Top 100 Criterion Quotes
#1. Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful - Christian community is the final apologetic.
Francis Schaeffer
#2. Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#3. The criterion of action is that todays work should not be deferred till the following day.
Umar
#4. Life was tough for me. When I was a kid, nobody played with me because they thought I looked ugly with my extra thumb. It pained me. So once I thought of getting it surgically removed. But I didn't. Slowly, I realized that the exterior is not the criterion for love and success.
Hrithik Roshan
#5. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.
Richard Dawkins
#6. I always feel it's necessary to look at my images from two distances. Here is my criterion: If I can look at it from a distance and then come up close but find nothing more to see, it's printed too large. It's not giving me any new information when I come up to it.
Bruce Barnbaum
#7. The theory that holds "good blood" or "bad blood" as a moral-intellectual criterion , can lead to nothing but torrents of blood in practice.
Ayn Rand
#8. Speciesism is morally objectionable because, like racism, sexism, and heterosexism, it links personhood with an irrelevant criterion. Those who reject speciesism are committed to rejecting racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of discrimination as well.
Gary L. Francione
#9. Calmness is the criterion of spiritual progress. Plunge the purified mind into the Heart. Then the work is over.
Ramana Maharshi
#10. From matters as crucial as the death of Jesus, to those as mundane as eating and drinking, the Bible presents the glo ry of God as the ultimate priority and the definitive criterion by which we should evaluate everything.
Donald S. Whitney
#11. Above all we need, particularly as children, the reassuring presence of a visible community, an intimate group that enfolds us with understanding and love, and that becomes an object of our spontaneous loyalty, as a criterion and point of reference for the rest of the human race.
Lewis Mumford
#12. Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Marshall McLuhan
#13. A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value. The only scientific criterion for judging the validity of a scientific theory is a confrontation with the data of experience.
Maurice Allais
#14. If I knew how to operate a DVR, you'd find episodes of 'The Tavis Smiley Show,' 'Democracy Now!' and lots of stuff from TV Land. What you can find now on my Hulu account are Korean soap operas, 'Grey's Anatomy' and films from the Criterion collection.
T'Keyah Crystal Keymah
#15. A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of friends.
George Washington
#16. There can be no other criterion, no other standard than gold. Yes, gold which never changes, which can be shaped into ingots, bars, coins, which has no nationality and which is eternally and universally accepted as the unalterable fiduciary value par excellence.
Charles De Gaulle
#17. Profitability is the sovereign criterion of the enterprise.
Peter Drucker
#18. The criterion of simplicity requires that the minimum number of assumptions be postulated.
Albert Low
#19. Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.
Ilka Chase
#20. In a society dominated by the fact of commercial competition, money is necessarily the test of prowess, and wastefulness the sole criterion of power. So
Upton Sinclair
#21. Real morality is based on a single criterion: right action, appropriate action, in the present moment and present situation.
Brad Warner
#22. It is He Who sent down to thee, in truth, the Book (Quran), confirming what went before it; and He sent down the Law (of Moses) and the Gospel (of Jesus) before this, as a guide to mankind, and He sent down the criterion (Quran) (of judgment between right and wrong). - Holy Quran 3:3
Anonymous
#23. The strictly theoretical and so attractive dream of possible equality had been traded for the worst authoritarian nightmare in history when it was applied to reality, understood, with good reason (more, in this case), as the only criterion of truth.
Leonardo Padura
#24. In the consumer economy taste is not the criterion in the marketing of expensive soft drinks, usability is not the primary criterion in the marketing of home and office appliances. We are surrounded with objects of desire, not objects of use.
Donald A. Norman
#25. There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth.
Vaclav Havel
#26. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
Werner Heisenberg
#27. Our assessment of socio-economic worth is largely a sham. We scientists should not lend ourselves to it - though we routinely do. We should, instead, insist on applying the criterion of quality.
John Charles Polanyi
#28. Simplicity is indeed often the sign of truth and a criterion of beauty.
Mahlon Hoagland
#29. The real point of the matter is that what we call a 'wrong datum' is one which is inconsistent with all other known data. It is our only criterion for right and wrong.
Isaac Asimov
#30. If you have a family mission statement that clarifies what your purpose is, then you use that as the criterion by which you make the decisions.
Stephen Covey
#31. The fundamental criterion for judging any procedure is the justice of its likely results.
John Rawls
#32. Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.
George Bernard Shaw
#33. We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.
Barack Obama
#34. The criterion for free choice can never be an absolute one, but neither is it entirely relative.
Herbert Marcuse
#35. We used to have just one criterion and that was profit, and then another criterion was added - social welfare. Now we have to add the third important criterion, and that is nature and the environment.
Mikhail Gorbachev
#36. The proper criterion for distinguishing "right" from "wrong" is not mysterious.It is embodied in the principles that advance the cause of the oppressed and exploited over the cause of those who live by oppression and exploitation.
Dhoruba Bin Wahad
#37. I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.
Scott Turow
#38. Our reliance on the validity of a scientific conclusion depends ultimately on a judgment of coherence; and as there can exist no strict criterion for coherence, our judgment of it must always remain a qualitative, nonformal, tacit, personal judgment.
Michael Polanyi
#39. Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society.
Jimmy Reid
#40. The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer's ideas or personality.
Emma Goldman
#41. Without a criterion enabling us to distinguish genuine human rights from the many impostors we will never be sure that our legal provisions, however wise, benevolent and responsible, will be secure against the individual desire to escape from them.
Roger Scruton
#42. ... For Weber ... autonomy resides not in the formulation of universal laws but in the value-creating activity unconstrained by any criteria - except in Weber's case, by the criterion of self-consistency.
Rogers Brubaker
#43. Every man will have his own criterion in forming his judgment of others. I depend very much on the effect of affliction. I consider how a man comes out of the furnace; gold will lie for a month in the furnace without losing a grain.
Richard Cecil
#44. A person's willingness to conform to arbitrary parameters is not a good criterion for selecting talent or allocating rewards.
Bruce Tulgan
#45. The goal of pacifism is possible only though a supranational organization. To stand unconditionally for this cause is the criterion of true pacifism.
Albert Einstein
#46. Repetition acts as an enforcement mechanism: It makes cooperation achievable when it is not achievable in the one-shot game, even when one replaces strategic equilibrium as the criterion for achievability by the more stringent requirement of perfect equilibrium.
Robert Aumann
#47. The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?'
M.H. Abrams
#48. If 'pleasing the people' is the only criterion (of a 'big' leader), then going to war or pretending to go to war or simulating outrage and bad mouthing states you can do nothing about, is the playbook for you.
Khaled Ahmed
#49. One thing that makes the adventure of working in our field particularly rewarding, especially in attempting to improve the theory, is that ... a chief criterion for the selection of a correct hypothesis ... seems to be the criterion of beauty, simplicity, or elegance.
Murray Gell-Mann
#50. Sporting events like the Olympics have developed and maintained a clear message of promoting gender equality as an essential criterion in the success of any international event.
Richard Attias
#51. Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the problem at hand - not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.
Ivan Chermayeff
#52. The man who is egoless is the man who has no ideals. Let this be the criterion, and you have stumbled upon a fundamental. The man of no ego is the man of no ideals. Then how can the ego be created? - the very energy is missing. The energy comes out of friction, conflict, struggle, will.
Rajneesh
#53. When we ascribe credit for an invention, determining who should be most noted by history, one criterion is looking at whose contributions turned out to have the most influence.
Walter Isaacson
#54. Why should we censure Othello when the Criterion Lover says, "Thou shalt have no other Gods before Me"?
Emily Dickinson
#55. Human desire is the criterion of all truth and all good. Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling. There is really nothing to fear. The motive of fear in religion is base ...
D.H. Lawrence
#56. The manners of women are the surest criterion by which to determine whether a republican government is practicable in a nation or not.
John Quincy Adams
#57. Human relationships are about communicating. Business jargon should be banished in favor of simple English. Simplicity is a sign of truth and a criterion of beauty. Complexity can be a way of hiding the truth.
Helena Rubinstein
#58. Herman Brown was a businessman who wanted value for money spent. His relationships with politicians were measured by that criterion.
Robert Caro
#59. Our empirical criterion for a series of theories is that it should produce new facts. The idea of growth and the concept of empirical character are soldered into one.
Imre Lakatos
#60. The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#61. Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness.
Ryszard Legutko
#62. Now in creative thought common sense is a bad master. Its sole criterion for judgement is that the new ideas shall look like the old ones. In other words it can only work by suppressing originality.
Alfred North Whitehead
#63. It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because (scientists) ... despise utility. But because.. useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before.
John Charles Polanyi
#64. I emphasize that virtually every engineering calculation is ultimately a failure calculation, because without a failure criterion against which to measure the calculated result, it is a meaningless number.
Henry Petroski
#65. The infallible criterion by which to distinguish the true from the would-be strategist is the degree of originality of his conceptions. It makes little difference whether this originality is carried to excess, as was the case with Steinitz and Nimzowitsch.
Alexander Alekhine
#66. If reason is a universal faculty, the decision of the common mind is the nearest criterion of truth.
George Bancroft
#67. Humanistic ethics is based on the principle that only humans themselves can determine the criterion for virtue and not an authority transcending us.
Bertrand Russell
#68. The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.
Giambattista Vico
#69. The criterion of true beauty is, that it increases in examination; of false, that it lessens. There is something, therefore, in true beauty that corresponds with the right reason, and it is not merely the creature of fancy.
George Grenville
#70. What is Reality, in the last resort," he asked, "but the thing a man's vision brings to him--to believe? There's no other criterion. The criticism of opposite types of mind is merely a confession of their own limitations." Being
Algernon Blackwood
#71. I am a romantic, in a literary way, by which I mean the Romantic poets, who thought just because a sensation is fleeting doesn't mean it isn't valuable. If the only criterion of value is whether something lasts, then the whole of human life is a waste of time.
Sebastian Faulks
#72. By what criterion ... can we distinguish among the numberless effects, that are also causes, and among the causes that may, for aught we can know, be also effects, - how can we distinguish which are the means and which are the ends?
Chauncey Wright
#73. To seek the timeless way we must first know the quality without a name. There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
Christopher Alexander
#74. The only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar minds - success.
Edmund Burke
#75. Every writer owes something to Holmes.
T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929
T. S. Eliot
#76. The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reigns supreme.
Pope Benedict XVI
#77. This is criterion by which the Church is to be judged, not by the forms of its doctrine or ritual, but by the reality of the reality of the love which it manifests.
Bede Griffiths
#78. The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.
Benjamin Graham
#79. There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#80. Striking in its insistence and durability is the quest or desire for a decisive criterion with which to differentiate humans from other animals as well as the human from the animal in human beings.
Dominick LaCapra
#81. Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it creates a desire for continuous growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact.
John Dewey
#82. Insofar as it is possible to divide people in categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity.Every Frenchman is different. But all actors are similar.
Milan Kundera
#83. Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organization of labor.
Christopher Caudwell
#84. To be pleasing to God, art must be true as well as good. Truth has always been one important criterion for art. Art is the incarnation of the truth. It penetrates the surface of things to portray them as they really are.
Philip Graham Ryken
#85. I don't care who likes it or buys it. Because if you use that criterion, Mozart would have never written Don Giovanni, Charlie Parker never would have played anything but swing music. There comes a point at which you have to stand up and say, this is what I have to do.
Branford Marsalis
#86. It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of the vitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spirits of that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothic art there is no disputing the proposition.
Thomas Hardy
#87. Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value - and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.
Ayn Rand
#88. As the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows.
Michael Behe
#89. There are so many ways to characterize evolutionary success. If one criterion is the number of millions of years that the species persists, we're still just infants. We're way too young of a species to tell if we were a creative fluke or if we have any staying power.
Greg Graffin
#90. One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.
Ayn Rand
#91. Since when has leadership been a criterion for sanity? Or vice versa. Hitler was a gifted leader, even Nixon. Exhibit leadership qualities as an adolescent, they pack you off to law school for an anus transplant. If it takes, you go into government.
Tom Robbins
#92. The point of equilibrium will be known by the criterion that an infinitely small amount of commodity exchanged in addition, at the same rate, will bring neither gain nor loss of utility.
William Stanley Jevons
#93. I am drawn to any story that makes me want to read from one sentence to the next. I have no other criterion.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#94. Another ethical ideal, the utilitarian principle, maintains that the ultimate criterion of an ethical decision is the balance of positive consequences over negative consequences produced by an action.
Philip A. Becnel IV
#95. Just remember one criterion: whatever you do should not be in the service of destruction, it should be in the service of creativity.
Rajneesh
#97. For me the criterion of a good photograph is that it is unforgettable.
Brassai
#98. The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime. If a small burglary is likely to improve his legal position, at least temporarily, one may be sure he has been deprived of human rights.
Hannah Arendt
#99. The outcome of a non-constant-sum game may be dictated by the individual rationality of the respective players without satisfying a criterion of collective rationality.
Anatol Rapoport
#100. Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others, is a just criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, is a criterion of iniquity.
Oliver Goldsmith
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