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All that he said about the clean state and efficiency was an affront to Liberalism & was pure claptrap – Efficiency as a watchword! Who is against it? This is all a mere réchauffé of Mr. Sydney Webb who is evidently the chief instructor of the whole faction
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Letter to Herbert Gladstone on Rosebery's speech advocating national efficiency collectivism (18 December, 1901).
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John Wilson, C.B.: A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (London: Constable, 1973), p. 371.

 

Henry Campbell-Bannerman

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The practice of first developing a clear and precise definition of a process without regard for efficiency, and then using it as a guide and a test in exploring equivalent processes possessing other characteristics, such as greater efficiency, is very common in mathematics. It is a very fruitful practice which should not be blighted by premature emphasis on efficiency in computer execution.

 

Kenneth E. Iverson

 

...what is the advice I have to offer you? the first head is this, that you have to clean your slate. (Cheers.) It is six years now since you were in office. It is 16 years since you were in anything like power, and it does seem to me that under these circumstances the primary duty of the Liberal party is to wipe its slate clean and consider very carefully what it is going to write on it in future (Cheers.) Now, there will be some who will not agree with that advice, for I will tell you a secret. There are a great many Tory Liberals in the Liberal party. There is a Toryism in Liberalism as great and as deep, though as unconscious, as any in the Carlton Club. There are men who sit still with the fly-blown phylacteries bound round their obsolete policy, who do not remember that, while they have been mumbling their incantations to themselves, the world has been marching and revolving, and if they have any hope of leading or guiding it they must march and move with it too. (Cheers.) I, therefore, hope that when you have to write on your clean slate you will write on it a policy adapted to 1901 or 1902 and not a policy adapted to 1892 or 1893. (Laughter.)...The last piece of advice I shall venture to offer the Liberal party is this, that they shall not dissociate themselves, even indirectly or unconsciously, or by any careless words, from the new sentiment of Empire which occupies the nation. To many the word "Empire" is suspect as indicating aggression and greed and violence and the characteristics of other empires that the world has known; but the sentiment that is represented now by Empire in these islands has nothing of that in it. (Cheers.) It is a passion of affection and family feeling, of pride and of hopefulness; and the statesman, however great he may be, who dissociates himself from that feeling must not be surprised if the nation dissociates itself from him. (Cheers.)...my watchword if I were in office at this moment would be summed up in one single word—the word "efficiency." (Cheers.) If we have not learned from this war that we have greatly lagged behind in efficiency we have learned nothing, and our treasure and our lives are thrown away unless we learn the lesson which the war has given us. (Hear, hear.)...there is another branch of national efficiency in which I think an energetic Government might take a great part, in the way of stimulation and inquiry—I mean our commerce and our industry. (Hear, hear.)...I believe that in that branch of our national efficiency there is much to be done by an energetic Government. But last, and, perhaps, greatest of all, there comes a question that underlies the efficiency of our nation—not of our services, not of any particular branch of our nation, but of the nation as a whole—I mean education (loud cheers), in which we are lagging sadly, and with which we shall have peacefully to fight other nations with weapons like the bow and arrow if we do not progress. We have nothing like a national system, but a great chaos of almost haphazard arrangement. Then there is another question closely allied to it, though not in appearance perhaps, the question of the housing of the people. Well, you will, I think, get nothing from the present Government, and you will get nothing from any Government that does not throw its heart and soul into the work. And, last of all, but by no means least, there comes that question of temperance (cheers), which means so much to us all in the extravagance, in the degradation, in the physical degeneracy of our race. That is a question which a firm and energetic Government could, I will not say settle, but make a great advance towards settling, if it grasped the nettle firmly and refused to listen to the fanatics on either side, and made up its mind that, come well or ill, even if it sacrificed for a moment its majority or its power, it would not leave office without having made an effort in the direction I have indicated. (Cheers.)

 

Archibald Primrose Rosebery

 

Our Constitution, by its separation of powers and its system of checks and balances, acts as a restraint upon efficiency by denying exclusive power to any branch of government. The logic of governmental efficiency, unchecked, runs straight on, not only to dictatorship, but also to torture, assassination, and other abominations.

 

Wendell Berry

 

Efficiency is not the issue when you go solar. There is so much solar that all you have to do is invest in the non-recurring cost of more dishes to drive a solar-hydrogen economy at whatever efficiency it happens to sit at.

 

Derek Abbot

 

This law (regarding the theoretical efficiency of heat engines by Mr. Joule), and the law of the maximum efficiency of heat engines, are particular cases of a general law which regulates all transformation of energy, and is the basis of the Science of Energetics.

 

William John Macquorn Rankine