Price Pritchett Quotes

If you must doubt something, doubt your limits

Too much attention on problems kills our faith in possibilities.

If you must doubt something, doubt your limits!

Change always comes bearing gifts.

Price Pritchett, author of The Quantum Leap Strategy, emphasizes that what often looks like failure is actually a work in progress: “Everything looks like a failure in the middle. You can’t bake a cake without getting the kitchen messy. Halfway through surgery it looks like there’s been a murder in the operating room.” If you measure your body fat after a week of work and there’s no change, you haven’t failed; you’ve simply produced a result. As long as you have a goal and you’re taking efficient daily action, then whatever result you produce is “performance feedback.” It may not be the result you want, but it’s still valuable feedback. You’ve learned one way that doesn’t work.

You must let your desires guide you, instead of allowing yourself to be boxed in by perceived constraints.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

I quit and joined him and went on strike,” said Hugh Akston, “because I could not share my profession with men who claim that the qualification of an intellectual consists of denying the existence of the intellect. People would not employ a plumber who’d attempt to prove his professional excellence by asserting that there’s no such thing as plumbing—but, apparently, the same standards of caution are not considered necessary in regard to philosophers. I learned from my own pupil, however, that it was I who made this possible. When thinkers accept those who deny the existence of thinking, as fellow thinkers of a different school of thought—it is they who achieve the destruction of the mind. They grant the enemy’s basic premise, thus granting the sanction of reason to formal dementia. A basic premise is an absolute that permits no co-operation with its antithesis and tolerates no tolerance. In the same manner and for the same reason as a banker may not accept and pass counterfeit money, granting it the sanction, honor and prestige of his bank, just as he may not grant the counterfeiter’s demand for tolerance of a mere difference of opinion—so I may not grant the title of philosopher to Dr. Simon Pritchett or compete with him for the minds of men. Dr. Pritchett has nothing to deposit to the account of philosophy, except his declared intention to destroy it. He seeks to cash in—by means of denying it—on the power of reason among men. He seeks to stamp the mint-mark of reason upon the plans of his looting masters. He seeks to use the prestige of philosophy to purchase the enslavement of thought. But that prestige is an account which can exist only so long as I am there to sign the checks. Let him do it without me. Let him—and those who entrust to him their children’s minds—have exactly that which they demand: a world of intellectuals without intellect and of thinkers who proclaim that they cannot think. I am conceding it. I am complying. And when they see the absolute reality of their non-absolute world, I will not be there and it will not be I who will pay the price of their contradictions.

Ask... seek... knock... and the dream shall be yours.