Wednesday, April 29, 2009

[did you know?] evil, lies, and self improvement

well this is not a did-you-know fact.  but i can't post it as a "quote me" because it's not from me.  and i don't wanna start a new thread right now.  so what the heck, did you know that the following quotes come from the following people?


"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing" - attributed to Edmund Burke, British philosopher.  From Wikipedia: This quotation, although often attributed to Burke does not occur in his works or recorded speeches. It first appeared in the 14th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1968), which incorrectly sourced it to a letter that did not in fact contain the quote.



"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." - popularized by Mark Twain.  "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" is part of a phrase attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and popularised in the United States by Mark Twain as above.  The statement refers to the persuasive power of numbers, the use of statistics to bolster weak arguments, and the tendency of people to disparage statistics that do not support their positions.  

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." - William Thomson, a.k.a. 1st Baron Kelvin, or Lord Kelvin, British scientist, engineer, and inventor, from whom the Kelvin scale of (absolute) temperature originated from.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin

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