Variables quotes

Variables

86 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

86 quotes
Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos Entrepreneur

"On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big."

Karl Marx
Karl Marx Philosopher, Economist

"As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone ."

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb Author, Statistician

"There is no effective difference between guessing a variable that is not random, but for which information is partial or deficient, and a random one. In this sense, guessing (what I don't know, but what someone else may know) and predicting (what has not taken place yet) are the same thing."

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Charlie Munger Investor, Businessman
Variables

"In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables - like the discount warehouses of Costco."

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Douglas Adams Writer, Humorist
Variables

"R is a velocity of measure, defined as a reasonable speed of travel that is consistent with health, mental well-being, and not being more than, say, five minutes late. It is therefore clearly as almost infinite variable figure according to circumstances, since the first two factors vary not only with speed as an absolute, but also with awareness of the third factor. Unless handled with tranquility, this equation can result in considerable stress, ulcers, and even death."

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Bill Gates Business Magnate, Philanthropist
Variables

"The first big effects will be farmers that live on the edge. Today's weather, they barely get by. Their kids, a high percentage are malnourished, and so if you impose more variable weather and more heat, you're getting more floods, more droughts, and during the germination time, the high heat, most crops...do poorly when there's more heat."

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Thomas E. Mann Political Scientist
Variables

"Votes in federal elections are cast and counted in a highly decentralized and variable fashion, with no uniform ballots and few national standards."

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Stephen Covey Author, Speaker
Variables

"Strategy is important, but trust is the hidden variable. On paper you can have clarity around your objectives, but in a low-trust environment, your strategy won't be executed."

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Variables

"There are things in your life you can control - and there are variables you can't. The more diligent you are at controlling what you can, the more influence you'll have over your destiny. You just have to figure out which are which."

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Terence McKenna Ethnobotanist, Philosopher, Writer
Variables

"We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables."

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John Locke Philosopher, Physician
Variables

"Whosoever is found variable, and changeth manifestly without manifest cause, giveth suspicion of corruption: therefore, always, when thou changest thine opinion or course, profess it plainly, and declare it, together with the reasons that move thee to change."

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Joan Didion Author, Essayist
Variables

"I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience."

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