Who said the insanity quote

Naively clinging to their share of power and protecting their areas of influence — as if the environment were the same as in those good old days — they are reluctant to embark on a necessary organizational transformation that the company needs to remain competitive and ensure its future viability. How can we make innovation a habit in our organization and thus achieve excellence?

Hi, The insanity quote is very often miscredited to Einsten. There is no proof anywhere that he wrote this. Even if Marie Antoinette did utter the phrase, the original version in French, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche," means "Let them eat brioche" — a type of crumbly French pastry not unlike cake but not totally the same eaten by the upperclass.

The misinterpreted quote portrays Marie Antoinette as a callous patrician, unconcerned with the plight of the poor. But she could have meant the wealthy should stop monopolizing food and share with the lower classes — if she said it. Voltaire didn't actually speak these words, but the idea does fall in line with his ideology. In her well-known biography of the French philosopher, "Friends of Voltaire," Evelyn Beatrice Hall writes, "'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,' was his attitude now.

The author was paraphrasing how she thought Voltaire felt about a certain topic. Everyone just decided the quote was real. Perhaps the most well-known phrase attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, these words appeared in a letter Newton wrote to Robert Hooke, another English philosopher and mathematician.

But Newton didn't coin the phrase himself. He was alluding to a simile said much earlier by Bernard of Chartres, a 12th-century man. John of Salisbury wrote that Bernard of Chartres used to say that "we [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. This fanciful excerpt from the former South African president's inaugural address has floated around the Internet for years. The passage goes on:. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. But crediting Mandela for these words right after getting out of prison seems downright ridiculous. Mandela, newly free after 27 years in prison, using his inaugural platform to inform us that we all have the right to be gorgeous, talented and fabulous, and that thinking so will liberate others," Morton writes.

He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in for his work on the theory of the strong force. Credit: Nick Higgins. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Therefore a hypothetically moving arrow has the same physical state as a stationary arrow in the same position.

The current physical state of an arrow determines its future physical state. This is Einstein Sanity—the denial of Einstein Insanity. Therefore a hypothetically moving arrow and a stationary arrow have the same future physical state. The arrow does not move. Get smart. In November a pamphlet from Narcotics Anonymous contained a close match as noted previously:. The trouble with Susan was that she made the same mistakes repeatedly.

Susan thought that her mere presence was enough. What more was there to give? Responsibility is normally defined as doing a job better than anyone else.

Lose and be forgotten. All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Like jumping out of a storey building, breaking every bone, spending six months in hospital, going back to the same building, up to the 39th floor, jumping and expecting it to be different.

In April an opinion piece by Baltazar A. I once heard insanity defined as a process by which an individual or a system does something over and over again in the same way while yet expecting different results. To continue to evaluate and address issues in our community strictly along ethnic, instead of human, considerations is insane if only for one reason: It will lead to the polarization that is the standard of paranoid societies. Flexibility is the ability to bend when we find ourselves in unworkable positions.