I've never heard that attributed to Friedrich Engels. The very old English proverb is "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."
Possibly Engels was paraphrasing that. John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) certainly paraphrased it, with "An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge." (Or, possibly, the proverb was a paraphrasing of what Wesley said.) In any case, I wouldn't change a word of it. It's a proverb, for goodness sake, not a measurement standard. This is, by the way, something we've dealt with before, in this list. We don't advance the cause of metrication by trying to metricate traditional proverbs, sayings, metaphors, and other figures of speech. They are what they are and they reflect the time in which they acquired their proverb status. Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of M R Sent: Friday, April 05, 2002 11:45 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:19261] Gram of action I read a proverb "An ounce of action is better than ton of theory" by Frederich Engels. During life of Frederich Engels, I think Germany should have used either grams or their traditional units and he should have used such unit. Some 1 should have made it an ounce. So we will say "A gram of action is better than ton of theory". That way, it will be easier to visualise & compare between 1 gram & 1 million grams. Madan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/
