1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes
page 4

Kenneth Ewart Boulding was an English-born American economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He published over three dozen books and over one-hundred dozen articles. Current Contents found him to be one of those rare authors of a "Citation Classic." Indeed, even more rare, he was the author of two Citation Classics: The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society and Conflict and Defense: A General Theory . He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. He was married to Elise M. Boulding.

✵ 18. January 1910 – 18. March 1993
Kenneth E. Boulding: 163   quotes 5   likes

Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

“In spite of the moderate usefulness of what the economist has to say on this subject… there is a cry for a cultural anthropologist or even a psychologist when the economist runs into sacred cows, extended families, traditional motivations, levels of achievement, and social morale, all of which may be more important to economic development than any of the traditional economic variables. We still await a true synthesis of the insights of economics with those of other social sciences in the area”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Kenneth Boulding (1961). "Contemporary economic research: . In Donald P. Ray (Ed.) Trends in social science. p..19 cited in: Erik Angner & George Loewenstein (2006) Behavioral Economics http://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/BehavioralEconomics.pdf
1960s

Family , Motivation , Science , Cry

“Nothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. We only learn from failure, but we do not always learn the right things from failure. If there is a failure of expectations, that is, if the messages that we receive are not the same as those we expected, we can make three possible inferences.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 42

Making love , Failure , Learning , Success

“Looked at from the perspective of twentieth-century earth, we see three great stages in the dynamic process of the universe. To this whole process, as it spreads out over perhaps ten billion years of time and ten billion light years of space, we give the name evolution, and we see three great patterns within it. The first is physical evolution.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

This presumably started with the development of the most elementary particles (whatever they may be); then of neutrons, protons, electrons, and radiations; then of elements from hydrogen to uranium and beyond formed by combining protons and electrons; then of chemical compounds; then finally of increasingly complex molecules from amino acids, and proteins to the great watershed of DNA, the beginnings of life.
Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 28

Light , Time , Universe

“The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich variety of the world.”

Kenneth E. Boulding

Boulding (1958) "Evidences for an Administrative Science: A review of the Administrative Science Quarterly, volumes 1 and 2". In Administrative Science Quarterly. vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 14
1950s

Tree , Thinking , Sense , World