Reducing Quotes

“Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms – which wasn’t working very well – was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change.”

“The tendency of modern science is to reduce proof to absurdity by continually reducing absurdity to proof.”

“I am in favor of reducing all budget items. But the item I don't want to reduce is the pension expenditure because it affects the weakest part of society.”

“To reduce poetry to its reflections of historical events and movements would be like reducing the poet's words to their logical or grammatical connotations.”

“My strategy is to stop the assaults--to reduce the number of factors your immune system has to deal with by cleaning up your diet, healing your gut, lightening your toxic burden, treating your infections, and reducing your overall stress.”

“War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.”

“Benjamin Franklin said there were only two things certain in life: death and taxes. But I'd like to add a third certainty: trash. And while some in this room might want to discuss reducing taxes, I want to talk about reducing trash.”

“I stress the expansion and elaboration of language. In simplifying it, reducing it, we reduce the power of our expression and our power to communicate. Standardization, the use of worn-out formulas, impedes communication because it does not match the subtlety of our minds or emotions, the multimedia of our unconscious life.”

“When e-commerce companies build scale, cost comes down. Companies that can handle scale and reduce costs over time will win. Margins will come from reducing costs over time and not by increasing prices. Technology is the answer at large scale.”

“You must remember that whether you like it or not, every day your life is diminishing, your life is reducing and your life is pouring out. Whether you convert that diminishing life into something or you don’t convert it to anything, it’s your problem. The life will keep on reducing and diminishing.”