Quotes about constraint (184 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“The respect for a musical score must come from the director... If the director has no power and has to surrender to budgetary constraints, this is where we have the problem.”

Ennio Morricone (1928–2020) Italian composer, orchestrator and conductor

Music , Problem

“Approved attributes and their relation to face make every man his own jailer; this is a fundamental social constraint even though each man may like his cell.”

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) Sociologist, writer, academic

Erving Goffman (1967: 10), as cited in: Trevino (2003,, p. 37).
1950s-1960s

“It is important at this point that Congress offer specific constructive approaches to what’s proven to be a foreign policy disaster because we’ve got too much at stake to simply stand on the sidelines and criticize…If we simply cut off funding without any structure for how a redeployment takes place, then you could genuinely have a Constitutional crisis or at least a crisis on the ground where the president continues to send troops there but now they’re being shortchanged in terms of armaments and support…The notion that as a consequence of that [2002 Congressional] authorization, the president can continue down a failed path without any constraints from Congress whatsoever is wrong and is not warranted by our Constitution.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Interview on Iraq with the Associated Press (30 January 2007) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16896534/
2007

Support

“[The Texas anti-sodomy statute] undoubtedly imposes constraints on liberty. So do laws prohibiting prostitution, recreational use of heroin, and, for that matter, working more than 60 hours per week in a bakery. But there is no right to 'liberty' under the Due Process Clause, though today's opinion repeatedly makes that claim.... The Fourteenth Amendment expressly allows States to deprive their citizens of 'liberty,' so long as 'due process of law' is provided....”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

On the right to sodomy: Lawrence v. Texas (2003) (dissenting).
2000s

Law

“Common elements of creativity are originality and imagination. Creativity is intertwined with the freedom to design, to invent and to dream. In engineering and science a creative idea is useful only if it meets three conditions: the constraint of the natural laws, the constraint of cost, and the constraint of technical feasibility.”

Martin Lewis Perl (1927–2014) American scientist

Essay on Creativity in Science and Engineering

Law , Dreams , Imagination , Idea

“Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interaction. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). Throughout history, institutions have been devised by human beings to create order and reduce uncertainty in exchange.”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

Douglass North. (1991). "Institutions." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1): 97-112; Abstract

Law , History

“Prophets do not help responsible Christian persons who seek to gain political and economic power as a means to serve the public good within the constraints of political, economic, medical, or other institutions.”

James Gustafson (1925) American academic

Source: "Varieties of Moral Discourse: Prophetic, Narrative, Ethical and Policy", p. 55

Help , Personality

“It was really fun. I had just joined the company, so rather than just working along with the designs. I'd ask what the conditions were and have fun working within those constraints.”

Takashi Tezuka (1960) video game designer

Quote

“The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.”

Thomas Mann book A Man and His Dog

Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)

Pain , Dogs

“Powerful groups set constraints on and may even determine the actions of state authority. They constitute the society that is protected by the state; their particular concept of justice reigns. The definition and functioning of property rights tend to advance their interest and welfare. …the basic domestic function of the state is to define and protect property rights of individuals and groups. …The primary external function of the state is to protect the property rights and personal security of its members vis-à-vis the citizens and actions of other states.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

War and Change in World Politics (1981)

Justice , Personality

“Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic, and social interactions. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, tradition, and code of conduct) and formal rules”

Douglass C. North (1920–2015) American Economist

constitutions, laws, property rights
Source: Institutions (1990), p. 97; As cited in: Oliver E. Williamson (1996) The Mechanisms of Governance. p. 4

Law

“A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics
Context: A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. To him life as such is sacred. He shatters no ice crystal that sparkles in the sun, tears no leaf from its tree, breaks off no flower, and is careful not to crush any insect as he walks. If he works by lamplight on a summer evening, he prefers to keep the window shut and to breathe stifling air, rather than to see insect after insect fall on his table with singed and sinking wings.
If he goes out in to the street after a rainstorm and sees a worm which has strayed there, he reflects that it will certainly dry up in the sunshine, if it does not quickly regain the damp soil into which it can creep, and so he helps it back from the deadly paving stones into the lush grass. Should he pass by an insect which has fallen into a pool, he spares the time to reach it a leaf or stalk on which it may clamber and save itself.

Life , Way , Feeling , Flowers

“In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good,a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.”

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist

Of the Network of Signifiers
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho Analysis (1978)
Context: It is on this step that depends the fact that one can call upon the subject to re-enter himself in the unconscious—for, after all, it is important to know who one is calling. It is not the soul, either mortal or immortal, which has been with us for so long, nor some shade, some double, some phantom, nor even some supposed psycho-spherical shell, the locus of the defences and other such simplified notions. It is the subject who is called— there is only he, therefore, who can be chosen. There may be, as in the parable, many called and few chosen, but there will certainly not be any others except those who are called. In order to understand the Freudian concepts, one must set out on the basis that it is the subject who is called—the subject of Cartesian origin. This basis gives its true function to what, in analysis, is called recollection or remembering. Recollection is not Platonic reminiscence —it is not the return of a form, an imprint, a eidos of beauty and good, a supreme truth, coming to us from the beyond. It is something that comes to us from the structural necessities, something humble, born at the level of the lowest encounters and of all the talking crowd that precedes us, at the level of the structure of the signifier, of the languages spoken in a stuttering, stumbling way, but which cannot elude constraints whose echoes, model, style can be found, curiously enough, in contemporary mathematics.

Truth , Beauty , Way , Mathematics

“I love the stuff and material of writing: words. The games you can play with them. The rhythm and lyricism in a good passage of writing. The power of a simple sentence. I also love the paradoxical bind of writing as both freedom and constraint. You start creating characters and scenes out of thin air. But if you do it well enough, that freedom constricts, because your characters are no longer inside you. They become their own people, agents on the page who need to act and think and feel in ways true to who they are…”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

On writing as a kind of spiritual act in “Both Freedom and Constraint: An Interview with Randa Abdel-Fattah” https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/both-freedom-and-constraint-an-interview-with in Words Without Borders (May 2015)

Freedom , Game , People , Thinking

“Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 15
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Men , Justice , Passion

“Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us.
Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly to rage on”

Homér Iliad

Source: The Iliad

Rage , Past , Hurt , Anger

“What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by "a few bad apples," it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America's checks and balances.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, NYU Speech (2004)

War , Nature

“Q: Does the creation of Design admit constraint?
Design depends largely on constraints.
Q: What constraints?
The sum of all constraints. Here is one of the few effective keys to the Design problem: the ability of the Designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible; his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time, and so forth. Each problem has its own peculiar list.”

Charles Eames (1907–1978) American designer, half of duo the Eames

Another part of the interview: Also cited at: Mark Wunsch. "[http://markwunsch.com/blog/2008/09/27/design-q-a-with-charles-eames.html A software engineer and technologist: Design Q&A with Charles Eames". at markwunsch.com/blog, 2008/09/27
Design Q & A with Charles Eames, 1972

Problem , Time , Dependency

“I have never been forced to accept compromises but I have willingly accepted constraints.”

Charles Eames (1907–1978) American designer, half of duo the Eames

Charles Eames, interview in: Domus, monthly review of architecture interiors design art, Nr. 482-493, 1970; Cited in: American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1980) Proceedings of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. p. 77

“It was a constraint; he makes of it his mission”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)
Original: (61).

“Adaptive system — whether on the biological, psychological, or sociocultural level — must manifest (1) some degree of "plasticity" and "irritability" vis-a-vis its environment such that it carries on a constant interchange with acting on and reacting to it; (2) some source or mechanism for variety, to act as a potential pool of adaptive variability to meet the problem of mapping new or more detailed variety and constraints in a changeable environment; (3) a set of selective criteria or mechanisms against which the "variety pool" may be sifted into those variations in the organization or system that more closely map the environment and those that do not; and (4) an arrangement for preserving and/or propagating these "successful" mappings.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 491.

Problem , Success

“[…] the nation’s present and future well-being is now threatened by human control over the biosphere including its underlying mechanisms. As a result, a new challenge begets the state’s responsibility: anticipating and preventing future and irreversible degradations, even if it implies severe constraints to the present.”

Dominique Bourg (1953) French philosopher, specialist of sustainability

"For an Ecological Democracy" https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/for-an-ecological-democracy, Green European Journal, 2014.

Future

“Most companies are saddled with institutional constraints. A company's history, for example, may commit it to an industry that now offers limited opportunity. A more common problem is a shareholder constituency that pressures its manager to dance to Wall Street's tune. Many CEOs resist, but others give in and adopt operating and capital-allocation policies far different from those they would choose if left to themselves.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2003 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2003ltr.pdf
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

History , Problem , Dance

“The critical act in formulating computational theories turns out to be the discovery of valid constraints on the way the world is structured -- constraints that provide sufficient information to allow the processing to succeed.”

David Marr (1945–1980) British neuroscientist and psychologist

Representation and recognition of the spatial organization of three-dimensional shapes, 1978

World , Way

“During this period I was able to carry out only one project of real interest to me. Pure Oil was a fully integrated oil company in the sense that they engaged in exploration for oil, construction of oil wells, production of crude oil, transportation to refineries, distribution of refinery products to company owned storage facilities and to gas stations. We developed a linear programming model of the whole network hoping to discover the optimum allocation to and from connected nodes in order to meet required deliveries at minimum cost. Then we collected all the data needed by our model and ran the model. The computations took several days and the results were disappointing: The optimum allocations were not significantly different from their current practices. Is it possible that we had discovered a system of human beings in which everyone knew the payoff functions and constraints, and, over time, had evolved behavior patterns that enabled them to achieve near optimum performance? Or was it possible that our model was not detailed enough as it was based so closely on current practice that no new behavior could emerge? Or was our data incorrect? This was disappointing but great experience.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Hope , Disappointment , Behavior , Sense

“We do not inhabit a perfected world where natural selection ruthlessly scrutinizes all organic structures and then molds them for optimal utility. Organisms inherit a body form and a style of embryonic development; these impose constraints upon future change and adaptation. In many cases, evolutionary pathways reflect inherited patterns more than current environmental demands. These inheritances constrain, but they also provide opportunity. A potentially minor genetic change […] entails a host of complex, nonadaptive consequences. […] What “play” would evolution have if each structure were built for a restricted purpose and could be used for nothing else? How could humans learn to write if our brain had not evolved for hunting, social cohesion, or whatever, and could not transcend the adaptive boundaries of its original purpose?”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Hyena Myths and Realities", p. 156
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

World , Optimism , Nature , Learning

“Sociologists and anthropologists have long been concerned with how individuals are linked to one another and how these bonds of affiliation serve as both a lubricant for getting things done and a glue that provides order and meaning to social life. The attention to networks of association, which began in earnest in the 1970s, provided welcome texture and dynamism to portraits of social life. This work stood in stark contrast to the reigning approaches in the social sciences. In contrast to deterministic cultural (oversocialized) accounts, network analysis afforded room for human agency, and in contrast to individualist, atomized (undersocialized) approaches, networks emphasized structure and constraint (Granovetter, 1985). Network studies offered a middle ground, a third way, even if no one was quite sure whether networks were a metaphor, a method, or a theory (Barnes 1979). But the sociologists and anthropologists who initially studied networks did not pay sustained attention to economic activity, although some industrial sociologists (Roy, 1954; Dalton, 1959) had long stressed the role of informal networks as an antidote to formal organization practices and structures.”

Walter W. Powell (1948) American sociologist

Walter W. Powell and Laurel Smith-Doerr. "Networks and economic life." The handbook of economic sociology. (1994). p. 368-380; introduction.

Life , Way , Study , Science

“Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of 'entitlements', which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006) American diplomat and Presidential advisor

Legitimacy and Force (1988), 130.
Jeane Kirkpatrick talking about a report of the Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which she termed "a letter to Santa Claus." as in A Human Rights Approach to Food and Nutrition Policies and Programmes by Peter L. Pellett http://www.unsystem.org/SCN/archives/scnnews18/ch06.htm, who quotes The Hypocrisy Of It All by Noam Chomsky (1999) http://www.middleeast.org/archives/1999_01_25.htm

Nature

“In America a woman loses her independence for ever in the bonds of matrimony. While there is less constraint on girls there than anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations. For the former, her father's house is a home of freedom and pleasure; for the latter, her husband's is almost a cloister.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book Three, Chapter X.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book Three

Pleasure , Home , Girl , Freedom

“These differences in moral vision and map-making bred, In turn, conflicting institutional needs and social policies, within the constraints of an under-developed economy and society in terms of Western standards. Though both were ‘backward-looking’, the hierarchical and theocratic Byzantine ideal with its cultural affinity to Orthodox Tsarism, lent itself to a rural and patriarchal society whose political institutions would be subordinated to the religious controls of the clergy and their supporters among the notables; their suspicions of the West would be compensated by the eastward drive inherent in the Megali Idea and its dream of a restored Byzantine empire in Anatolia and the Aegean. Whereas the Hellenic vision”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1987), p. 203.

Dreams , Idea , Support

“Legitimacy constraints also emanate from the environment. Any legitimacy an organization has been able to generate constitutes an asset in manipulating the environment. To the extent that adaptation (e. g., eliminating undergraduate instruction in public universities) violates the legitimacy claims, it incurs considerable costs. So external legitimacy considerations also tend to limit adaptation.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 932

Universe

“Ever wish you could draw a few diagrams, press a button, and have a working software system that meets your needs? Sound like magic? Perhaps, but that’s a major part of the Executable UML vision. The basic idea is that you will use a CASE tool to develop detailed UML diagrams and then supplement them by specifications written in a formal language, presumably the OMG’s Object Constraint Language (OCL). The basic idea behind Executable UML is that systems can be modeled at a higher level of abstraction than source code, simulated to support validation of your efforts, and then translated into efficient code. This higher-level of abstraction should help to avoid premature design, enable you to change your system as your requirements evolve, and to delay implementation decisions until the last minute.”

Scott W. Ambler (1966) Canadian software engineer/consultant/author

Source: Agile Modeling: Effective Practices for eXtreme Programming and the Unified Process (2002), p. 172

Idea , Support , Decision , Effort

“… I believe I have come to adopt a cybernetic way of thinking… I became aware of this in the many conversations with students who were worrying about their future and asked for advice. I heard myself telling them that it was far more important to know what one did not want to do, than to have detailed plans of what one did want to do. One day it dawned on me that this was plain cybernetic advice; It is more useful to specify constraints rather than goals. - And then I explained it by adding that in one’s teens or twenties one usually has already discovered a number of things that one cannot stand, whereas it is quite impossible to foresee what, ten or twenty years later, will provide the satisfactions needed to maintain one’s equilibrium.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Glasersfeld (1992, p. 25) cited in: Stuart Umpleby (2007) "Cybernetics: Definitions and Descriptions". In: A Larry Richards Reader 1997–2007. http://polyproject.wikispaces.com/file/view/Larry+Richards+Reader+6+08.pdf. Larry Richards eds.

Way , Thinking , Future

“Liberalism is the philosophy of the individual. Its ethic is liberty and its characteristic is autonomy — the freedom of the will from external constraint. It says "I shall…".
Socialism is the philosophy of the state. Its ethic is equality and its characteristic is coercion — the power, in the last resort, to exert force over individuals and groups. It says "you must…".
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority”

Danny Kruger (1974) British politician and Conservative MP

the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says "we should…".
"Triangulation", p. 13
On Fraternity : Politics Beyond Liberty & Equality (2007)

Family , Communication , Freedom

“Incredibly, at this critical juncture in financial history, after which so much changed so quickly, the only constraint in the subprime mortgage market was a shortage of people willing to bet against it.”

Michael Lewis book The Big Short

Source: The Big Short (2010), Chapter Three, " How Can A Guy Who Can't Speak English Lie?", p. 80

People , History , Change

“The thought of being under absolute compulsion, the plaything of another, is unendurable for a human being. Hence, if every way of escape from the constraint is taken from him, there is nothing left for him to do but to persuade himself that he does the things he is forced to do willingly, that is to say, to substitute devotion for obedience. … It is by this twist that slavery debases the soul: this devotion is in fact based on a lie, since the reasons for it cannot bear investigation. … Moreover, the master is deceived too by the fallacy of devotion.”

Simone Weil book Gravity and Grace

Source: Gravity and Grace (1947), p. 142 (1972 edition)

Lie , Way , Soul

“[T]he whole time I was having this conversation, I was mildy enjoying it, but it bothered me how little substance there was. I always feel this during movie and music conversations, that it's entirely constrainted to just naming things…Perhaps the greatest pain of it is how shallow it is compared to the actual experience.”

Why the lucky stiff American computer programmer

Collected PDFs (2013)

Pain , Music , Feeling , Time

“What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive interaction rituals, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense. Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into property appropriated under the sanction of social groups.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), pp. 28-29

Life , People , World , Way

“Rules of simultaneous ensemble constraint can't be assumed a priori to be the kinds of rules or rest on the same foundations as rules for constraint on succession. They may well be similar, but they may well not be similar also. It seems to me that ensemble constraints must first be understood in their own terms, within musical cultures individually and comparitively, looking to what appear to be basic principles in each in light of the others, I would call such a study "comparative counterpoint.”

Harold Powers (1928–2007) American academic

Harold Powers, "Language Models and Musical Analysis", p.39.

Music , Study , Light , Appearance

“In his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty, Buchanan returned to the study of constitutions, but now approached them with a somewhat more cynical (realistic?) Hobbesian perspective. His later books with Geoffrey Brennan (1980,1985) also emphasized the importance of constitutional rules as constraints on the selfish pursuits of individual actors, and as means for controlling that public sector beast—Leviathan. This concern with constitutional decision making and constitutional rules can be regarded as one of the salient characteristics of James Buchanan’s research throughout his career.”

Dennis Mueller (1940) American economist

James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and The Calculus (2012)

Books , Decision , Study , Selfishness

“There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind…knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next—that restricts our world’s path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible…”

Neal Stephenson book Anathem

Orolo and Erasmas, Part 4, "Anathem"
Anathem (2008)

World , Way , Freedom

“For the struggle with the world, ordinary men and women have the spark of the divine. They are embodied spirit, unresigned to belittling circumstance. They can ascend, whether or not with the help of divine grace …. It is not just that the lowly are equal to the lordly and that the vulgar forms of sensibility are as revealing as the hieratic or canonical ones. It is that the lowly and the vulgar are higher. They are higher because they are freer from the posturing and vigilance—over himself and others—that prevent each of us from coming closer to what Shakespeare called the thing itself: unaccommodated man. The more orphaned ordinary men and women are by the established powers of the world, the more reason they have to find the divine within themselves and to struggle against the constraints that established arrangements impose on their rise to a larger life and a higher state of being.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 135

Life , Women , Men , World

“What we have now come to regard as typical of Middle Eastern regimes is not typical of the past. The regime of Saddam Hussein, the regime of Hafiz al Assad, this kind of government, this kind of society, has no roots either in the Arab or in the Islamic past. It is due and let me be quite specific and explicit it is due to an importation from Europe, which comes in two phases.
Phase one, the 19th century, when they are becoming aware of their falling behind the modern world and need desperately to catch up, so they adopt all kinds of European devices with the best of intentions, which nevertheless have two harmful effects. One, they enormously strengthen the power of the state by placing in the hands of the ruler, weaponry and communication undreamt of in earlier times, so that even the smallest petty tyrant has greater powers over his people than Harun al-Rashid or Suleyman the Magnificent, or any of the legendary rulers of the past.
Second, even more deadly, in the traditional society there were many, many limits on the autocracy, the ruler. The whole Islamic political tradition is strongly against despotism. Traditional Islamic government is authoritarian, yes, but it is not despotic. On the contrary, there is a quite explicit rejection of despotism. And this wasn't just in theory; it was in practice too because in Islamic society, there were all sorts of established orders in society that acted as a restraining factor. The bazaar merchants, the craft guilds, the country gentry and the scribes, all of these were well organized groups who produced their own leaders from within the group. They were not appointed or dismissed by the governments. And they did operate effectively as a constraint.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, Islam and the West: A Conversation with Bernard Lewis (2006)

People , World , Communication , Time

“…to replace, as far as possible, works in the concrete conditions wherein they were written, spiritual conditions in part, that is to say, philosophical, rhetorical or poetic tradition, material conditions in part, that is to say, scholarly and social milieu, constraints stemming from the material support of writing, historical circumstances. Every work must be replaced in the praxis from which it emanates.”

Pierre Hadot (1922–2010) French historian and philosopher

...replacer, autant que possible, les œuvres dans les conditions concrètes où elles ont été écrites, conditions spirituelles d’une part, c’est-à-dire tradition philosophique, rhétorique ou poétique, conditions matérielles d’autre part, c’est-à-dire milieu scolaire et social, contraintes venues du support matériel de l’écriture, circonstances historiques. Toute œuvre doit être replacée dans la praxis dont elle émane.
La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001)

Support , Parting

“The single idea that resounds on every page of this book is the idea of the infinity of the human spirit, in the individual as well as in humanity. It is a view of the wonderful and terrible disproportion of that spirit to everything that would contain and diminish it, of its awakening to its own nature through its confrontation with the reality of constraint and the prospect of death, of its terror before the indifference and vastness of the nature around it, of its discovery that what it most shares with the whole of the universe is its ruination by time, of its subsequent recognition that time is the core of reality if anything is, of its enslavement to orders of society and culture that belittle it, of its need to create a world, a human world, in which it can be and become itself even if to do so it must nevertheless rebel against every dogma, every custom, and every empire, and of its power to realize this seemingly impossible and paradoxical program by identifying, in each intellectual and political situation, the next steps.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 26-7

Death , Books , World , Idea

“Granting this premise, the anarchist position appeared logical to me, as it did to Prince Kropotkin and Bakunin. Putting it roughly, if all men are human, if all bipeds classifiable as homo sapiens are human beings, social harmony and a general progress in civilization will be far better brought about by methods of free agreement and voluntary association than by constraint, whether directly under force, or under the menace of force which is always implicit in obedience to law.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

A Little Conserva-tive (1936)

Men , Law , Appearance

“According to the resource dependence perspective, firms do not merely respond to external constraint and control through compliance to environmental demands. Rather, a variety of strategies may be undertaken to somehow alter the situation confronting the organization to make compliance less necessary.”

Jeffrey Pfeffer (1946) American academic

Source: Organizations and organization theory, 1982, p. 197

Dependency

“In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distributions, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.”

Chris Anderson book The Long Tail

Source: The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (2006), Ch. 4, p. 52

“What is lost when the private realm is abolished are many of the attributes typically associated with quality of life. Most people have experienced how privacy enables liberation from constraint. And we’ve all, conversely, had the experience of engaging in private behavior when we thought we were alone – dancing, confessing, exploring sexual expression, sharing untested ideas – only to feel shame at having been seen by others.”

Glenn Greenwald book No Place to Hide

Penguin Books 2015 edition, pages 173-174.
No Place to Hide (2014)

Life , People , Behavior , Feeling

“… Hence, Paul Morand's generalization to the effect that French writers are never younger, never more free from constraint, than when they have passed their sixtieth birthday. By that time they have broken free from the romantic agonies of youth and turned their backs on that pursuit of honors which, in a country where literature plays a social role, absorbs too much of their energies during the years of maturity.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

The Art of Writing

Youth , Literature , Birthday , Time

“Of course there is much criticism of the court by this group or that, depending on the court's decisions in various highly publicized cases. Some of the criticism is profoundly uninformed and unhelpful. And all too often, uncivil second-guessing is not encumbered by the constraints of facts, logic or reasoned analysis.”

Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

1990s, I Am a Man, a Black Man, an American (1998)

Decision , Dependency

“He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Celui qui ignore à quel point la fortune variable et la nécessité tiennent toute âme humaine sous leur dépendance ne peut pas regarder comme des semblables ni aimer comme soi-même ceux que le hasard a séparés de lui par un abîme. La diversité des contraintes qui pèsent sur les hommes fait naître l'illusion qu'il y a parmi eux des espèces distinctes qui ne peuvent communiquer.
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 192

Love , Communication , Chance

“The system of constraints that governs the projections and transformations of… bodies in space must long ago have become internalized as a powerful, though largely unconscious, part of our perceptual machinery.”

Roger Shepard (1929) American psychologist

R.N. Shepard (1978). "The mental image." American Psychologist 33, 125-137. Shepard, 1978, p. 136.

Parting

“In a nutshell, Blue Ocean Strategy proposes that strategy can shape industry structure, whereas competitive strategy sees strategy as choosing the right position under given structural constraints. The field of strategy has been long dominated by a structuralist view; in other words, the idea that the industry’s structure is fixed. Strategy, as commonly practiced, tees off with industry analysis and is conventionally about matching a company’s strengths and weaknesses to the opportunities and threats present in the existing industry. Here, strategy becomes a zero-sum game where one company’s gain is another company’s loss, as firms are bound by existing market space.”

W. Chan Kim (1951) South Korean economist

"Interview with W.Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne," in: Blue Ocean Strategy http://centres.insead.edu/blue-ocean-strategy/documents/e-ibosi2015.pdf, INSEAD document, 2015.

Game , Idea , Loss

“Marx imagined the end of scarcity would bring the end of history. He could not bring himself to see that a world without scarcity had already been achieved - in the prehistoric societies that he and Engels lumped together as 'primitive communism'. Hunter-gatherers were less burdened by labour than the majority of mankind at any later stage, but their sparse communities were completely dependent on the Earth's bounty. Natural catastrophe could wipe them out at any time. Marx could not accept the constraint that was the price of the hunter-gatherers' freedom. Instead, animated by the faith that humans are destined to master the Earth, he insisted that freedom from labour could be achieved without any restraints on their desires. This was only the Brethren of the Free Spirit's apocalyptic fantasy returning as an Enlightenment utopia.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: Twentieth-century anti-capitalists, THE Phalanstery and The Medieval Brethren of The Spirit (p. 167-8)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Faith , Imagination , History

“Iconography becomes even more revealing when processes or concepts, rather than objects, must be depicted—for the constraint of a definite “thing” cedes directly to the imagination. How can we draw “evolution” or “social organization,” not to mention the more mundane “digestion” or “self-interest,” without portraying more of a mental structure than a physical reality? If we wish to trace the history of ideas, iconography becomes a candid camera trained upon the scholar's mind.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"A Tale of Three Pictures", p. 428
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Imagination , History , Idea , Reality

“One way to clarify the origin and character, if not the justification, of the ideal inspiring our programmatic institutional ideas is to say that our program arises from the generalization of aims broadly shared by the great secular doctrines of emancipation of the recent past—both liberal and socialist—and by the social theories that supported them. At the heart of each of these doctrines lay the belief that the weakening of social divisions and hierarchies would reveal deeper commonalities and liberate productive and creative powers. The theoretical and practical consequences of this belief were drastically constricted by dogmatic assumptions about the possible forms of social change and their possible institutional expressions. We have attacked the second set of constraints and therefore, by implication, the first. The result is a more generalized or radicalized version of the social ideal. Our attack on these constraints has led us to rethink the content of the progressive cause.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: The Critical Legal Studies Movementː Another Time, A Greater Task (2015), p. 104-5

Way , Idea , Support , Change

“Suppose the reasoning centers of the brain can get their hands on the mechanisms that plop shapes into the array and that read their locations out of it. Those reasoning demons can exploit the geometry of the array as a surrogate for keeping certain logical constraints in mind. Wealth, like location on a line, is transitive: if A is richer than B, and B is richer than C, then A is richer than C. By using location in an image to symbolize wealth, the thinker takes advantage of the transitivity of location built into the array, and does not have to enter it into a chain of deductive steps. The problem becomes a matter of plop down and look up. It is a fine example of how the form of a mental representation determines what is easy or hard to think.”

Steven Pinker book How the Mind Works

Source: How the Mind Works (1997), p. 291

Problem , Thinking , Reading , Wealth

“Before attempting to determine the effect of institutions, it is necessary to consider the inherent circumstances, constraints, and impelling forces at work in the environment within which the institutional mechanisms function.”

Thomas Sowell (1930) American economist, social theorist, political philosopher and author

Source: 1980s–1990s, Knowledge and Decisions (1980; 1996), Ch. 2 : Decision-Making Processes

“Jefferson Davis is categorical in pronouncing four million Americans, and all their descendants for all future time, to be "the degenerate sons of Ham", fit only to be slaves. This implies that Negroes were descended from the Canaanites. But the Canaanites were not black! Neither were the great majority of the many millions of slaves in the ancient world. We mention these facts as conclusively refuting Davis' thesis, even if there is someone not under legal constraint who is inclined to accept the lunatic notion that anyone today can be justly enslaved because of the episode described in the ninth chapter of Genesis.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, Defending the Cause of Human Freedom (1994)

World , Time , Future

“Managers construct, rearrange, single out, and demolish many “objective” features of their surroundings. When people act they unrandomize variables, insert vestiges of orderliness, and literally create their own constraints.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1970s, Social Psychology of Organizing, (1979), p. 243 ; As cited in: Dr. Adrian McLean (2013), Leaderhip and Cultural Webs in Organisations: Weavers' Tales. p. 213

People

“Happiness flourishes where there is happiness, and love withers quickly in an atmosphere of constraint and gloom.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love , Happiness

“If an organization is to learn anything, then the distribution of its memory, the accuracy of that memory, and the conditions under which that memory is treated as a constraint become crucial characteristics of organizing.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl E. Weick (1979; 206), cited in: James P. Walsh and Gerardo Rivera Ungson. "Organizational memory." Academy of management review 16.1 (1991): 57-91.
1970s

Learning , Memory

“The original idea [for Destroy All Monsters! ] was to show all of the monsters. We then started thinking about undersea farming. Eventually, we came up with the idea of an island on which all of the monsters had been collected for scientific study. You see, we imagined that undersea farming would be required to feed all of the monsters. I very much wanted to explore that idea, but because of financial constraints, I was not allowed to do so. Only the idea of an island of monsters survived.”

Ishirō Honda (1911–1993) Japanese film director

As quoted by David Milner, "Ishiro Honda Interview" http://www.davmil.org/www.kaijuconversations.com/honda.htm, Kaiju Conversations (December 1992)

Imagination , Idea , Thinking , Study

“Stirner’s political praxis is quixotic. It accepts the established hierarchies of constraint as given. … Not liable to any radical change, they constitute part of the theatre housing the individual’s action. … The egoist uses the elements of the social structure as props in his self-expressive act.”

John Carroll (1944) Australian professor and author

Source: Break-Out from the Crystal Palace (1974), p. 85

Change , Parting , Housing

“A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.”

Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) French sociologist (1858-1917)

Source: Rules of Sociological Method, 1895, p. 10

Way , Exercises , Time

“To sum up all these steps, each of which is very lengthy and complex, we will have put the game of truth back in the network of constraints and dominations. Truth, I should say rather, the system of truth and falsity, will have revealed the face it turned away from us for so long and which is that of its violence.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Source: Lectures on the Will to Know (1970), p. 4

Truth , Game

“Well, I've grown up on the tennis circuit which has friendships with people from diverse religions, races, backgrounds and scores of different countries across the globe. I think this experience broadened my horizons. I can comfortably embrace relationships on a personal level while looking beyond narrow constraints.”

Sania Mirza (1986) Indian tennis player

Source: Arun Sharma "Sachin's my inspiration - he's also excellent at tennis: Sania Mirza"

Friendship , People , Religion , Thinking

“The more sectors in which the organization subject to rationality norms is constrained; the more power the organization will seek over remaining sectors of its task environment… many constraints and unable to achieve power in other sectors of its task environment will seek to enlarge the task environment.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Source: Organizations in Action, 1967, p. 36-37; As cited in: Christopher A. Simon (2001). To Run a School: Administrative Organization and Learning, p. 40

“In our advance to a greater life, we confront an initial obstacle. Unless we remove or overcome this obstacle, we can rise no further. We spend our time in a daze of diminished existence, neither awake nor asleep. We resign ourselves to compromise and routine, seeing the world through the categories of the prevailing culture or the methods of established ways of thinking. We reconcile ourselves to the mutilation of our experience that we begin to accept when we entered on a particular course of life. We allow ourselves to be subdued by the carapace of diminished experience that formed around is, as we grew older. For the vast majority of men and women, overwhelming economic necessity and drudgery overwhelm and disguise a stupefaction that would otherwise be apparent. For the increasing number of people who, with the material progress of society, are released from grinding material constraint, there is no disguise. In this way, we cease to live as embodied spirit: as the context-bound but context-resisting agents that we really are. That which is most precious—life itself—we give away in return for nothing. We belittle ourselves, wrongly mistaking our belittlement for a fate as inescapable as our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger The Religion of the Future

Source: The Religion of the Future (2014), p. 356

Life , Women , Men , Fate

“I think there is an incredible crisis now of how we train performers. Their training encourages them to behave as though they are back in the 19th century, and they are not allowed to get out of that box very much. 'If they play a tiny bit of contemporary music, it's looked on as a bit eccentric, and it's sort of tolerated instead of absolutely encouraged. And they certainly can't improvise, and they find it difficult to encounter jazz or jazz styles. 'I think they're all waking up to this, and it's very difficult for them, because the training and the value systems that get put on them go against what we all know to be the real world. Musicians do want to break out of these constraints. It's slightly boring to just play the same cycle of pieces over and over again.”

Joanna MacGregor (1959) British musician

Denver Post, 18/02/2005
On Classical Music

World , Music , Thinking , Training

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Diﬀerent productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for diﬀerent types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?
This question interested me, but nevertheless appeared to be quite particular and elementary, so I did not begin to study it by giving up everything else. I put this question for discussion at a meeting of the mathematics department, where there were such great specialists as Gyunter, Smirnov himself, Kuz’min, and Tartakovskii. Everyone listened but no one proposed a solution; they had already turned to someone earlier in individual order, apparently to Kuz’min. However, this question nevertheless kept me in suspense. This was the year of my marriage, so I was also distracted by this. In the summer or after the vacation concrete, to some extent similar, economic, engineering, and managerial situations started to come into my head, that also required the solving of a maximization problem in the presence of a series of linear constraints.
In the simplest case of one or two variables such problems are easily solved—by going through all the possible extreme points and choosing the best. But, let us say in the veneer trust problem for ﬁve machines and eight types of materials such a search would already have required solving about a billion systems of linear equations and it was evident that this was not a realistic method. I constructed particular devices and was probably the ﬁrst to report on this problem in 1938 at the October scientiﬁc session of the Herzen Institute, where in the main a number of problems were posed with some ideas for their solution.
The universality of this class of problems, in conjunction with their difficulty, made me study them seriously and bring in my mathematical knowledge, in particular, some ideas from functional analysis.
What became clear was both the solubility of these problems and the fact that they were widespread, so representatives of industry were invited to a discussion of my report at the university.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 39; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 15-26

Marriage , Search , Mathematics , Idea

“A key characteristic of the engineering culture is that the individual engineer’s commitment is to technical challenge rather than to a given company. There is no intrinsic loyalty to an employer as such. An employer is good only for providing the sandbox in which to play. If there is no challenge or if resources fail to be provided, the engineer will seek employment elsewhere. In the engineering culture, people, organization, and bureaucracy are constraints to be overcome. In the ideal organization everything is automated so that people cannot screw it up. There is a joke that says it all. A plant is being managed by one man and one dog. It is the job of the man to feed the dog, and it is the job of the dog to keep the man from touching the equipment. Or, as two Boeing engineers were overheard to say during a landing at Seattle, “What a waste it is to have those people in the cockpit when the plane could land itself perfectly well.” Just as there is no loyalty to an employer, there is no loyalty to the customer. As we will see later, if trade-offs had to be made between building the next generation of “fun” computers and meeting the needs of “dumb” customers who wanted turnkey products, the engineers at DEC always opted for technological advancement and paid attention only to those customers who provided a technical challenge.”

Edgar H. Schein (1928) Psychologist

Edgar H. Schein (2010). Dec Is Dead, Long Live Dec: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equiment Corporation. p. 60

People , Dogs , Loyalty

“We consider an organization to be a set of constraints on the activities performed by agents. This view follows that of Weber, who views the process of bureaucratization as a shift from management based on self-interest and personalities to one based on rules and procedures.
Mintzberg [1983] provides an early (and informal) analysis of organization structure distinguishing among ﬁve basic parts of an organization and ﬁve distinct organization conﬁgurations that are encountered in practice. This “ontology” includes several mechanisms that together achieve coordination, like goals, work processes, authority, positions and communication. The various parts of an organization are distinguished by the speciﬁc roles they play in achieving coordination with the above means.
The “language/action perspective” (Winograd 1987) on cooperative work in organizations provides an ontology that emphasizes the social activity by which “agents” generate the space of cooperative actions in which they work, rather than the mental state of individuals. The basic idea is that social activity is carried out by language and communication.”

Mark S. Fox (1952) Canadian computer scientist and Professor of Industrial Engineering

Source: An Organization Ontology for Enterprise Modelling (1997), p. 2-3

Communication , Idea , Parting , Personality

“I used to be a person who wanted to believe that there were moral and democratic limits – or, failing that, pragmatic constraints - to how low the prime minister was willing to go, how far he was willing to bend to the proud proponents of apartheid, in order to bolster his power. Not any more. Not after Danny Danon.”

Bradley Burston israeli journalist

It's Time to Admit It. Israeli Policy Is What It Is: Apartheid (2015)

Personality

“The rights of individuals to the use of resources (i. e., property rights) in any society are to be construed as supported by the force of etiquette, social custom, ostracism, and formal legally enacted laws supported by the states' power of violence of punishment. Many of the constraints on the use of what we call private property involve the force of etiquette and social ostracism. The level of noise, the kind of clothes we wear, our intrusion on other people's privacy are restricted not merely by laws backed by police force, but by social acceptance, reciprocity, and voluntary social ostracism for violators of accepted codes of conduct.”

Armen Alchian (1914–2013) American economist

Source: Economic Forces at Work, 1977, p. 129-130 ; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 34)

People , Law , Support , Clothes

“If one could be perfectly certain that everybody always stays within his budget constraint, everybody could be allowed to obtain goods without a specific quid pro quo.”

Jürg Niehans (1919–2007) Swiss economist

Source: The theory of money, 1978, p. 63

“When Bonner writes that “natural selection for optimal feeding is then presumed to be the cause of non-motility in all forms,” I can't help suspecting that some plants might do even better if they could walk from shade to sun—but the inherited constraints of design never permitted a trial of this intriguing option.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"The Ghost of Protagoras", p. 67
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

Optimism , Nature , Sun , Help

“Work is not a constraint. Man's activity provides his true fulfilment. True fulfilment however, can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave.”

Elfriede Jelinek book Wonderful, Wonderful Times

73
Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1990)

“This monograph is about the current status of the faculty psychology program; not so much its evidential status (which I take to be, for the most part, an open question ) as what the program is and where it does, and doesn't, seem natural to try to apply it. Specifically I want to do the following things: (1) distinguish the general claim that there are psychological faculties from a particular version of that claim, which I shall call the modularity thesis; (2) enumerate some of the properties that modular cognitive systems are likely to exhibit in virtue of their modularity; and (3) consider whether it is possible to formulate any plausible hypothesis about which mental processes are likely to be the modular ones. Toward the end of the discussion, I'll also try to do something by way of (4) disentangling the faculty jmodularity issues from what I'll call the thesis of Epistemic Boundedness: the idea that there are endogenously determined constraints on the kinds of problems that human beings can solve, hence on the kinds of things that we can know.”

Jerry Fodor (1935–2017) American philosopher

Source: Modularity of Mind (1983), p. 1-2

Way , Idea , Question , Nature

“I mean by pacifism, not the love of peace as a good to be secured by a definite form of action, but the belief that any form of social constraint of others or any violent action is in itself wrong, and that violence such as war must be passively resisted because to use violence to end violence would be logically self-contradictory. I oppose pacifism in this sense to the Communist belief that the only way to secure peace is by a revolutionary change in the social system, and that ruling classes resist revolution violently and must therefore be overthrown by force.”

Christopher Caudwell (1907–1937) British Marxist literary critic, journalist and writer

Studies in a Dying Culture (1938), Pacifism and Violence: A Study in Bourgeois Ethics

Love , War , Peace , Way

“Our last call in Zagreb before returning to Washington was on U. N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali's senior representative in the former Yugoslavia, Yasushi Akashi, whom I had known since my two visits to Cambodia in 1992. Akashi had been harshly treated by the press and castigated by critics of the U. N. for his weakness. But it was entirely not his fault: he was operating under tight constraints imposed by Boutros-Ghali. Furthermore, Akashi was virtually ignored by General Janvier and the U. N. military. (…) He was leaving Zagreb with his previously distinguished records blemished, but his mission had been doomed from the start beacuse of limits imposed from New York. The United States was delighted with his replacement: Kofi Annan (…), the U. N. official in whom we had the greatest confidence, and his arrival was good news.”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 200

Confidence

“Exercise is the technique by which one imposes on the body tasks that are both repetitive and different, but always graduated. By bending behavior towards a terminal state, exercise makes possible a perpetual characterization of the individual…It thus assures, in the form of continuity and constraint, a growth, an observation, a qualification.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Behavior , Exercises

“Formulating consists of determining the system inputs, outputs, requirements, objectives, constraints. Structuring the system provides one or more methods of organizing the solution, the method of operation, the selection of parts, and the nature of their performance requirements. It is evident that the processes of formulating a system and structuring it are strongly related.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70

Nature , Parting

“I hope that you will have learned from the pain and suffering which you have endured in the past few decades, and have realized how to cherish the blessings of liberty. You will therefore know that freedom does not mean that the people should be licentious and behave in an arbitrary fashion, but that it also involves certain limits, since if there are no constraints no one will be free, and the strong will enslave the weak.”

Mohammad Ali Foroughi (1877–1942) Iranian politician

Radio broadcast (October 1941)

Pain , People , Hope , Fashion

“Heteroecy appears to be a consequence of the seasonal polymorphism of aphids, which causes some morphs (the fundatrices) to be more evolutionarily constrained than others (the summer females) in their abilities to acquire hosts. Some aphid lineages have escaped this constraint by replacing the ancestral fundatrix morph and remaining all year on former secondary hosts, thus becoming secondarily autoecious. Most of the large and species-rich groups of Aphidinae on herbaceous angiosperms probably are derived from ancestors showing such life-cycle reduction.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[The Evolution of Host-Plant Alternation in Aphids: Evidence for Specialization as a Dead End, The American Naturalist, 132, 5, November 1988, 681–706, 10.1086/284882]

Life , Appearance , Summer , Season

“A free society is a community of free beings, bound by the laws of sympathy and by the obligations of family love. It is not a society of people released from all moral constraint–for that is precisely the opposite of a society. Without moral constraint there can be no cooperation, no family commitment, no long-term prospects, no hope of economic, let alone social, order.”

Roger Scruton (1944–2020) English philosopher

"The Limits of Liberty," http://spectator.org/42528_back-basics/ The American Spectator (December 2008).

Love , People , Family , Law

“If one of two lovers is loyal, and the other jealous and false, how may their friendship last, for Love is slain! But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth. For what the lover would, that would the beloved; what she would ask of him that should he go before to grant. Without accord such as this, love is but a bond and a constraint. For above all things Love means sweetness, and truth, and measure.”

Marie de France medieval poet

Se l'uns des amans est loiax,
E li autre est jalox è faus,
Si est amors entr'ex fausée,
Ne puet avoir lunge durée.
Amors n'a soing de compagnun,
Boin amors n'est se de Dex nun,
De cors en cors, de cuer en cuer,
Autrement n'est prex à nul fuer.
Tulles qui parla d'amistié,
Dist assés bien en son ditié,
Que vent amis, ce veut l'amie
Dunt est boine la compaignie,
S'ele le veut è il l'otreit.
Dunt la druerie est à dreit,
Puisque li uns l'autre desdit,
N'i a d'amors fors c'un despit;
Assés puet-um amors trover,
Mais sens estuet al' bien garder,
Douçour è francise è mesure.
"Graelent", line 85; pp. 149-50.
Misattributed

Love , Friendship , Truth , Lovers

“The industrial animal factory offers a nightmarish glimpse of what capitalism is capable of in the absence of any moral or regulatory constraint whatsoever.”

Michael Pollan book The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), p. 318.

Animals

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

“I am working with Unite in Salford to set up the Bank of Salford. It is going well. They have consolidated the credit unions, put money in, the city council will put their pay roll through it to stabilise the asset, the government are supporting it with advice and lowering entry requirements to become a bank that can lend to businesses as well as families. It will be bounded within Salford, there will be local residents on the board as well as institutions, but Unite cannot do it on their own. There needs to be a partnership between the Church and labour that can put some constraint on capital without relying on the state. Relational accountability and democratic governance are key to this. That is how the old bones will walk again, by renewing a commitment to the common good in action. It’s a great thing to do.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Blue Labour, Tackling Poverty Together http://www.bluelabour.org/2013/11/24/tackling-poverty-together/

Money , Family , Business , Support

“If any real efforts are to be made to free Black people of the constraints and conditions that characterize racial subordination, then theories and strategies purporting to reflect the Black community’s needs must include an analysis of sexism and patriarchy. Similarly, feminism must include an analysis of race if it hopes to express the aspirations of non-white women. Neither Black liberationist politics nor feminist theory can ignore the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents. In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender). The praxis of both should be centered on the life chances and life situations of people who should be cared about without regard to the source of their difficulties.”

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw book Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex

Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989)

Life , Women , People , Hope

“My first serious programming work was done in the very early 1960s, in Assembler languages on IBM and Honeywell machines. Although I was a careful designer — drawing meticulous flowcharts before coding — and a conscientious tester, I realised that program design was hard and the results likely to be erroneous. Into the Honeywell programs, which formed a little system for an extremely complex payroll, I wrote some assertions, with run-time tests that halted program execution during production runs. Time constraints didn't allow restarting a run from the beginning of the tape. So for the first few weeks I had the frightening task on several payroll runs of repairing an erroneous program at the operator’s keyboard ¾ correcting an error in the suspended program text, adjusting the local state of the program, and sometimes modifying the current and previous tape records before resuming execution. On the Honeywell 400, all this could be done directly from the console typewriter. After several weeks without halts, there seemed to be no more errors. Before leaving the organisation, I replaced the run-time halts by brief diagnostic messages: not because I was sure all the errors had been found, but simply because there would be no-one to handle a halt if one occurred. An uncorrected error might be repaired by clerical adjustments; a halt in a production run would certainly be disastrous.”

Michael A. Jackson (1936) British computer scientist

Michael A. Jackson (2000), "The Origins of JSP and JSD: a Personal Recollection", in: IEEE Annals of Software Engineering, Volume 22 Number 2, pages 61-63, 66, April-June 2000.

Error , Time , Drawing

“In general, we can say that the larger the system becomes, the more the parts interact, the more difficult it is to understand environmental constraints, the more obscure becomes the problem of what resources should be made available, and deepest of all, the more difficult becomes the problem of the legitimate values of the system.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 77; cited in John Gall (1978) Systemantics; how systems work... and especially how they fail

Understanding , Problem , Parting

“The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evolved from folkways of prehistoric origin.The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is superimposed.Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest.”

M. King Hubbert (1903–1989) American geoscientist

"Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture." Summary, by M. King Hubbert, of a seminar he taught at MIT Energy Laboratory, 30 September 1981, recovered from http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/monetary.htm

World , Exercises , Knowledge , Universe