutifully implemented is essential, as the reproduction of the post-capitalist society lite hangs on the thin thread of an accommodating systematic architecture. Structuralist critique of false institutions may therefore have to be complemented by a renewed culturalist critique of false consciousness. — Wolfgang Streeck

When we combine very real workplace inequalities with these romantic opt-out stories, the idea that "having it all" is a laughable goal becomes enshrined as immutable truth. And when we portray opting out as a simple matter of "choice," we ignore the systematic problems that make combining work and motherhood so difficult. — Emily Matchar

I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way. — Eric Holder

Those institutes can develop research-based teaching initiatives in which they work with colleagues across the university to tackle problems. They might focus on why certain groups of students (defined by whatever demography) do not achieve the kind of learning expected, or about how to help all students achieve a new level of development. The initiative would refine the questions; explore the existing literature; and fashion a hypothesis about what might work, a program to implement that hypothesis, and a systematic assessment of the result, ultimately contributing to a growing body of literature on university learning. — Ken Bain

The people who come to work deserve to be paid properly, and there's no excuse. I could understand someone making a small error, but sometimes people make systematic errors, and that's not right. — Fred DeLuca

If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

The sheep-like tendency of human society soon makes inroads on a child's unsophistications, and then popular education completes the dastardly work with its systematic formulas, and away goes the individual, hurtling through space into that hateful oblivion of mediocrity. We are pruned into stumps, one resembling another, without character or grace. — N. C. Wyeth

The moral and medical lessons from this story are even more relevant today. Medicine is in the midst of a vast reorganization of fundamental principles. Most of our models of illness are hybrid models; past knowledge is mishmashed with present knowledge. These hybrid models produce the illusion of a systematic understanding of a disease - but the understanding is, in fact, incomplete. Everything seems to work spectacularly, until one planet begins to move backward on the horizon. We have invented many rules to understand normalcy - but we still lack a deeper, more unified understanding of physiology and pathology. — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In particular, I adopted the matrix algebra used in my thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays (almost) learned in a course in Tensor Analysis rashly taken in my third year at Queen's, and (eventually) the notion of Operators in the sense introduced by Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell's equations. — Kenneth E. Iverson

Since we have emphasized that analysis will lead to a positive conclusion only in the exceptional case, it follows that many securities must be examined before one is found that has real possibilities for the analyst. By what practical means does he proceed to make his discoveries? Mainly by hard and systematic work. — Benjamin Graham

The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged. — Joanna Russ

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual. They fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work. — Peter Drucker

After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,' published in 1944. — John Harsanyi

What is nature? An encyclopedic systematic index or plan of our spirit. Why should we be content with the mere catalogue of our treasures - let us examine them for ourselves - and work with them and use them in diverse ways. — Novalis

A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be effected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government. — Karl Marx

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves. — Boris Pasternak

This loss of certain movements is not due to the complete paralysis of such or such muscle, for all the muscles are able to work in other movements. It is certain combinations, certain systems of muscular contractions, that have disappeared. It is for this reason that such paralyses have often been described under the name of sys-tematised paralyses. M. Babinski, in publishing very interesting examples of these phenomena, observes that the word " systematic ' would be a better term.* He recalls that to systematise designates an act, " bring facts back to a system,"' and that systematic applies simply — Anonymous

I fancy you give me credit for being a more systematic sort of cove than I really am in the matter of limits of significance. What would actually happen would be that I should make out Pt (normal) and say to myself that would be about 50:1; pretty good but as it may not be normal we'd best not be too certain, or 100:1; even allowing that it may not be normal it seems good enough and whether one would be content with that or would require further work would depend on the importance of the conclusion and the difficulty of obtaining suitable experience. — William Sealy Gosset

My books have all been very deeply felt. You don't spend eight years of your life working on a trendy knockoff. In that sense I've been serious. But I don't do lots of things that other serious writers do. I don't write book reviews. I don't sit on panels about the state of the novel. I don't go to writer conferences. I don't teach writing seminars. I don't hang out at Yaddo or MacDowell. I'm not concerned with my reputation as a writer and where I stand relative to other writers. I'm not competitive or professionally ambitious. I don't think about my work and my career in an overarching or systematic way. I don't think about myself, as I think most writers do, as progressing toward some ideal of greatness. There's no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me. — Bret Easton Ellis

If just for one week in the South would show them some simple, impartial courtesy. I wonder what would happen. Do you think it'd give 'em airs or the beginnings of self-respect? Have you ever been snubbed, Atticus? Do you know how it feels? No, don't tell me they're children and don't feel it: I was a child and felt it, so grown children must feel, too. A real good snub, Atticus, makes you feel like you're too nasty to associate with people. How they're as good as they are now is a mystery to me, after a hundred years of systematic denial that they are human. I wonder what kind of miracle we could work with a week's decency. — Harper Lee

No other work has more often been blamed for more heinous crimes by the perpetrators of such crimes. The Bible has been named as the instigating or justifying factor for many individual and mass crimes, ranging from the religious wars, inquisitions, witch burnings, and pogroms of earlier eras to systematic child abuse and ritual murders today. — Nadine Strossen

I think that, as a white person stepping into doing any sort of anti-systematic-racism type of work, asking yourself, 'What is your intention?' needs to happen on a consistent basis. Check yourself. Check yourself. Check yourself, like, constantly. — Macklemore

The scientist's religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages. — Albert Einstein