Quotes About Quotas

“Death doesn't care about personalities - he's more interested in meeting quotas.”

— Jasper Fforde

“It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers
were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency
as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single
person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people
obeyed orders.”

— Stanley Milgram

“In any case, ideals are something we strive for; they are somewhere on the horizon of our efforts; they provide meaning and direction; they are not, however, static quotas that we either fulfill or do not.”

— Vaclav-Havel

“To get at parts of the vine high off the ground, men frantic to get every possible drop of rubber would sometimes tear down the whole vine, slice it into sections, and squeeze the rubber out. Although the Congo state issued strict orders against killing the vines this way, it also applied the chicotte to men who didn't bring in enough rubber. The chicotte prevailed. One witness saw Africans who had to dig up roots in order to find enough rubber to meet their quotas.”

— Adam Hochschild

“Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers-a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars-and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.”

— Peter M. Senge

“The IPL, involving the socialist principle of a salary cap and the protectionist mechanism of quotas, is not perhaps the best example of a market left flourishingly to its own devices and dynamics.”

— Gideon Haigh

“Carter's renowned 1979 "malaise speech" [ ... ] is little remembered for what it actually was: a call to arms for fixing our nation's dire energy future. "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977
never" [ ... ] Carter was going to use all the weapons at his disposal: import quotas, public investment in coal, solar power, and alternative fuel, and [ ... ] "a bold conservation program" where "every act of energy conservation ... is more than just common sense; I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”

— Rachel Maddow

“The towns were like scattered puddles, left behind by a receding tide, still holding some precious drops of electricity, but drying out in a desert of rations, quotas, controls, and power-conservation rules.”

— Ayn Rand

“Jefferson grasped the import of the moment, issuing a proclamation banning armed British ships from U.S. waters.9 At a cabinet meeting he decided to call on the governors of the states to have their quotas of one hundred thousand militiamen ready, and he ordered the purchase of arms, ammunition, and supplies.10,11 The president gave the order unilaterally, without congressional approval. He”

— Jon Meacham

“I am not in favour of quotas. Just put the best person into the job. It is not about gender; it is about experience, leadership and vision.”

— Angela Ahrendts

“The Australian way of affirmative action is setting goals and recognising discrimination and lack of opportunity and deciding to take action and setting some goals and targets. I guess I prefer that language to talking about quotas.”

— Quentin Bryce

“Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas.”

— Gunter Grass

“We believe that visa quotas should be lifted and people should visit anywhere they wish freely.”

— Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

“I am appreciative of the Bush administration's commitment to fair trade by looking at the facts in this case and ruling affirmatively for the implementation of quotas in this specific category.”

— Howard Coble

“I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.”

— Clarence Thomas

“Since governmental quotas expand bureaucratic power, provoke a backlash and are unfair to individuals, we need to find a better way to increase minority opportunities.”

— Marvin Olasky

“Jaidee studies the general's desk. "I wasn't aware that the Environment Ministry only inspected cargo at others' convenience."
"I am trying to reason with you. My hands are full with tigers: blister rust, weevil, the coal war, Trade Ministry infiltrators, yellow cards, greenhouse quotas, fa' gan outbreaks ... And yet you choose to add another."
Jaidee looks up. "Who is it?"
"What do you mean?"
"Who is so angry that you're pissing your pants this way? Coming to ask me not to fight? It's Trade, yes? Someone in the Trade Ministry has you by the balls."
Pracha doesn't say anything for a moment. "I don't know who it is. Better that you don't know, either. What you do not know, you cannot fight." He slides a card across the desk. "This arrived today, under my door." His eyes lock on Jaidee so that Jaidee cannot look away. "Right here in the office. Inside the compound, you understand? We are completely infiltrated."
Jaidee turns over the card.”

— Paolo Bacigalupi

“Here's the point - you're looking at affirmative action, and you're looking at marijuana. You legalize marijuana, no need for quotas, because really, who's gonna wanna work?”

— Jon Stewart

“My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.”

— Chris Bohjalian

“Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong - wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.”

— Jack Kemp

“I'm not out for quotas. I'm out to attract the best young men and women of our nation.”

— James F. Amos

“There's something that people misunderstand about screen quotas. It's not about rejecting or hating other countries' films, but about protecting our domestic film industry.”

— Min-sik Choi

“Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.”

— W. Edwards Deming

“Between the Community Redevelopment Act, requiring banks to make what I would call very weak loans, and specific quotas that the Congress imposed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that created the market demand that really led to the subprime phenomenon.”

— Wilbur Ross

“The delight of populists and the horror of the European Union, Switzerland voted in favour of quotas for EU migrants.”

— Anonymous.

“It is true that I opposed quotas in employment, education, and other areas. I consider quotas, whether they favor blacks or whites, men or women, to be a new form of discrimination as bad as the old ones.”

— Ronald Reagan

“France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans to designated filmmakers, and have placed quotas not only on imports but on television time.”

— Tyler Cowen

“There is a tendency in all of us to ask for better statistical performance. There is a tendency to impose quotas behind which usually lies imposition of pressure to achieve improved statistics.”

— Gordon B. Hinckley

“Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment.”

— Ilana Mercer

“Skilled shortages in America exist because we are shielding our skilled labor force from world competition. [Visa quotas] have been substituted for the wage pricing mechanism. In the process we have created [a] privileged elite whose incomes are being supported at non-competitively high levels by immigration quotas on skilled professionals. Eliminating such restrictions would reduce at least some of the income inequality.”

— Alan Greenspan

“We do not believe in quotas. They would not only be undesirable, they would be illegal. There is legal protection for the autonomy of universities in running their own admission arrangements.”

— David Willetts

“Though editorialists at The New York Times and The Washington Post still don't get it, most Democrats in Congress finally do: Today's trade disputes are no longer mostly about tariffs, quotas, or free entry of goods. They are about the ground rules for capitalism. Are there to be only property rights? What about the other rights that liberal democracies have fought for since the 1880s?”

— Robert Kuttner

“I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

— Samuel Alito

“Diversity is, by definition, discrimination. It leads to things like quotas and racial profiling.”

— Mary Kissel

“I started thinking about the endless bullshit about quotas, and how certain types of character are fine "as long as it's important to the story," and so on, started thinking about the absence of the abject.”

— Hal Duncan

“We have entered an Orwellian era in which entitlement replaces responsibility, coercion is described as compassion, compulsory redistribution is called sharing, race quotas substitute for diversity, and suicide is prescribed as 'death with dignity.' Political discourse has become completely corrupted. The reason is that if you tell people directly that you want to raise their taxes, transfer their wealth, count them by skin color, or let doctors kill them, most will object. Statists know this and therefore are obliged to obfuscate.”

— Theodore J. Forstmann

“Protectionism is a misnomer. The only people protected by tariffs, quotas and trade restrictions are those engaged in uneconomic and wasteful activity. Free trade is the only philosophy compatible with international peace and prosperity.”

— Walter Block

“I'm not a believer that you should set quotas for these things, because I think what happens is no matter how qualified the woman is who gets the job, people will say she [Hillary Clinton] shouldn't have gotten it. She only got it because she's a woman. That is the problem with quotas.”

— Christy Clark

“I am certain that we do not need quotas for women, especially not in a time when we have a growing shortage of qualified workers. Companies are already asking head hunters to find women for top positions.”

— Kristina Schroder

“A quota for women always amounts to a failure of politics. For me, economics is first and foremost the ability to act freely without state rules. That's why I believe quotas should only be used as a last resort.”

— Kristina Schroder

“When leadership set the goals by themselves, they are not goals, they are quotas.”

— Dave Ramsey

“I think there are some things ... that may even be distorted in the practice, such as some affirmative action programs becoming quota systems. And I'm old enough to remember when quotas existed in the United States for the purpose of discrimination, and I don't want to see that happen again.”

— Ronald Reagan

“They don't worship at the altar of forced busing and mandatory quotas. They don't believe you can remedy past discrimination by mandating new discrimination. (Defending his nominees for Civil Rights Commission)”

— Ronald Reagan

“I still just like everybody else need to meet quotas with my spins, with my buzz and make my way into the office. It has to be undeniable; the world has to know about you before Jay-Z makes a call.”

— Drake

“Incompetent government embraces hiring quotas, thus furthering their incompetence.”

— James Cook

“A tough manager will have realistic quotas for his employees that he keeps to himself and aggressively stretch quotas, anywhere from ten percent higher to a lot more, which he imposes on his staff. If his people miss the stretch numbers but exceed the realistic goals, he's happy. If he's a superb manager, he knows how far they can stretch without breaking.”

— Twyla Tharp

“What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don't know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that's my position.”

— George W. Bush

“Quotas are bad for America. It's not the way America is all about.”

— George W. Bush

“Women do not enter a profession in significant numbers until it is physically safe. So until we care enough about men's safety to turn the death professions into safe professions, we in effect discriminate against women. But when we overprotect women and only women it also leads to discrimination against women ... If [an employer works] for a large company for which quotas prevent discrimination, they find themselves increasingly hiring free-lancers rather than taking on a woman and therefore a possible sexual harassment lawsuit ...”

— Warren Farrell

“If you still are growing, you go through the archetype of the statesman or stateswoman. You stop asking "What are my quotas?" and stop saying "What is in it for me?" and "How much can I get?" You begin to say, instead, "What are your quotas?" and, "How may I serve?" Providing for others becomes much more important in your life than what you can get for yourself.”

— Wayne Dyer