Actual Failure Rate

Famous quotes containing the words actual, failure and/or rate:

    To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.
    Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)

    War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    “Terence, this is stupid stuff:
    You eat your victuals fast enough;
    There can’t be much amiss, ‘tis clear,
    To see the rate you drink your beer.
    —A.E. (Alfred Edward)