James C. Maxwell Quotes

I don't understand why a 40 is a quarter of beer when a 40 is 40 ounces. It's time to embrace the metric system.

The infrastructure we provide is the same in a remote town in Africa or New York or an archipelago in Sweden: we use the same system, and the chips inside the phone are the same.

Science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is you are trying to study. The key is measurement, simple as that.

To measure is to know. If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

An ounce of algebra is worth of a ton of verbal argument.

It's very hard to rank performances. It's very difficult, and it doesn't really matter if you rank performances.

People think it's so easy to make hamburgers. That consistent quality in so many restaurants, in that many parts of the world, is not an easy thing to do.

I've got a lot of stats. I did a lot of stuff.

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

If it is possible to have a linear unit that depends on no other quantity, it would seem natural to prefer it. Moreover, a mensural unit taken from the earth itself offers another advantage, that of being perfectly analogous to all the real measurements that in ordinary usage are also made upon the earth, such as the distance between two places or the area of some tract, for example. It is far more natural in practice to refer geographical distances to a quadrant of a great circle than to the length of a pendulum.

Our impatience of miles, when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty yards.

Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.

Nobody in the United States knows what either a "meter" or a "kilogram" is. The whole reason why we fought the Cold War was so we wouldn't have to learn the metric system.

Physics without mathematics is meaningless.

Here is a bold embrace of internationalism. Let's join the rest of the world and go metric.

When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.

What gets measured gets improved.

The method I take to do this is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetic I have long aimed at) to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature.

What is important to me is there has been consensus and clarity, (and) much better coordination. We'll be much quicker to control avian influenza as a result.

I come from a world where accountability and accomplishments matter, and where titles and rhetoric take a back seat to results.

When you are healthy you look your best and in modeling when you look and feel your best, you get the best results.

[O]pulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessors.

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages.

I’ve learned that by doing things, things get done.

We got results that would not have been possible without a negotiating partner like Joe Biden.