Efficiency Quotes

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
― Robert Heinlein

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

[From the Preface]”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“The most inefficient and self-harming thing a person can do is go out looking for love. Let it find you when the time is right and you're out doing what you love to do. Only then will you find it in its truest form.”
― A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar

“Never waste any time you can spend sleeping.”
― Frank H. Knight

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
― Peter Joseph

“A critic looking at these tightly focused, targeted interventions might dismiss them as Band-Aid solutions. But that phrase should not be considered a term of disparagement. The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. In their history, Band-Aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!”
― Bill Watterson, There's Treasure Everywhere

“Healey’s First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.”
― Denis Healey

“The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the “Way of the brush”—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the “Way of flowers.” Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular.”
― H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

“Be a worthy worker and work will come.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Put on a sweater.”
― Jimmy Carter

“Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.”
― Jacques Ellul

“The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“Resilient organizations are designed for evolution,
not just efficiency.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., GAME CHANGR6: An Executives Guide to Dominating Change, by applying the R6 Resilience Change Management Framework

“In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.”
― STEPHANE AUDEGUY, The Theory of Clouds

“The change which would be produced by simpler habits on political economy is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolising eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal … The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of generating disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, A vindication of natural diet: Being one in a series of notes to Queen Mab

“Elevation into leadership roles must be driven from inside and from the bottom up, especially where a strong culture is professionally designed and implemented.

In organizations where culture is by default & ad-hoc, one doesn't need to care much.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“Are you a ‘Listening Organization?’

Organizations that execute constant feedback loops from customers, vendors, and employees will have a competitive advantage in staying agile and evolving.

Building systems to ensure that your firm is empathetic and open-minded is critical to your survival and growth.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“Organizational culture is the most underrated management initiative in all sizes of companies.

The lack of a professionally designed Organizational Culture establishes that promoters of the company lack the basic understanding of regulating human behavior for quantifiable positive outcomes & profits.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“TradeCast revolutionizes the trading experience with seamless integration, empowering investors to trade smarter and faster.”
― Sohaib CATALYST

“[Agribusiness Conglomerates'] growth relies on ripping down circuit breaking, back-up systems, and modularity, and streamlining a system whose major nodes are already too big and whose links are already too strong. It's an accelerating cycle that inexorably destabilizes the system.”
― George Monbiot, Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet

“No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has
been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has
set out at tremendous speed- to go nowhere.”
― Jacques Ellul

“In London, efforts to improve drainage received a new impetus in 1858 by what came to be called the Great Stink of London. The long hot summer of that year lowered the flow of the Thames, while every day tons of raw sewage continued to flow into the river. As the sewage stewed, foul smells engulfed the neighbourhoods along the banks, including the Houses of Parliament, which was 'all but compelled to legislate upon the great London nuisance by the force of sheer stench.' (The Times, 18 June 1858). The result was the Metropolis Local Management Amendment Act of 1858, which became law just 18 days after it was introduced: clear proof of how efficient Parliament could be when properly motivated.”
― W. Walker Hanlon, The Laissez-Faire Experiment: Why Britain Embraced and Then Abandoned Small Government, 1800–1914

“A disciplined body is the prerequisite of an efficient gesture.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison Penguin Modern Classics Paperback 9 April 2020

“there are no winners here. The farming businesses who rule these fields have got so big they are entirely reliant on one or two monopolistic buyers who screw them on prices and can bankrupt them at will. The money flows off the land to the banks that finance the debt on which it is all built, to the engineering companies selling the tractors and machinery, the synthetic fertilizer and pesticide corporations, the seed companies and the insurance agents. And yet, judged solely as productive businesses, focussing on efficiency and productivity (and ignoring fossil fuel input and ecological degradation), these new farmers are amazing - the best farmers that have ever lived. In the year 2000 the average American farmer produced twelve times as much per hour as his grandfather did in 1950. And this amazing efficiency means the end for most farmers. In the UK, the number of dairy farmers has more than halved from more than 30,000 in 1995 to about 12,000 today. In turn, the number of dairy cows in Britain has halved in the past twenty years. The amazing productivity of the remaining farmers and super-cows in demonstrated in the simple fact that milk production has remained more or less stable.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“If we accept that technology is simply beyond our control, we cede our future to engineers, corporate leaders, and venture capitalists. Some might pin their hopes on the market, thinking that it will look out for our interests, deliver the technologies we want, and weed out those that are not useful or might even do harm. But the market is good at some things and not at others. It rewards profit without regard to social consequences. It prizes efficiency while ignoring other values. It celebrates domination. These priorities are encoded in the algorithms that power new technologies, the metrics that drive company strategy, and the regulatory environment that governs what companies may and may not do.”
― Rob Reich, System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot