Individual Effort Quotes

From my earliest youth I have regarded the connection between Ireland and Great Britain as the curse of the Irish nation, and felt convinced, that while it lasted, this country would never be free or happy. In consequence, I determined to apply all the powers which my individual efforts could move, in order to separate the two countries. ~ Theobald Of Bec

I think that from the time you start playing sports as a child you see that your responsibility to your team is to play the best that you can play as an individual ... and yet, not take anything away from being part of a team. ~ Wayne Gretzky

The more directly individual rewards are tied to individual achievements, the greater incentive there is to increase one's individual effort. Joint Efforts ~ Harry Browne

It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, rather, to bring people back to ... the warmth of community, to the worth of individual effort and responsibility ... and of individuals working together as a community, to better their lives and their children's future. ~ Robert Kennedy

Here effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual efforts than any other ... regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Sometimes we feel that one individual's action is very insignificant. Then we think, of course, that effects should come from channeling or from a unifying movement. But the movement of the society, community or group of people means joining individuals. Society means a collection of individuals, so that initiative must come from individuals. Unless each individual develops a sense of responsibility, the whole community cannot move. So therefore, it is very essential that we should not feel that individual effort is meaningless- you should not feel that way. We should make an effort. ~ Dalai Lama

Men make opportunity. Every great industrial achievement has been the result of individual effort - the practical development of a dream in the mind of an individual. ~ Charles M. Schwab

The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual. ~ Vince Lombardi

Of course, as the United States built a safety net that excluded and punished black families, it created a wealth-building apparatus to buoy and enrich white ones. It is not market forces and individual effort alone that determine who succeeds and prospers and who remains impoverished and excluded in the United States, but government policy and deep-seated cultural and societal mores. ~ Annie Lowrey

Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is not alone the fact that women have generally had to spend most of their strength in caring for others that has handicapped them in individual effort; but also that they have almost universally had to care wholly for themselves ~ Anna Garlin Spencer

To a great extent the achievements of invention, of mechanical and of artistic creation, must of necessity, and rightly, be individual rather than governmental. It is the self-reliant pioneer in every enterprise who beats the path along which American civilization has marched. Such individual effort is the glory of America. ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

The United States over the last thirty years has seen a growing gap - indeed, a deepening gulf - between rich and poor. The gap is significantly greater than in any other developed nation. Moreover, the growing gulf between rich and poor is the result of social and economic policy, not because some classes of people worked harder and others slacked off over the last thirty years (all of us, according to most studies, are working harder). The differences among countries generate the same conclusion: social policy, not simply individual effort, is responsible for the distribution of wealth. Our recent social policy may not have been intended to produce this result, but it has. The consequence is increased suffering and desperation among the poor and potentially grave consequences for the society as a whole.

Moreover, many people in the middle, who are most often struggling financially, support the individualistic ideology underlying our social policy - namely, the notions that we each have worked hard for what we have and ought to be able to keep all of it, that government is bad (or at least inefficient and wasteful - and hungry for our tax dollars), and that things will be better for all of us if we let the wealthiest people in our country make and keep as much money as possible. Many of us seem not to realize that the people who benefit the most from our politics and economics of individualism are the wealthiest 10 percent, especially the top 1 percent. People wil ~ Marcus J. Borg

The transmission of SARS, Dwyer said, seems to depend much on super spreaders - and their behavior, not to mention the behavior of people around them, can be various. The mathematical ecologist's term for variousness of behavior is "heterogeneity," and Dwyer's models have shown that heterogeneity of behavior, even among forest insects, let alone among humans, can be very important in damping the spread of infectious disease.

"If you hold mean transmission rate constant," he told me, "just adding heterogeneity by itself will tend to reduce the overall infection rate." That sounds dry. What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd. An individual gypsy moth may inherit a slightly superior ability to avoid smears of NPV as it grazes on a leaf.

An individual human may choose not to drink the palm sap, not to eat the chimpanzee, not to pen the pig beneath mango trees, not to clear the horse's windpipe with his bare hand, not to have unprotected sex with the prostitute, not to share the needle in a shooting gallery, not to cough without covering her mouth, not to board a plane while feeling ill, or not to coop his chickens along with his ducks. "Any tiny little thing that people do," Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, "is going to reduce infection rates. ~ David Quammen

The conventional understanding of meritocracy is that it is a system for awarding or allocating scarce resources to those who most deserve them. The idea behind meritocracy is that people should achieve status or realize the promise of upward mobility based on their individual talent or individual effort. It is conceived as a repudiation of systems like aristocracy where individuals inherit their social status.

I am arguing that many of the criteria we associate with individual talent and effort do not measure the individual in isolation but rather parallel the phenomena associated with aristocracy; what we're calling individual talent is actually a function of that individual's social position or opportunities gained by virtue of family and ancestry. So, although the system we call "meritocracy" is presumed to be more democratic and egalitarian than aristocracy, it is in fact reproducing that which it was intended to dislodge.

Michael Young, a British sociologist, created the term in 1958 when he wrote a science fiction novel called The Rise of Meritocracy. The book was a satire in which he depicted a society where people in power could legitimate their status using "merit" as the justificatory terminology and in which others could be determined not simply to have been poor or left out but to be deservingly disenfranchised. ~ Lani Guinier

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

There is only one way a boy can be sure to learn to play hockey - on the pond, on the creek, on a flooded lot. The foundation of hockey isn't really hockey at all. It's shinny, a wild melee of kids batting a puck around, with no rules, no organization - nothing but individual effort to grab and hold the puck. ~ Lester Patrick

Ministers should impress upon the people the necessity of individual effort. No church can flourish unless its members are workers. The people must lift where the ministers lift. ~ Ellen G. White

The true purpose of life is the perfection of humanity through individual effort, under the guidance of God's inspiration. Real life is response to the best within us. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, is to deprive one's self of the real joy of living. ~ David O. McKay

Non-violence is not a quality to be evolved or expressed to order. It is an inward growth depending for sustenance upon intense individual effort. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Be sure that your reward systems actually reward what you say you value. Many organizations preach cooperative effort but reward only individual effort - ~ Hawthorne Publishers

Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. --"The Crusade of Indignation," in Nation ~ James Baldwin

I think that hip-hop is more of an individual effort. That means you're an artist from the streets, they expect you to rap about the streets, because that's what happens there. ~ Conor Oberst

The little individualist, recognizing his individual impotence, realizing that he did not possess within himself even the basis of a moral judgement against his big brother, began to change his point of view. He no longer hoped to right all things by his individual efforts. He turned to the law, to the government, to the state. ~ Walter Weyl

Unions are for 'collective bargaining,' not individual bargaining. It follows that most of the achievements of a union, even if they were more impressive than the staunchest unionist claims, could offer the rational worker no incentive to join; his individual efforts would not have a noticeable effect on the outcome, and whether he supported the union or not he would still get the benefits of its achievements. ~ Mancur Olson

Freedom is not an individual effort.
Yours comes only when you grant others theirs ~ Sergio Aragones

I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. ~ John F. Kennedy

Though it is a team game by definition, it is actually a series of loosely connected individual efforts. ~ Bill Veeck

Words like 'freedom', 'justice' and 'democracy' are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous, and above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply. ~ James A. Baldwin

Besides the healthcare bill being unconstitutional and a great expansion of federal government, I think if it does not respect people's individual religious views and makes groups or individuals do things that are contrary to their deeply held beliefs, there is going to be a visceral negative reaction. ~ Bob McDonnell

No effort is ever wasted, although some pay dividends later than you think. Do not imagine that you "wasted your time" because something didn't turn out right. There is no such thing as "waste" in the Universe. Everything - everything - yields benefit. It's true. And your life will show you this. So don't decry the "effort that failed." All things lead to your highest good. You just may not know it yet. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

One feels the insignificance of the individual, and it makes one happy. ~ Albert Einstein

There is economics in biology, nothing is free, everything has to be paid for, there are costs as well as benefits to everything in life, for example, there was never sufficient natural selection pressure to develop better eyes, individuals could earn other things like smiley smiles rather than waste energy & time on better eyes ... ~ Richard Dawkins

Pay less attention to what you hear about someone, and more to what you learn about them ... as you make the effort. ~ Og Mandino

You're doing it to make the character as specific as possible, so that it's a specific individual that you're talking about, not that whole class of people. ~ Joel Coen

By an individual being, whatever one's metaphysical doctrine, one means an unique being, that is, a being which is alone of its own type, or is such that no other of its class exists. ~ Josiah Royce

Papa said marriage is not kept by affection but by a pledge. Affection does not beget the pledge; the pledge begets the affection. When you share a life and a home and a bed with someone, you become soul mates as surely as cream and effort produce butter ... And so I began to imagine my life with James Luddy. I imagined being butter. ~ Susan Meissner

The photographs that excite me are photographs that say something in a new manner; not for the sake of being different but ones that are different because the individual is different and the individual expresses himself. ~ Harry Callahan

VI. LOOKING BACKWARD

How the planters, having lost the war for slavery, sought to begin again where they left off in 1860, mere substituting for the individual ownership of slaves, a new state serfdom of black folk. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Always remember that there is a law of compensation which operates just as infallibly as gravitation, and that victory goes at last where it ought to, and that this is just as true of individuals as of nations. ~ William Feather

Many of us have spent a lifetime trying to be what we're not, feeling lousy about ourselves when we fail and sometimes even when we succeed. We hide our differences when, by accepting and celebrating them, we could collaborate to make every effort more exciting, productive, enjoyable, and powerful. Personally, I think we should start right now. ~ Martha Beck

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness ... is without any question the most fatuous which could possibly be undertaken. This lamentable phrase the pursuit of happiness is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

The truth is that the market doesn't really reflect some magical perfect valuation of a stock under the efficient market hypothesis. It reflects the mass consensus of how actual individual investors value the stock. It is the sum total of everyone's hopes and fears about what a company is capable of doing. ~ M.E. Thomas

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture. ~ William Irwin Thompson

Prosperity does not elevate the sage and adversity does not depress him. For he has always made the effort to rely as much as possible on himself and to derive all delight from himself. ~ Seneca.

LCSH terms that are "orphans" in terms of their individual coverage are seldom orphans in terms of their relationships. ~ Thomas Mann

People generally cannot be trusted, especially in my profession where trust is such a rarity that it's not worth wasting the time and effort searching for it. ~ J.A. Redmerski

The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the ;thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good. ~ Ralph Barton Perry

You know, I think that romance sort of coincides with effort, so you can fall flat on your face, but as long as you're making a great effort, I think it comes off as romantic. ~ Ashton Kutcher

Insincerity had never come easily to her, but good manners required it on occasion, even if a superhuman effort was needed. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

To narrate is to give oneself: it seems obvious that literature, as an effort to communicate fully, will continue to be blocked so long as misery and illiteracy exist, and so long as the possessors of power continue to carry on with impunity their policy of collective imbecilization through the mass media. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Grief doesn't hit us in tidy phases and stages, nor is it something that we forget and move on from; it is an individual process that has a momentum of its own, and the work involves finding ways of coping with our fear and pain, and also adjusting to this new version of ourselves, our "new normal. ~ Julia Samuel

Jesus Christ, as the first-fruit of the Kingdom, began the work of conquering death on an individual basis, but we, as His church, will be the ones to complete the task. Jesus said (Matthew 28:18), "all power is given unto me in heaven and in earth," and the church today has that same power. Death will not be conquered by Jesus returning to earth. It will be conquered when the church stands up boldly and says, "We have dominion over the earth." ~ Earl Paulk

I want to thank the efforts of the American Public Health Association and its 200-plus partners who have organized events around the Nation that serve to raise everyone's awareness of the need to improve public health. ~ Lois Capps

The pessimist is seldom an agitating individual. His creed breeds indifference to others, and he does not trouble himself to thrust his views upon the unconvinced. ~ Agnes Repplier

God has guarded His Word so that only the pure in heart can see its secrets. All other efforts will fail. ~ Winkie Pratney

You're right about this being limited to me, it's entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering. Like Tom Sawyer! He had to suffer in a pitch-black cave, but at the same time he found his way out into the light he also found a bag of gold! But what I'm experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation; it goes straight down to a hopeless depth and never opens on anybody else's world. So I can sweat and suffer in that same dark cave and my personal experience won't result in so much as a fragment of significance for anybody else. Hole-digging is all I'm doing, futile, shameful hole-digging; my Tom Sawyer is at the bottom of a desperately deep mine shaft and I wouldn't be surprised if he went mad! ~ Kenzaburo Oe

The personal power that comes from principle-centered living is the power of a self-aware, knowledgeable, proactive individual, unrestricted by the attitudes, behaviors, and actions of others or by many of the circumstances ~ Stephen R. Covey

There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski. ~ James R Newman

Whoever you are and wherever you find yourself as you seek your way in life, I offer you "the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6). Wherever else you think you may be going, I ask you to "come unto Him" as the imperative first step in getting there, in finding your individual happiness and strength and success. ~ Jeffrey R. Holland

Everything in life that's meaningful takes effort - takes vitality. You have to work at it. And God helps them who help themselves ... help you. ~ Jack LaLanne

Tell you what.' Alec reached for a second seraph blade. 'We live through this, and I promise I'll introduce you to my whole family.'
Magnus raised his hands, his fingers shining with individual azure flames. They lit his grin with a fiery blue glow. 'It's a deal. ~ Cassandra Clare

Norfolk is not on the way to anywhere, you don't stop off on the way somewhere else - it's an end in itself. You have to want to go there; it's an effort. ~ Beth Orton

Children need both latitude of expression and firmly enforced limits on their behaviors, in a blend that results in calm, patientmanagement. The key to success is to tailor the rearing environment to the developmental level of the child
what she or he can handle
and to individual differences among children. ~ Sandra Scarr