“Harmony thus appears as a temporary adjustment, established among all forces acting upon a given spot — a provisory adaptation; and that adjustment will only last under one condition: that of being continually modified; of representing every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions.”

— Peter Kropotkin

Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal (1896)
Context: Harmony thus appears as a temporary adjustment, established among all forces acting upon a given spot — a provisory adaptation; and that adjustment will only last under one condition: that of being continually modified; of representing every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions. Let but one of those forces be hampered in its action for some time and harmony disappears. Force will accumulate its effect; it must come to light, it must exercise its action, and if other forces hinder its manifestation it will not be annihilated by that, but will end by upsetting the present adjustment, by destroying harmony, in order to find a new form of equilibrium and to work to form a new adaptation. Such is the eruption of a volcano, whose imprisoned force ends by breaking the petrified lavas which hindered them to pour forth the gases, the molten lavas, and the incandescent ashes. Such, also, are the revolutions of mankind.

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Peter Kropotkin 141

Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scie… 1842–1921

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1970s, "Educational organizations as loosely coupled systems," 1976, p. 7

“The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases to discriminate between good and evil. He becomes a slave in body and soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don’t adjust! Revolt against the reality!”

Mordechai Anielewicz (1919–1943) Leader of the Jewish Combat Organization

The last letter from Mordecai Anielewicz , April 23 1943, written to Yitzhak Cukierman. [M.Kann], Na oczach swiata, ("In The Eyes of the World"), Zamosc, 1932 [i.e. Warszawa, 1943], pp. 33-34.

“There’s no condition one adjusts to so quickly as a state of war.”

Alice Sebold book The Lovely Bones

Source: The Lovely Bones

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

“ANARCHISM (from the Gr. ἅν, and άρχη, contrary to authority), the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being. In a society developed on these lines, the voluntary associations which already now begin to cover all the fields of human activity would take a still greater extension so as to substitute themselves for the state in all its functions. They would represent an interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national and international temporary or more or less permanent — for all possible purposes: production, consumption and exchange, communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs. Moreover, such a society would represent nothing immutable. On the contrary — as is seen in organic life at large — harmony would (it is contended) result from an ever-changing adjustment and readjustment of equilibrium between the multitudes of forces and influences, and this adjustment would be the easier to obtain as none of the forces would enjoy a special protection from the state.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Kropotkin's entry on "Anarchism" in the Encyclopædia Britannica (1910) http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/britanniaanarchy.html

“All scientific work is incomplete – whether it be observational or experimental. All scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time.”

Austin Bradford Hill (1897–1991) English epidemiologist and statistician

“The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 58 (1965), 295-300

“As result a new kind of theory to be applied on a class of motions … these geometric motions are that which acquire different parts of a system of bodies, without neither perturb themselves nor the other and consequently these motions do not depend of the action or reaction among the bodies, but only upon the conditions of their connections, and thus being determined only by geometry and not dependent of the rules of dynamics.”

Lazare Carnot (1753–1823) French political, engineering and mathematical figure

On geomatric motion. A History of the Work Concept: From Physics to Economics, by Agamenon Oliveira, p. 154.

“The genetic expression within any given cell at any given time is not “fixed,” as many people think it is. It is not a static thing. Rather, it is continually adapting to both external and internal stimuli – meaning that it adjusts to the environment and to any changes in the surroundings, as well as to any changes within the body itself.”

Neale Donald Walsch (1943) American writer

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1.

“A true prophecy creates and systematically orients conduct toward one internal measure of value. In the face of this the "world" is viewed as material to be fashioned ethically according to the norm. Confucianism in contrast meant adjustment to the outside, to the conditions of the "world." A well-adjusted man, rationalizing his conduct only to the degree requisite for adjustment, does not constitute a systematic unity but rather a complex of useful and particular traits.”

Max Weber (1864–1920) German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist

Source: Religion of China (1915), p. 235

“Harmony thus appears as a temporary adjustment, established among all forces acting upon a given spot — a provisory adaptation; and that adjustment will only last under one condition: that of being continually modified; of representing every moment the resultant of all conflicting actions.”

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