Quotes About Analysis

Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason; the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.

History is made up of hundreds of correlations, and at best we manage to see a few of them. So let us not jump to conclusions on the basis of oversimple premises.

The question of boundaries is the first to be encountered; from it all others flow. To draw a boundary around anything is to define, analyze, and reconstruct it, in this case, select, indeed adopt, a philosophy of history.

The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders.

Put more simply, they did not see art the way we do. They read art in a way we no longer can.

all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

If you have ever made a point of questioning both sides impartially, seeking to see the point of view of both, you must have been struck with the distrust amounting almost to fear of both contracting parties.

One of the things that I've been doing over the past few years is reevaluating my own powers of political analysis.

Politics is a far more intellectual business than is often realized. You may think: Well, if it's simplicity that's required, you don't need a whole lot of detail. Wrong. The simplicity is not born of superficial analysis. It is simple precisely because it is the product of being worked through.

What always happens, in my experience, is that people always think American politics is very different, but usually it is a predictor of what happens in the politics elsewhere.

Nothing matters but the facts. Without them, the science of criminal investigation is nothing more than a guessing game.

the wider consequences of a strategic decision needs destructive testing, especially by the board.

Processes without intelligent and rigorous scrutiny are not enough.

learning audit – on what could be done more, what could be done less, and what is satisfactory.

in marketing, advertising, and media our strategies have no inevitability about them. Just probabilities and likelihoods.

there are two kinds of people: people who simplify things and people who complicate them.

Reasoning is the mental tool that use to think with

I think when you dissect a joke too much, you have ruined whatever there is in comedy.

Many people have their reputations as reporters and analysts because they are on television, batting around conventional wisdom. A lot of these people have never reported a story.

I think people are smart enough to sort it out. They know when they're watching one of these food fight shows where journalists sit around and yell and scream at each other, versus serious issue reporting.

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

All that matters on the chessboard is good moves.

You want to keep intelligence separate from policy.

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.