Manpower Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Manpower. Here they are! All 100 of them:

They needed a plan. And manpower. They needed Tristan
Chelsea Fine (Awry (The Archers of Avalon, #2))
Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.
Frank Zappa
Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
It's stupidity to continue using a method which is proven to be useless [and] fruitless. It's a waste of manpower.
Teodoro A. Agoncillo (Talking History: Conversations with Teodoro A. Agoncillo)
You can defend your kingdom, or you can defend your people, Majesty. You don’t have the manpower to do both at once.” “People are more important than land.
Erika Johansen (The Invasion of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling, #2))
For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
The Metropolitan Police has a very straightforward approach to murder investigations, not for them the detective’s gut instinct or the intricate logical deductions of the sleuth savant. No, what the Met likes to do is throw a shitload of manpower at the problem and run down every single lead until it is exhausted, the murderer is caught or the senior investigating officer dies of old age.
Ben Aaronovitch (Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London, #3))
Fat people already are ashamed. It's taken care of. No further manpower needed on the shame front, thx. I am not concerned with whether or not fat people can change their bodies through self-discipline and "choices." Pretty much all of them have tried already. A couple of them have succeeded. Whatever. My question is, what if they try and try and try and still fail? What if they are still fat? What if they are fat forever? What do you do with them then? Do you really want millions of teenage girls to feel like they're trapped in unsightly lard prisons that are ruining their lives, and on top of that it's because of their own moral failure, and on top of that they are ruining America with the terribly expensive diabetes that they don't even have yet? You know what's shameful? A complete lack of empathy.
Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
We can't have your people fighting each other," I said. The 'royal we' is very important in police work; it reminds the person you're talking to that behind you stands the mighty institution that is the Metropolitan Police, robed in the full majesty of the law and capable, in manpower terms, of invading a small country. You only hope when you're using that term that the whole edifice is currently facing in the same direction as you are.
Ben Aaronovitch (Midnight Riot (Rivers of London #1))
From the very start, Churchill understood a fundamental truth about the war: that he could not win it without the eventual participation of the United States. Left to itself, he believed, Britain could endure and hold Germany at bay, but only the industrial might and manpower of America would ensure the final eradication of Hitler and National Socialism.
Erik Larson (The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz)
Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine-time, all of which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment.
W. Edwards Deming (The Essential Demming (PB): Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality)
Mao’s instruction to exterminate grass had led to a constant demand for manpower bc of the grass’s obstinate nature.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
Before we complicated life with money, machines and missiles we did well with morals, manpower and meetings.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)
But getting the sinner where justice deemed he belonged was the trick. It required a system. And the system demanded its rules, techniques, manpower, organizations, and loopholes. And the occasional seminar to educate and inform.
J.D. Robb (Three in Death (In Death, #7.5, 12.5, 22.5))
Adding manpower to a late project makes it later.
Robert C. Martin (Clean Agile: Back to Basics)
The government is so efficient it often takes two people to do the work of one. Actually, more accurately, it takes twice the manpower to do half the work.
Jarod Kintz (This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks (This isn't really my best book))
If you can’t do it with brainpower, you can’t do it with manpower—overtime,” is axiomatic with me.
Clarence L. Johnson (Kelly: More Than My Share of It All)
In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed one another rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot one another by accident.
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
In software development there’s a term called “Brooks’s Law” that Fred Brooks first coined back in 1975 in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month. Put simply, Brooks’s Law says “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”8 This has been borne out in study after study.
Jeff Sutherland (Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time)
He moved his arm so that she could rest against his chest. “All the time. The FBI loves overwhelming people with manpower and firepower.” “Good.” In her drowsy state, this suddenly was very important to her, knowing that he was as safe as possible while doing his extraspecial agent thing. Her eyes felt heavy, so she decided to shut them for just a teeny tiny moment. The last thing she remembered was feeling Vaughn’s fingers stroking up and down on her arm in a light, soothing caress.
Julie James (It Happened One Wedding (FBI/US Attorney, #5))
For society, you are not even a human; you are just a trained manpower. For them, you can “Rest in Peace” only after death. That too is a lie. To discover the eternal peace inside you, you have to walk alone.
Shunya
A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation.
Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction)
There is only so much manpower and tax revenue that can be devoted to riot control, to social surveillance, to chasing fast youths down dark alleyways, to fire-hosing and pepper-spraying suspicious-looking gatherings.
Margaret Atwood (The Heart Goes Last)
This revolutionary idea of Western citizenship—replete with ever more rights and responsibilities—would provide superb manpower for growing legions and a legal framework that would guarantee that the men who fought felt that they themselves in a formal and contractual sense had ratified the conditions of their own battle service. The ancient Western world would soon come to define itself by culture rather than by race, skin color, or language. That idea alone would eventually bring enormous advantages to its armies on the battlefield. (p. 122)
Victor Davis Hanson (Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power)
When a little black kid disappears and the media ignores it, so does the public. I know you know this. Not only that but how much media coverage a case gets has a direct relationship to how much manpower the brass assigns to solving that case. It also impacts whether or not the feds get involved. I know you know this too, dammit . . .” “. . . Lobby her on the other case at the same time, knock yourself out, but grant her an interview on Gilbert. Is that understood?” “Loud and clear, boss. After all, we can’t let a little thing like institutional racism get in our way, now, can we?
Mark M. Bello (Betrayal In Black (Zachary Blake Legal Thriller, #4))
We have a historical chance. Imagine the power which Egypt, Iran, and Turkey have, are working in one organization. We have the world's energy center, manpower, history and civilization. If this confederate has created, it will regain the face of nation.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ruler, then, maximizes the state-accessible product, if necessary, at the expense of the overall wealth of the realm and its subjects.
James C. Scott (The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series))
The responsible thing to do, the Head of the House thing to do, would be to send her on her way. This wasn’t our fight and there was no profit to be made here. We were an emerging House, and we had neither the financial resources nor the manpower of MII. If I helped her, I would be putting all of us in danger. But she was a friend. She’d kept us all from dying at Nevada’s wedding, and when I looked at her, my chest hurt.
Ilona Andrews (Sapphire Flames (Hidden Legacy, #4))
MARCHAND, leaning forward to see Monceau: You would think, though, that with the manpower shortage they’d economize on personnel. In the car that stopped me there was a driver, two French detectives, and a German official of some kind. They could easily have put a notice in the paper—everyone would have come here to present his documents. This way it’s a whole morning wasted. Aside from the embarrassment. LEBEAU: I’m not embarrassed, I’m scared to death. To Bayard: You embarrassed?
Arthur Miller (The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays)
However, other machines changed the world even more profoundly. These were the machines which made use of the forces of nature instead of manpower.
E.H. Gombrich (A Little History of the World)
The problem is quite simple. I do not have the manpower to program reports to satisfy their every whim and curiosity—in the outrageous time frames given.
A.G. Riddle (Genome (The Extinction Files, #2))
Never reject an idea because you don't have the money, manpower, muscle, or months to achieve it!
Syed Ather
The Nazis, it turned out, possessed neither the manpower nor the will power to remain “tough” when they met determined opposition.
Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil)
Though we hear much less about it, India had made a bigger contribution to the imperial war than Australia in terms of both finance and manpower.
Niall Ferguson (Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World)
IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
If you can’t do it with brainpower, you can’t do it with manpower—overtime,” is axiomatic with
Clarence L. Johnson (Kelly: More Than My Share of It All)
No one on the radio told him that responders could devote unlimited manpower to the fourteen people inside Stairwell B because they comprised the largest single group of known survivors.
Mitchell Zuckoff (Fall and Rise: The Story of 9/11)
The ultimate objective of the leaders of both groups is identical. They are determined to win for themselves undisputed control of the wealth, natural resources, and manpower of the entire planet. They intend to turn the world into their conception of a Luciferian totalitarian socialist state. In the process they will eliminate all Christians, Jews, and atheists. You have just learned one, but only one, of the great mysteries
Milton William Cooper (Behold! a Pale Horse, by William Cooper: Reprint recomposed, illustrated & annotated for coherence & clarity (Public Cache))
Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?
Denise Kiernan (The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II)
MATCH your potentials with the right credentials Education and environment can mould and modify behaviours. God is a perfect matchmaker. Match your potentials with the right resources and manpower to explore and exploit it. Want to know how?
Ikechukwu Joseph
Where else short of colonizing another planet could they hide the required plant, machinery and equipment – and the manpower to operate it – away from the prying eyes of Joe Citizen, investigative journalists and inquisitive everyday people like us?
James Morcan (Underground Bases (The Underground Knowledge Series, #7))
Every ‘asset’ is a ‘liability’, unless proven otherwise - even your (share) capital is put under ‘liability’ head, or for that matter manpower as well. Now one who can be the soul of a family, company, society or country and turns these around is a true CEO.
Sandeep Sahajpal
Morale, my boy, is what counts. Man-power and tonnage and fire-power are important, of course, but morale has won every war in history. And our morale right now is higher than a cat’s back—higher than any time since John Paul Jones—and getting higher by the day.
David Gerrold (The 10th Science Fiction MEGAPACK®)
In fact, if anybody on the Somme battlefield is overdue to be treated with a little pathos it is not the attackers, with their threefold artillery superiority, total control of the air and copious reserves of of manpower, but rather the German defenders opposite.
Alexander Watson
Nazi regime in Germany raised the Jewish population in Palestine from just 18 percent of the total in 1932 to over 31 percent in 1939. This provided the demographic critical mass and military manpower that were necessary for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948.
Rashid Khalidi (The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017)
Anything you can tell me would help. I know you’re swamped here. You can’t possibly give Chelsea’s case a hundred percent of your attention. Sharp and Kruger are experienced investigators who can focus solely on finding Chelsea. You don’t have the manpower or the budget.
Melinda Leigh (Her Last Goodbye (Morgan Dane #2))
The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.
Emily St. John Mandel (The Glass Hotel)
Other agents say magnetometers have also been waived for events attended by President George W. Bush and every recent leading presidential candidate. Agents attribute such blatant lapses in security to the fact that the Secret Service does not have enough manpower to screen everyone properly.
Ronald Kessler (The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents)
All these adoptions of European styles make it obvious that the Greenlanders paid very close attention to European fashions and followed them in detail. The adoptions carry the unconscious message, “We are Europeans, we are Christians, God forbid that anyone could confuse us with the Inuit.” Just as Australia, when I began visiting it in the 1960s, was more British than Britain itself, Europe’s most remote outpost of Greenland remained emotionally tied to Europe. That would have been innocent if the ties had expressed themselves only in two-sided combs and in the position in which the arms were folded over a corpse. But the insistence on “We are Europeans” becomes more serious when it leads to stubbornly maintaining cows in Greenland’s climate, diverting manpower from the summer hay harvest to the Nordrseta hunt, refusing to adopt useful features of Inuit technology, and starving to death as a result. To us in our secular modern society, the predicament in which the Greenlanders found themselves is difficult to fathom. To them, however, concerned with their social survival as much as with their biological survival, it was out of the question to invest less in churches, to imitate or intermarry with the Inuit, and thereby to face an eternity in Hell just in order to survive another winter on Earth. The Greenlanders’ clinging to their European Christian image may have been a factor in their conservatism that I mentioned above: more European than Europeans themselves, and thereby culturally hampered in making the drastic lifestyle changes that could have helped them survive.
Jared Diamond (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive)
Today, when we talk about the two atomic bombs* the United States dropped on Japan, we tend to do so in the context of the morality of dropping them. The truth is, the decision makers almost certainly didn’t have the range of options we often assume (or wish) they had. The idea that President Truman could have done something other than use the atomic bomb on Japan is probably a little out of step with the political realities of the time.* As the historian Garry Wills wrote in his book Bomb Power: “If it became known that the United States had a knockout weapon it did not use, the families of any Americans killed after the development of the bomb would be furious. The public, the press, and Congress would turn on the President and his advisors. There would have been a cry to impeach President Truman and court-martial General Groves. The administration would be convicted of spending billions of dollars and draining massive amounts of brain power and manpower from other war projects and all for nothing.
Dan Carlin (The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments, from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses)
Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 per cent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 per cent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s ‘treasure chest’, containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east – the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal–Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics)
I found during my times in command that a leader can only accomplish two or three major tasks during their tenure. If you stretch your attention too widely, nothing great gets done, because only you can keep the rank and file focused on the big tasks. Only you, the leader, can ensure that the manpower, the resources, the finances, and the energy are there to tackle the big jobs.
William H. McRaven (The Wisdom of the Bullfrog: Leadership Made Simple (But Not Easy))
You did a splendid job causing trouble in the republic, you rotten little brat. We already lack the manpower over here, so we’ve had to employ fresh graduates to carry some of the load. I hear you’re acquainted with the girl I’m sending. Hope you two get along! Just know that, if you cheat, I’ll be sure to tell Duke Redgrave what a two-timing snake you are. Sincerely, Your Amazing and Incredible King
Yomu Mishima (Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs, Volume 4)
Some equestrians were involved in the potentially lucrative business of provincial taxation, thanks to another law of Gaius Gracchus. For it was he who first arranged that tax collecting in the new province of Asia should, like many other state responsibilities, be contracted out to private companies, often owned by equestrians. These contractors were known as publicani – ‘public service providers’ or ‘publicans’, as tax collectors are called in old translations of the New Testament, confusingly to modern readers. The system was simple, demanded little manpower on the part of the Roman state and provided a model for the tax arrangements in other provinces over the following decades (and was common in other early tax raising regimes). Periodic auctions of specific taxation rights in individual provinces took place at Rome. The company that bid the highest then collected the taxes, and anything it managed to rake in beyond the bid was its profit. To put it another way, the more the publicani could screw out of the provincials, the bigger their own take – and they were not liable to prosecution under Gaius’ compensation law. Romans had always made money out of their conquests and their empire, but increasingly there were explicitly, and even organised, commercial interests at stake.
Mary Beard (SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome)
As a team gets bigger, the number of links that need to be managed among members goes up at an accelerating, almost exponential rate.” In his handbook Leading Teams, Hackman reminds us of “Brook’s Law”: the adage that adding staff to speed up a behind-schedule project “has no better chance of working … than would a scheme to produce a baby quickly by assigning nine women to be pregnant for one month each … adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Stanley McChrystal (Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World)
There are few things more dangerous in the world than unemployed young men. There’s a reason that un- and underemployed young men have long been the primary source of manpower for every extremist and terrorist group in modern history. A young man without a job doesn’t have prospects. He doesn’t have luxuries. Odds are that means he doesn’t have a significant other. This leaves him frustrated, horny, and, most of all, angry. And that anger can be focused as a laser-sharp tool.
C. Robert Cargill (Day Zero (Sea of Rust, #0))
The only problem that ever really seems to bother empire builders is bureaucracy. Before a new colony on the frontier could be founded, the Senate and Triumvirate would have to pass the plan. Factors influencing the High Lords decision would include, among others, the number of people needed to found the colony and whether this would result in any significant population shift. Another, more critical factor would be whether Tactical Defense could spare the ships or the manpower to patrol the area.
Christina Engela (Space Sucks!)
She stood and meandered around the room. “For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food. “Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
Administrators and campus police are loath to do anything that might necessitate the use of force against student darlings. But if arrests are all but foreclosed, enough police manpower must be summoned to maintain open access through sheer command presence. Before a planned blockade, the faculty must reaffirm in their classes the institution’s belief in free expression. And the faculty must show up to the threatened event itself to give meaning to the ideal of free speech; they must shame the students trying to prevent their fellow students from hearing ideas that challenge campus orthodoxies.
Heather Mac Donald (The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture)
Although these firms deploy units that are often much smaller in manpower relative to their client’s adversaries, their effectiveness lies not in their size, but in their comprehensive training, experience, and overall skill at battlefield judgment, all in fundamentally short supply in the chaotic battlefields of the last decade.14 Utilizing coordinated movement and intelligent application of firepower, their strength is their ability to arrive at the right place at the right moment. The fundamental reality of modern warfare is that in many cases such small tactical units can achieve strategic goals.
P.W. Singer (Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs))
...the disease killed eight thousand...between its first appearance in October 1635 and its eventual disappearance in July 1637...The appalling impact of the plague had two significant consequences. One was that it created a shortage of labor and thus resulted in a rise in wages as employers competed for man-power.
Mike Dash (Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused)
Employment of this concept of surfaces and gaps, then, gives us many advantages over what could be called slower moving forms of combat, where strength is thrown against strength. Attacking through gaps, avoiding surfaces, gives us an advantage of economy of force. If we are pitting strength against strength, assaulting enemy strong points, we are consuming our manpower as well as ammunition and supplies as we go along. If we go through the gaps, we are practicing economy of force. We are reaching our objective without using up our men. We are leaving the enemy behind. Because we are moving faster, we have the advantage of rapid exploitation.
William S. Lind (Maneuver Warfare Handbook)
The failure of emancipation to take root during the war is one of the great What ifs of the Revolution. Another is: What if blacks had not fought for the American cause? What if a slave had not saved Colonel William Washington’s life, with the result that his cavalry charge dissolved and the Battle of Cowpens had become a British victory? As the historian Thomas Fleming speculates, both North and South Carolina might well have gone over to the British. What if Glover’s regiment of Massachusetts sailors had not had the manpower to complete the evacuation of Washington’s army before the fog lifted in New York—and Washington himself, waiting for the last boat, had been captured? *
Henry Wiencek (An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America)
Whatever its European credentials, Russia is not an Asian power for many reasons. Although 75 percent of its territory is in Asia, only 22 percent of its population lives there. Siberia may be Russia’s “treasure chest,” containing the majority of the mineral wealth, oil, and gas, but it is a harsh land, freezing for months on end, with vast forests (taiga), poor soil for farming, and large stretches of swampland. Only two railway networks run west to east—the Trans-Siberian and the Baikal-Amur Mainline. There are few transport routes leading north to south and so no easy way for Russia to project power southward into modern Mongolia or China: it lacks the manpower and supply lines to do so.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place, #1))
It goes without saying," Miranda had said, in their initial phone call, "but of course no police force is going to investigate this." The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she'd disappeared in international waters, so it wasn't actually Mauritania's problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.
Emily St. John Mandel (The Glass Hotel)
For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, human civilization was about one thing and one thing only: food. Every culture that existed put most of their time, energy, manpower, and resources into food. Hunting it, gathering it, farming it, ranching it, storing it, distributing it…it was all about food. “Even the Roman Empire. Everyone knows about the emperors, the armies, and the conquests. But what the Romans really invented was a very efficient system of acquiring farmland and transportation of food and water.” She walked to the other side of the room. “The industrial revolution mechanized agriculture. Since then, we’ve been able to focus our energies on other things. But that’s only been the last two hundred years. Before that, most people spent most of their lives directly dealing with food production.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
Oh don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not after your money. I’ve never cared much for that. No, what I’m after are men. Manpower. Power. Freedom. The chance to win.” He sighed and looked around him with distaste. “You could have been living with me. You could have had it all. Instead you’re in a shithole in America. Do you know where I am now? I have the most beautiful house you could ever imagine, with views as far as the eye can see. I have privilege now. More than that, I have… prestige. What Violetta said about me having a cartel nobody cares about? Oh, I wish she could see me now. I took over for Travis. And more than that, I took over from the Morales. I am at the top. Where I always should have been.” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and looked me dead in the eye, face completely serious. “Where you should have been. Angel. Where the fuck did we go wrong?
Karina Halle (Bold Tricks (The Artists Trilogy, #3))
Only a handful of iconoclasts guessed that airplanes and submarines would rewrite all the rules of naval warfare, that by the late 1930s battleships would be worse than useless (because of the money and manpower they diverted), and that Mahan’s three dogmas were sinking rapidly into obsolescence. The First World War revealed glimpses of the future. The German U-boats proved that submarines could menace seaborne supply lines. The war in Europe hinted at the possibilities of airpower, and by the end of the war the British had demonstrated that airplanes could take off from and land on ships. Jutland, the largest naval battle of the conflict, neither bore out Mahan’s doctrines nor completely refuted them. But none of the lessons of the First World War could break the power of the battleship cult, whose acolytes dominated the ranks of all the world’s major navies until the opening salvos of the next war.
Ian W. Toll (Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941–1942)
I do not believe that one can maintain a situation in which a man toils and works a whole year, only to get a ludicrous salary, and another just sits down in a leather seat and gets enormous sums for it. This is a condition unworthy of man. [-] After all, there are two worlds which confront each other. And they are right when they say: “We can never reconcile ourselves to the National Socialist world.” For how could a narrow-minded capitalist possibly declare his agreement with my principles? It would be easier for the devil to go to church and take holy water. [-] This is the first state in our German history which, as a matter of principle, eliminated all social prejudice in the assignment of social positions, and this not only in civilian life. I myself am the best proof of that. I am not even an advocate; just think of what this means! And still I am your Fuhrer! [-] What was it that I asked of the outside world Nothing but the right of Germans to unite, and second, that what was taken away from them be restored. I asked for nothing which might have implied a loss for another people. How often have I offered my hand to them Immediately after my rise to power. For what does armament mean? It gobbles up so much manpower. And especially I who regard work as the decisive factor, I had wished to employ German manpower for other plans. And, my Volksgenossen, I believe it became common knowledge that I have plans of some substance, beautiful and great plans for my Volk. I have the ambition to make the German Volk rich, the German lands beautiful. I wish the standard of living of the individual to increase. I wish us to develop the most beautiful and best culture. I wish theater to be an enjoyment affordable for the entire Volk and not only for the upper ten thousand as in England. Beyond this, I wish the entirety of German culture to benefit the Volk. These were enormous plans which we possessed, and for their realization I needed manpower. Armament just takes men away. I made proposals to restrict armament. But all they did was laugh at me. [-] For it was quite clear: what was I before the World War? An unknown, nameless man. What was I during the War? A small, common soldier. I bore no responsibility for the World War. But who are the folk who lead England once again today The very same people who were already agitating before the World War. It is the same Churchill, who was already the vilest warmonger in the World War, and the late Chamberlain who agitated just as much then. And the whole audience (Korona) that belongs there, and naturally that people which always believes that with the trumpets of Jericho it can destroy the peoples: these are the old specters which have arisen once more! Adolf Hitler – speech to the workers of a Berlin December 10, 1940
Adolf Hitler
Mughals to the importance of sea power. The Mughals had a predominantly continental outlook. Preoccupation with cavalry warfare blinded the Indian rulers to the maritime challenge of the European powers. The Mughals would only take an enemy seriously if he confronted them with large contingents of cavalry. Thus, they neglected the Indian Ocean as the most important element of the total Indian environment. They knew the monsoon would not permit a sustained maritime invasion of India. Thus, a maritime invader would find his supply lines cut in a short time-frame. The European powers, however, never attempted such an invasion. India itself had a huge military manpower pool with a mercenary orientation. It generally flocked to the banner of whichever local ruler paid the best. The European success lay in nativisation. They built up their military contingents in India by drilling local infantry troops who were far less expensive to maintain but in the end proved fatal to the Indian cavalry.
G.D. Bakshi (The Rise of Indian Military Power: Evolution of an Indian Strategic Culture)
There was one obligation that the Romans imposed on all those who came under their control: namely, to provide troops for the Roman armies. In fact, for most of those who were defeated by Rome and forced, or welcomed, into some form of ‘alliance’, the only long-term obligation seems to have been the provision and upkeep of soldiers. These peoples were not taken over by Rome in any other way; they had no Roman occupying forces or Roman-imposed government. Why this form of control was chosen is impossible to know. But it is unlikely that any particularly sophisticated, strategic calculation was involved. It was an imposition that conveniently demonstrated Roman dominance while requiring few Roman administrative structures or spare manpower to manage. The troops that the allies contributed were raised, equipped and in part commanded by the locals. Taxation in any other form would have been much more labour-intensive for the Romans; direct control of those they had defeated would have been even more so.
Mary Beard (SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome)
[In Montana at the fenced US-Canada Border] Not for the first time I am forced to contemplate the melancholy truth that, in one significant way at least, Al-Qaeda has won. Its victory in the interior of the United States may not be complete, but it is enough. Through one outrageous and atrocious act and the credible threat of more, they hage ensured that America's freedom and conveniences have been unprecendently curtailed. Queuing up for security checks in every international amd domestic airport, having one's sun-cream, nail scissors amd mineral water binned and one's patience worn down, these are minor but palpable victories. No one spdays say it in the queues as they build and build, it would be considered unpatriotic. That fact, that the truth itself is now unlatriotic, that too is a victory, Al Qaeda have cost the US and its citizens unbillilns in tkme and manpower, in incinvenience and stress. And along with the thousands and thousands of miles of international borders, they are costing American tax-payers billions more. New helicopters, thousands of new recruits. The bill is incaculable.
Stephen Fry (Stephen Fry in America)
Drafting conscript workers was one thing. But unless they were adequately fed they were useless. There was no industry in the 1940s in which the correlation between labour productivity and calorific input was more direct than in mining.91 But after 1939 the food supply in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal.92 As was true of Germany, the high-intensity dairy farms of France, the Netherlands and Denmark were dependent on imported animal feed. Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed.93 Of course, France was a major producer of grain in its own right. But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis.
Adam Tooze (The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy)
Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.
Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)
Necessary because it could not be suppressed, this role of poverty was necessary too because it made wealth possible. Because they labor and consume little, those who are in need permit a nation to enrich itself, to set a high value on its fields, its colonies, and its mines, to manufacture products which will be sold the world over; in short, a people would be poor which had no paupers. Indigence becomes an indispensable element in the State. In it is concealed the secret but also the real life of a society. The poor constitute the basis and the glory of nations. And their poverty, which cannot be suppressed, must be exalted and revered: "My purpose is merely to attract a share of that vigilant attention [that of the government] to the suffering portion of the People...; the succor it is owed derives essentially from the honor and the prosperity of an Empire, of which the Poor are everywhere the firmest support, for a sovereign cannot preserve and extend his realm without favoring the population, the cultivation of the Land, the Arts, and commerce; and the Poor are the necessary agents of these great powers which establish the true strength of a People." Here is an entire moral rehabilitation of the Pauper, which designates, at a deeper level, a social and economic reintegration of his role and character. In the mercantilist economy, the Pauper, being neither producer nor consumer, had no place: idle, vagabond, unemployed, he belonged only to confinement, a measure by which he was exiled and as it were abstracted from society. With the nascent industry which needs manpower, he once again plays a part in the body of the nation.
Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason)
What we have so often preached at home about the essence of the enemy coalition has now been confirmed: it is a devilish pact between democratic capitalism and Jewish Bolshevism. All nations whose statesmen have signed this pact will sooner or later become the victims of the demonic spirits they have summoned. Let there be no doubt that National Socialist Germany will wage this fight for as long as it takes for this historic turn of events to come about here, too, and this will happen still this year. No power on earth will make us weak at heart. They have destroyed so many of our beautiful, magnificent, and sacred things that there remains only one mission in our lives: to create a state that will rebuild what they have destroyed. Therefore, it is our duty to preserve the freedom of the German nation for the future and not allow German manpower to be abducted to Siberia, but to deploy it for the rebuilding and dedicate it to the service of our own Volk. They have taught us so many horrible things that there is no more horror for us. What the homeland must endure is dreadful, what the front must accomplish is superhuman. Yet when, in the face of such pain, a whole nation proves itself as reliable as the German Volk, then Providence cannot and will not deny its right to live in the end. As always in history, it will reward its steadfastness with the prize of earthly existence. Since so many of our possessions have been destroyed, this can only reinforce us in our fanatical determination to see our enemies a thousand times over as what they truly are: destroyers of an eternal civilization and annihilators of mankind! And out of this hatred will grow a sacred will: to oppose these annihilators of our existence with all the strength God has given us and defeat them in the end. Adolf Hitler - proclamation to the German Folk Fuhrer Headquarters, February 24, 1945
Adolf Hitler
In Nevada, at Frenchman’s Flat, a bright flash and ugly mushroom cloud had signified a gigantic change in the tactical battlefield—a change that had not come about at Hiroshima, despite statements to the contrary. In its early years the atomic device had remained a strategic weapon, suitable for delivery against cities and industries, suitable to obliterate civilians, men, women, and children by the millions, but of no practical use on a limited battlefield—until it was fired from a field gun. Until this time, 1953, the armies of the world, including that of the United States, had hardly taken the advent of fissionable material into account. The 280mm gun, an interim weapon that would remain in use only a few years, changed all that, forever. With an atomic cannon that could deliver tactical fires in the low-kiloton range, with great selectivity, ground warfare stood on the brink of its greatest change since the advent of firepower. The atomic cannon could blow any existing fortification, even one twenty thousand yards in depth, out of existence neatly and selectively, along with the battalions that manned it. Any concentration of manpower, also, was its meat. It spelled the doom of Communist massed armies, which opposed superior firepower with numbers, and which had in 1953 no tactical nuclear weapons of their own. The 280mm gun was shipped to the Far East. Then, in great secrecy, atomic warheads—it could fire either nuclear or conventional rounds—followed, not to Korea, but to storage close by. And with even greater secrecy, word of this shipment was allowed to fall into Communist hands. At the same time, into Communist hands wafted a pervasive rumor, one they could neither completely verify nor scotch: that the United States would not accept a stalemate beyond the end of summer. The psychological pressures on Chinese Intelligence became enormous. Neither an evaluative nor a collective agency, even when it feels it is being taken, dares ignore evidence.
T.R. Fehrenbach (This Kind of War: The Classic Military History of the Korean War)
If, in the exigencies of war, industry makes too great a demand on our man-power, then we must use the man-power of the territories which we have occupied. To deserve its place in history, our people must be above all a people of warriors. This implies both privileges and obligations, the obligation of submitting to a most rigorous upbringing and the privilege of the healthy enjoyment of life. If a German soldier is expected to be ready to sacrifice his life without demur, then he is entitled to love freely and without restriction. In life, battle and love go hand in hand, and the inhibited little bourgeois must be content with the crumbs which remain. But if the warrior is to be kept in fighting trim, he must not be pestered with religious precepts which ordain abstinence of the flesh. A healthyminded man simply smiles when a saint of the Catholic Church like St. Anthony bids him eschew the greatest joy that life has to give, and offers him the solace of self-mortification and castigation in its place.
Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
The other was until a fortnight ago in the occupation of a liaison officer from the Ministry of Manpower, when the Treasury in its wisdom decided that co-operation with other branches of the Government was a luxury that could not be tolerated in time of war.
Cyril Hare (With a Bare Bodkin (Francis Pettigrew, #2))
The Union was about a lot of things. One that’s rarely mentioned is the need for imperial manpower: England needed more bodies to serve in its armies. Although it wasn’t immediately obvious how they could increase their population by aligning with a country which was, at that point in history, burning anyone with a womb and a cat.
Frankie Boyle (The Future of British Politics)
Your teams need the ability—and the manpower—to relentlessly pursue a specific objective; asking a team to split its time between two different business lines is likely to result in the failure of both.
Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
arms began flowing into Israel in large quantities: machine guns, rifles, artillery, ammunition, and even tanks and planes. The IDF doubled its manpower, due in part to the new arrivals from the detention camps in Cyprus, as well the continued influx of overseas Jewish volunteers. Unlike the detainees from Cyprus, the overseas volunteers had, for the most part, served in the Second World War.
Eric Gartman (Return to Zion: The History of Modern Israel)
In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
Discouraging risk-taking. Attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics have other, more subtle effects: they not only promote short-termism, as noted earlier, but also discourage initiative and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, their productivity would have seemed to be zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 percent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of their superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not have panned out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks. This is typical of situations involving long-term investments of manpower.
Jerry Z. Muller (The Tyranny of Metrics)
With the restriction of government to its proper sphere and its concentration into our organization, resulting in the liberation of man-power into wealth-producing enterprise, and especially with the enormous growth of inter-world commerce, world-income increased to such a point that taxation could be reduced to a minimum; and the lower the taxes the more flourishing business became and the greater the income.
E.E. "Doc" Smith (Gray Lensman)
The age of plague also reconfigured political incentives and military technologies. In particular, the sudden shortage of manpower incentivized the use of labor-saving devices, especially those that concentrated great violence in a few hands.
Kyle Harper (Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History)
President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller, Mr. Webb. Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen: I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief. I am delighted to be here and I'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion. We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation's own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far out-strip our collective comprehension. No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only 5 years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than 2 years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than 2 months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight. This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward. So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward-and so will space. William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage. If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it - we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace...
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
US Navy into which young men enlisted during the late 1930s and early 1940s was decidedly white. This had not always been the case. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, African Americans served in a largely integrated American Navy and made up about 25 percent of its enlisted strength. Some thirty thousand African Americans manned Union vessels during the Civil War, with little discrimination as to duties. After segregation was legalized in 1896, African American enlistments declined and black men were increasingly relegated to the galley or engine room. After World War I, African American enlisted personnel declined further as the Navy recruited Filipino stewards for mess duties. By June 1940, African Americans accounted for only 2.3 percent of the Navy’s 170,000 total manpower. The fleet had mostly converted from coal to oil, and the vast majority of African Americans performed mess duties. Black reenlistments in technical specialties were never barred, however, and a few African American gunner’s mates, torpedo men, and machinist mates continued to serve. Amendments to the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 guaranteed the right to enlist regardless of race or color, but in practice, “separate but equal” prejudices consigned most blacks to the Steward’s Branch. Its personnel held ratings up to chief petty officer, but members wore different uniforms and insignia, and even chief stewards never exercised command over rated grades outside the Steward’s Branch. The only measure of equality came when, just as with everyone else aboard ship, African American and Filipino stewards were assigned battle stations. Only then could they stand shoulder to shoulder with their white brothers in arms.13
Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
To find that right answer, you must develop a clear understanding of the trade-offs between the various factors—manpower, capacity, and inventory—and you must reduce the understanding to a quantifiable set of relationships.
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
just the one hundred years since Marx’s theory was first put into practice there have been three Socialist governments with the manpower and the resources to invade other lands. Two – Germany and Russia – tried to take over the world, committed the cruelest of oppressions, and murdered more human beings than any other peoples in history. The third, China, has been only somewhat less adventurous overseas, but this is mostly because, with a population of 1.4 billion people and provinces so different from one another they are akin to their own countries, the Chinese are typically still too distracted trying to homogenize their own people into one to venture too far outside their own already massive borders. Still, their body count is staggering – between 40 and 80 million people under Socialist favorite Mao Tse-Tung alone.
Evan Sayet (The Woke Supremacy: An Anti-Socialist Manifesto)
Now, that’s something an amateur might find difficult, comparatively, given the resources in manpower and time of the Yard.
Charles Finch (The Fleet Street Murders)
I think the curfew's about public order. The government don't have the balls or the manpower to order people to stay in their houses indefinitely.
Louise Welsh (A Lovely Way to Burn (Plague Times, #1))
That’s the curse of librarianship. If your library is of any quality at all, then its collection is going to outpace your manpower.
Ben Aaronovitch (Tales from the Folly)
Vice Admiral William S. Pye relieved Admiral Kimmel on 17 December 1941 as temporary Commander of the Fleet. He was number two in the fleet echelon of command and assumed the job as additional duty until a regular relief arrived. Admiral Pye was hard put to decide whether to take action in relieving Wake Island. He had two task forces near enough to the island to subject the Japanese forces to an aircraft carrier raid. But to do so required him to risk the loss of a carrier, which at that stage he could ill afford. Hindsight proves that action even against the land-based planes of the Japanese from the Marshall Islands only about 500 miles away would have been successful. But Wake is nearer to Japan than Hawaii, and holding it would have been impossible without changing the whole complexion of the war which lay ahead. The relief of Wake would have prevented the capture of military and some 650 civilian personnel which the Japanese took into custody. There were a number of other considerations involved, including the state of the weather, the shortage of fleet oilers, and the lack of loading and unloading facilities at Wake. As it appears now, Admiral Pye acted wisely, about 22 December 1941, in sacrificing the manpower on Wake without risking the loss or crippling of one or more aircraft carriers. 7.
Homer N. Wallin (Why, How, Fleet Salvage And Final Appraisal [Illustrated Edition])
Father braced himself to hold the stump still. He turned his head to look at her. “Horses!” he shouted. All the pent silence of the two of them that long afternoon through was being shattered in the one wonderful shout. “Horses! Great jumping Jehosaphat! No! We started this with manpower and, by Godfrey, we’ll finish it with manpower!
Jack Schaefer (Shane)
Global Pakistani Manpower Recruitment Agency and Overseas Employment Promoter We are one of the top recruitment agencies in Pakistan, providing the best recruitment services to the top companies in 50+ countries around the Globe, including the Middle East And Central European Countries.
Imran Khan
Who needs horsepower when you've got manpower?
Dipti Dhakul (Quote: +/-)
An employee-oriented culture that focuses on real relationships with each other instead of a purely profit-oriented sales and earnings culture, as we find in the majority of companies today. An inspiring management culture that does not focus purely on the use of manpower but on the development of each individual employee’s potential. An appreciative and inspiring environment that allows each individual, the entire team, and ultimately the entire company to grow beyond itself.
Lars Behrendt (GET REAL INNOVATION)