Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I outline in some detail, but even after the outline is done I often get a new idea that is an improvement, so the outline is a living, breathing thing as well. I also re-outline when I'm two-thirds done, to be sure that there is an emotional payoff from all the plot lines and to be sure the story is as tight as it can be.
The Federal Reserve's objectives of maximum employment and price stability do not, by themselves, ensure a strong pace of economic growth or an improvement in living standards. The most important factor determining living standards is productivity growth, defined as increases in how much can be produced in an hour of work.
It is a very great mistake, and a very common one, even for well-read persons, to adopt the idea that the progress of the human race in the science of government, in the arts of civilization and refinement, and in the establishment of morality and religion, has been constantly and steadily towards improvement and perfection.
We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.
By enriching the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere from its impoverished pre-industrial levels, human beings have increased the productivity of the entire biosphere - so much so that roughly one out of every seven living things on the planet owes its existence to the marvelous improvement in nature that humans have effected.
I didn't get a ton of interest from colleges in baseball and football, but I was outstanding in track and had the sense that this would be my meal ticket... Track was a sport where I saw immediate improvement, and I had a lot of good support behind me... and the coaches had a lot of experience and pushed me in that direction for sure.
I have a great respect for incremental improvement, and I've done that sort of thing in my life, but I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed.
Don't be sensitive if I should, in future, seem brusque, harsh, or even unjust in my criticism. I sincerely hope I never shall be; but if I should, remember that fault-finding is perhaps both my privilege and my weakness, that correction is the only road to improvement, and that my quick temper and illness are entitled to some consideration.
We're missing a lot of the real-life stories of what people's work looks like. Those are the people that I want sitting on the zoning board meetings, on the zoning commissions. Those are the people I want participating in business improvement in their own industry. The gentrification processes that often happen in cities so often manifest in street sweeps of sex workers. How do you get sex workers on neighborhood associations, regarded as members of the neighborhood?