Quotes About Variability

#1. Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.

G.K. Chesterton

#2. The great variability of all the external differences between the races of man, likewise indicates that they cannot be of much importance; for if important, they would long ago have been either fixed and preserved, or eliminated.

Charles Darwin

#3. The five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slow down in the growth rate of net climate forcing.

James Hansen

#4. Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

William Osler

#5. Mindfulness involves two key strategies for improving health: attention to context and attention to variability.

Ellen J. Langer

#6. A complex system benefits from not following the same practices over and over again. By enduring a little bit of stress and continuously adapting to variability in the environment, the system learns to become fitter and healthier.

Jurgen Appelo

#7. Nature will eventually do what nature has always done. It will respond in a self-stabilizing manner over the long term with moderate variability over multi-decade periods and with occasional significant variability over the short term.

John H. Sununu

#8. Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#9. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.

Jacques Barzun

#10. Scrum embraces the fact that in product development, some level of variability is required in order to build something new.

Kenneth S. Rubin

#11. When an investor focuses on short-term investments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns - in short, being fooled by randomness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#12. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

Thomas Henry Huxley

#13. Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#14. The grand points in human nature are the same to-day they were a thousand years ago. The only variability in them is in expression, not in feature.

Herman Melville

#15. If it were not for the great variability among individuals, medicine might as well be a science, not an art.

William Osler

#16. The great fact of individual difference and variability (that is, inequality) is evident from the long record of human experience: hence, the general recognition of the antihuman nature of a world of coerced uniformity.

Murray Rothbard

#17. Variability is the world's most fundamental quality. For

Vadim Zeland

#18. On average, 90 percent of the variability of returns and 100 percent of the absolute level of return is explained by asset allocation.

Roger G. Ibbotson

#19. I think the impacts of 9/11 on academic freedom vary greatly depending on locale and time (softening with the passage of time), and even within the same community, and likely within the same schools. This variability makes it difficult to offer generalized responses without accompanying caveats.

Richard A. Falk

#20. According to any textbook on dynamic meteorology, one may reasonably conclude that in a warmer world, extratropical storminess and weather variability will actually decrease.

Richard Lindzen

#21. Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

David Hare

#22. It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life - with the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#23. In particular, Australia, because of its ancient geography, soil profile and distinctive weather patterns, is more adversely affected by climate variability than some other continents.

Peter Garrett

#24. Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently of the variability of spelling in the age than the fact that a dictionary published in 1604, A Table Alphabeticall of Hard Words, spelled "words" two ways on the title page.

Bill Bryson

#25. Never think that lack of variability is stability. Don't confuse lack of volatility with stability, ever.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#26. The only way to reduce the variability in the estimate is to reduce the variability in the project.

Steve McConnell

#27. That the variability of an organism to a certain extent is a constant and certain condition of life we admit, otherwise there would be no distinguishable individuals of a species.

Richard Owen

#28. Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.

Judith Curry

#29. The noble things and the just things, which the political art examines, admit of much dispute and variability, such that they are held to exist by law11 alone and not by nature.

Aristotle.

#30. Anything organic requires some dose of variability so it can adapt all the time, and fixing things is not a good idea.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#31. Perception can be one-sided or variant: "Glass half empty or half full." There usually is more than one way of perceiving. Thoroughly check your inner dialogue.

T.F. Hodge

#32. Verbal arguments should always be suspect.

Lee Spetner