Quotes from Matthew Stewart

We are all equal not because we partake in some peculiar nature or because we share in the same credo of unreasoned beliefs, but because we take it that no thinking being is incapable of seeing reason.

If you're working for somebody and trying to check on them, it never works. You're just saying what they want you to say at the end of the day.

George Washington participated as a vestryman in his local congregation, but that didn't really imply any particular kind of religious belief. This was necessary in order to participate in the society.

We're just one rock surrounded by this immense universe.

Most management systems have to do with establishing trust and getting people to cooperate. They're not really about expertise or science.

Businesspeople get a little bit of bad press sometimes. There are a lot of normal and ethical people.

We mislead ourselves when we pretend we can make someone into an effective manager by putting them through a few courses in business school.

Wherever I was in the world, at the beginning of every consulting project, one thing was certain: I would know less about the business at hand than the people I was supposed to be advising.

The conservative interpretation of American history says that wherever the word 'God' appears, it's obviously our God, it's obviously a Christian God; it's usually an evangelical God. The simplest point I'm making is: That is just absolutely not true.

It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results.

Whoever pays the consultant gets pretty much what they want to hear.

I'd like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation - more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education.

The core of the consulting business is going in and essentially making yourself indispensible by eating the brain of the organization, meaning that the consultants go in and assume key functions in the organization.

At its best, management theory is part of the democratic promise of America. It aims to replace the despotism of the old bosses with the rule of scientific law. It offers economic power to all who have the talent and energy to attain it.

Generations of devoted American history buffs have spent countless hours reading and writing long books about the American Revolution without ever having come across the name of Dr. Thomas Young. Yet it was Young who came up with the idea for the original tea party - the one in Boston Harbor.

Benjamin Franklin maintained that every star is a sun, and every sun nourishes a 'chorus of worlds' just like ours.

Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in 'worlds' just like our own.

It was 1988, and I was just finishing a D.Phil at Oxford University on the topic of 'Nietzsche and German Idealism.'

The simplest answer is that scientific management fulfilled too many hopes and prayers to be ignored merely on account of its logical and factual deficiencies.

class does not make people smarter; it produces a small group of people who are deluded about the sources of their good fortune and a large group of people who are deceived about the sources of their misfortune.

Tyranny happens when a society turns against itself, with one part usurping the power of [the] whole and applying it to the exploitation of the rest. Corruption, or misdirection of public effort for private gain, is one common feature of tyranny.... Government through fear is another common feature of tyranny, since it it through fear that one part of society can induce the other to betray its own interests.

What the United States is may be impossible to establish with any great precision; what it is supposed to be is less disputable. It is the republic dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.

The hottest rage of those grieving their whiteness is reserved not for the members of another race but for the members of another social class.