Efficiency Quotes

“Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”
― Robert Heinlein

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."

[From the Preface]”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“The most inefficient and self-harming thing a person can do is go out looking for love. Let it find you when the time is right and you're out doing what you love to do. Only then will you find it in its truest form.”
― A.J. Darkholme, Rise of the Morningstar

“Never waste any time you can spend sleeping.”
― Frank H. Knight

“A critic looking at these tightly focused, targeted interventions might dismiss them as Band-Aid solutions. But that phrase should not be considered a term of disparagement. The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. In their history, Band-Aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. The Band-Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

“Healey’s First Law Of Holes: When in one, stop digging.”
― Denis Healey

“The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

“In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the “Way of the brush”—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the “Way of flowers.” Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular.”
― H.E. Davey, Japanese Yoga: The Way of Dynamic Meditation

“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
― Peter Joseph

“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or, the Whale

“Put on a sweater.”
― Jimmy Carter

“We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!”
― Bill Watterson, There's Treasure Everywhere

“Be a worthy worker and work will come.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity.”
― Jacques Ellul

“The only way to efficiently battle evil is to copy enough to know how to counter each argument, yet not enough to believe all the bullshit.”
― Will Advise, Nothing is here...

“I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and when I'm hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I'm scoring a goal in hockey.”
― Jack Gantos, Dead End in Norvelt

“In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient.”
― Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet

“One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.”
― STEPHANE AUDEGUY, The Theory of Clouds

“It is a funny paradox of design: utility breeds beauty. There is elegance in efficiency, a visual pleasure in things that just barely work.”
― Ben Orlin, Math with Bad Drawings

“Professionalism is not about what work you do, it is about how well you do the work.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“Efficiency is to do what is effective, achieve high customer satisfaction with less operating cost, and improve employee productivity with good teamwork.”
― Pearl Zhu, Quality Master

“Good fortune and efficiency are closely related concepts. They help you get what you want more quickly and easily than you would through effort alone.”
― Suh Yoon Lee, The Having: The Secret Art of Feeling and Growing Rich

“Difference between a professional and amateur is like a difference between your dominant hand and non-dominant hand.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“More pervasive and corrosive are the nearly invisible forms of time denial that are built into the very infrastructure of our society. For example, in the logic of economics, in which labor productivity must always increase to justify higher wages, professions centered on tasks that simply take time - education, nursing, or art performance - constitute a problem because they cannot be made significantly more efficient.”
― Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World

“Having helps you find the best point of application for yourself. It’s a system that lets you achieve maximum efficiency with minimum effort.”
― Suh Yoon Lee, The Having: The Secret Art of Feeling and Growing Rich

“Success is all about fine tuning our own original style following the process of identification and elimination of ineffective stuff and emphasizing the uniqueness in our originality.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Open the Windows

“The work which can be done by your subordinates should be delegated, even if you like doing the work yourself. You must rather focus only on those tasks that can be done by you alone. If you still have some time left, focus on future planning and improving the efficiency of the organisation.”
― Awdhesh Singh, 31 Ways to Happiness

“Organizational Procurement is a tight balancing act between “cost and quality” on one side and “time and compliance” on the other side, yet a seasoned procurement specialist keeps it evenly balanced.”
― Victor Manan Nyambala

“...certain business leaders mistakenly believe that time on-task equates with task completion and productivity. Even in the industrial era of rote factory work, this was untrue. It is a misguided fallacy, and an expensive one, too.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The problem was that Citra was very bad at doing things half-fast.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe