Standardized sizes made inexpensive, off-the-rack garments economically feasible. They gave shoppers a reliable guide to finding clothes in self-service shops.

Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not.

Hoover's first emphasis was on the individual, the spark for all innovation and progress. This is a man who, while commerce secretary, standardized our modern economy, from brick sizes to bed sizes, so that housewives would not be frustrated when the sheets that arrived didn't fit.

Though my parents were professionals and expected me to go to college, they were immigrants from India with no idea about how the admissions process worked in the United States or the importance of standardized tests.

Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call.

Beginning with the No Child Left Behind law and continuing today with Race to the Top, the federal emphasis on standardized assessments has become so excessive that it has modified state and district behavior in troubling ways.

For Cantonese - because there's no standardized pinyin system - I have to have someone read it to me, and then I rewrite the whole script in my own Cantonese pinyin.

If one limits to developing only the kitchen and bathroom as standardized rooms because of their installation, and then also decides to arrange the remaining living area with movable walls, I believe that any justified living requirements can be met.

I had started teaching because I love brainteasers. At some point, I had taken every standardized test out there - the SATs, the GREs, the GMATs, the MCATs. I just took them for fun.

With demands for special education or standardized test prep being shouted in their ears, public schools can't always hear a parent when he says: 'I want my child to be able to write contracts in Spanish,' or, 'I want my child to shake hands firmly,' or, 'I want my child to study statistics and accounting, not calculus.'

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SAT.

I think of makeup as more like a design, decoration, or jewelry. I mean, it's literally paint; it's art. I don't prefer to use it as concealing anything because it influences the illusion of standardized perfection.

Children typically are not screened for dyslexia, which means it's not until fourth grade that it's detected, at which point they have to take a standardized test, and they can't read. I mean, they literally cannot read.

Education means teaching kids how to do stuff and how to think about stuff. Education is a pretty simple concept with a very clear way to measure results: you give some kind of an exam - maybe it's one of those standardized tests all kids hate, maybe it's some kind of essay, but whatever it is, it'll measure the results, and the kids will hate it.

I don't imagine myself, my work, or my life, fitting into any kind of standardized path. In fact, the idea of there even being a standard freaks me out a lot.

If we are indeed nostalgic for the weight of clock time, it is worth remembering that the standardized time that most of us know has only been around since the mid-nineteenth century. It was invented for the railroads.

Derivatives trading should be standardized and as much as possible moved to clearinghouses.

President Obama still places far too much emphasis on relentless testing with standardized exams.

The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves.