Matthew Stewart Quotes

#1. I'd like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation - more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.

Matthew Stewart

#2. I don't have an M.B.A. I have a doctoral degree in philosophy - nineteenth-century German philosophy, to be precise.

Matthew Stewart

#3. Most management systems have to do with establishing trust and getting people to cooperate. They're not really about expertise or science.

Matthew Stewart

#4. It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.

Matthew Stewart

#5. George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn't really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society.

Matthew Stewart

#6. In order to produce generalist courses, business school professors have been forced to invent subjects called strategy, called organizational behavior and so on.

Matthew Stewart

#7. Nature's God really descends from an ancient Greek tradition that was passed along to the early modern philosophers. And these were quite radical thinkers who were really challenging the ways of thinking of their time and the established religion.

Matthew Stewart

#8. Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.

Matthew Stewart

#9. For me, the only sources of moral values are the pursuit of understanding and the pursuit of happiness.

Matthew Stewart

#10. Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in 'worlds' just like our own.

Matthew Stewart

#11. The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word 'God' appears, it's obviously our God, it's obviously a Christian God; it's usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I'm making is: That is just absolutely not true.

Matthew Stewart

#12. Most religions assume that you find purpose through some agent that sits above or outside the world and imbues it with purpose.

Matthew Stewart

#13. Businesspeople get a little bit of bad press sometimes. There are a lot of normal and ethical people.

Matthew Stewart

#14. America's revolutionary deists saw themselves as - and they were - participants in an international movement that drew on most of the same literary sources across the civilized world.

Matthew Stewart

#15. At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.

Matthew Stewart

#16. It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of 'Nietzsche and German Idealism.'

Matthew Stewart

#17. Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising.

Matthew Stewart

#18. If you're working for somebody and trying to check on them, it never works. You're just saying what they want you to say at the end of the day.

Matthew Stewart

#19. Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.

Matthew Stewart

#20. One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

Matthew Stewart

#21. By "radical" I mean something more than that they aimed to change the order of society in a fundamental way or that they searched for the deepest roots of problems. The opposite of radical is not "moderate" or "conservative" but "common.

Matthew Stewart

#22. Whoever pays the consultant gets pretty much what they want to hear.

Matthew Stewart

#23. We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.

Matthew Stewart

#24. We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.

Matthew Stewart

#25. The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization.

Matthew Stewart

#26. At the decisive Boston town meeting of Nov. 29, 1773, while ships loaded with cargo from the East India Company idled in the harbor, Thomas Young was the first and only speaker to propose that the best way to protest the new Tea Act was to dump the tea into the water.

Matthew Stewart

#27. Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client's rank and file.

Matthew Stewart

#28. Ethan Allen was convinced that every planet out there has its own intelligent extraterrestrials. And this, as you can imagine, is a radical, inspiring, but very unsettling, idea.

Matthew Stewart

#29. Sir Isaac Newton gave the extraterrestrials their biggest shot in the arm when he embraced the infinite universe as the basis for his hugely influential system of physics. Even so, the aliens of the early modern period remained creatures of philosophy rather than science.

Matthew Stewart

#30. During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions.

Matthew Stewart

#31. In the ideal scenario, consultants work for a board, and they're helping the board check on certain aspects of management. Their work is made public and transparent.

Matthew Stewart

#32. There were about two years when I literally paid no rent anywhere in the world. Everyone's a contact, but there's no real human interaction. That's a very wearying thing.

Matthew Stewart

#33. In business, experience is the big teacher.

Matthew Stewart

#34. What do you need to succeed in business? You need the ability to think critically and communicate, and those things you can get just as easily out of a philosophy degree.

Matthew Stewart

#35. We are all equal not because we partake in some peculiar nature or because we share in the same credo of unreasoned beliefs, but because we take it that no thinking being is incapable of seeing reason.

Matthew Stewart

#36. The Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom ranked for Jefferson as one of the three achievements worthy of gracing his tombstone (the Declaration of Independence and the University of Virginia were the other two).

Matthew Stewart