Quotes about environment (1199 quotes, page 10)

“Capitalist development requires, as a precondition, that the state foster a general sociopolitical and legal framework conducive to market relationships. An environment of security of property and predictability is basic to encourage investment; in turn, this requires political stability and a minimum degree of social harmony.”

Richard Sandbrook (1946–2005) environmentalist

Source: The State and Economic Stagnation in Tropical Africa, p. 320

“Social organizations are flagrantly open systems in that the input of energies and the conversion of output into further energy input consists of transactions between the organization and its environment.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 16-17

“Lewontin, Richard (2000). The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment. Cambridge (MA). Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-00159-1”

Mort Sahl (1927–2021) American comedian and actor

Sources

Universe

“When I visited Costa Rica earlier this year, I saw how a country can develop successfully without an army, to become a stable democracy committed to peace and the protection of the natural environment. This confirmed my belief that my vision of Tibet in the future is a realistic plan, not merely a dream.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

Nobel lecture (1989)

Peace , Dreams , Democracy , Nature

“Man's characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience superior to his own, the superiority of which he feels. Because the greater, better part of his existence transcends the body, he escapes the body's yoke, but is subject to that of society.”

Émile Durkheim book Suicide

Suicide (1897)

Feeling , Parting

“Usability is not often thought of as a criterion during the purchasing process. Moreover, unless you actually test a number of units in a realistic environment doing typical tasks, you are not likely to notice the ease or difficulty of use. […] Do it right there in the store. Do not be afraid to make mistakes or ask stupid questions. Remember, any problems you have are probably the design's fault, not yours.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 3, p. 78.

Stupidity , Question , Problem

“Evolution in… cases has clearly been a very slow and almost (if not quite) continuous process, exactly as Darwin had predicted.
We must remember, however, that the organisms studied in this way are far from representative. They are in general the most successful members of animal associations living in very constant marine or lacustrine environments. We have not got similar data for land species… Nor do we possess them for the rarer forms. We shall see… that perhaps dominant species in a uniform environment are the least likely to undergo sudden change to a new type.”

J. B. S. Haldane book The Causes of Evolution

Introduction, p. 22.
The Causes of Evolution (1932)

Way , Study , Change , Success

“Absolute faith is not the place of self-affirmation, but the place of self-negation. Life of faith is not limited to our spiritual life. What is important is how our spiritual sensitivity is applied to our relative environment.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

The Way of God's Will Chapter 3-2 Life of Faith http://www.unification.org/ucbooks/WofGW/wogw3-02.htm Translated 1980.

Life , Faith

“Stephen Jay Gould is extremely bright, inventive. He thoroughly understands paleontology; he thoroughly understands evolutionary biology. He has performed an enormous service in getting people to think about punctuated equilibrium, because you see the process of stasis/sudden change, which is a puzzle. It's the cessation of change for long periods of time. Since you always have mutations, why don't things continue changing? You either have to say that the particular form is highly adapted, optimal, and exists in a stable environment, or you have to be very puzzled. Steve has been enormously important in that sense. Talking with Steve, or listening to him give a talk, is a bit like playing tennis with someone who's better than you are. It makes you play a better game than you can play. For years, Steve has wanted to find, in effect, what accounts for the order in biology, without having to appeal to selection to explain everything—that is, to the evolutionary "just-so stories." You can come up with some cockamamie account about why anything you look at was formed in evolution because it was useful for something. There is no way of checking such things. We're natural allies, because I'm trying to find sources of that natural order without appealing to selection, and yet we all know that selection is important.”

Stuart Kauffman (1939) American biophysicist

Kauffman in: John Brockman, ed. (1995) The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution, p. 64-65. ( online http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/i-Ch.2.html)

People , Way , Game , Optimism

“Being a physicist, my father was a great believer in progress, but he also loved nature. He was a photographer, and outside of taking the occasional family photographs, all he did was photograph nature. He loved birds. That meant a lot to me growing up. Healthy progress also means we have to be concerned for the environment. That may have something to do with what I believe about farming.”

Dave Matthews (1967) American singer-songwriter, musician and actor

"The Craftsman: Dave Matthews," interview by Dave Hoekstra for Farm Aid

Love , Family , Nature , Bird

“The Management of Innovation (1961) [by Tom Burns and George M. Stalker is]… the first major attempt to deal with the nature of organization-environment relations and identify the types of organizational structure and managerial practices that are appropriate for different environmental condition. Introduced the mechanistic-organic polarity (never a dichotomy) to the management lexicon.”

Daniel A. Wren (1932) American business theorist

Source: "Most influential management books of the 20th Century," 2001, p. 224.

Nature

“The Communist dream of a great new "one world" of the future is based on the belief that a regime of violence and coercion under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat would permit the establishment of a society which would produce a new order of men who would acquire the habit of observing what Lenin called the "simple fundamental rules of every-day social life in common." The fallacy of this hope lies in Communism's perverted interpretation of human behavior. It assumes, on the basis of Dialectical Materialism, that if you change things outside of a man this automatically compels a change on the inside of the man. The inter-relation between environment on the outside and the internal make-up of man is not to be disputed, but environment only conditions man, it does not change his very nature. For example, just as men will always laugh, eat, propagate, gravitate into groups and explore the unknown, so likewise they will always enjoy the pleasure of possessing things (which alone gives pleasure to sharing); they will always possess the desire for individual expression or self-determination, the ambition to improve their circumstances and the motive to excel above others. These qualities are inherent in each generation and cannot be legislated away nor ignored.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Life , Men , Pleasure , World

“The moral relativists ask: what do you mean by should? Here's how you should act: Act in a way so that things are good for you like they would be for someone you're taking care of. But they have to be good for you in a way that's also good for your family, and they have to be good for you and your family also in a way that's good for society (and maybe even good for the broader environment if you can manage that), so it's balanced at all those levels. And it has to be good for you, your family, and society right now, AND next week, AND next month, AND a year from now, AND ten years from now. It's this harmonious balancing of multiple layers of Being simultaneously, and that's a Darwinian reality, I would say. Your brain is actually attuned to tell you when you are doing that. And the way it tells you is that it reveals that what you're doing is meaningful. That's the sign. Your nervous system is adapted to do this. It's adapted to exist on the edge between order and chaos. Chaos is where things are so complex that you can't handle it, and order is where things are so rigid that it's too restrictive. In between that, there's a place. It's a place that's meaningful. It's where you're partly stabilized, and partly curious. You're operating in a manner that increases your scope of knowledge, so you're inquiring and growing, and at the same time you're stabilizing and renewing you, your family, society, nature; now, next week, next month, and next year. When you have an intimation of meaning, then you know you're there.""Lies and deception destroy people's lives. When they start telling the truth and acting it out, things get a lot better.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

People , Truth , Family , Way

“We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they were animals, in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put there ourselves.”

Valentino Braitenberg (1926–2011) Italian-Austrian neuroscientist

p 2
Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984)

Behavior , Nature , Animals

“Now "cybernetics" is the term coined by Wiener to denote "steersmanship" or the science of control. Although current engineering usage restricts it to the study of flows in closed systems, it can be taken in a wider context, as the study of processes interrelating systems with inputs and outputs, and their structural-dynamic structure. It is in this wider sense that "cybernetics" will be used here, to wit, as system-cybernetics, understanding by "system" an ordered whole in relation to its relevant environment”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

hence one actually or potentially open
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 38.

Understanding , Sense , Study , Science

“Clearly, we have compiled a record of serious failures in recent technological encounters with the environment. In each case, the new technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs.”

Barry Commoner (1917–2012) American biologist, college professor and eco-socialist

Quoted from "Frail Reeds in a Harsh World". New York: The American Museum of Natural History. Natural History. Journal of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. LXXVIII No. 2, February, 1969, p. 44.

Failure

“From the physical point of view the characteristic state of the living organism is that of an open system. A system is closed if no material enters or leaves it; it is open if there is import and export and, therefore, change of the components. Living systems are open systems, maintaining themselves in exchange of materials with environment, and in continuous building up and breaking down of their components.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Von Bertalanffy (1950) " The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology http://vhpark.hyperbody.nl/images/a/aa/Bertalanffy-The_Theory_of_Open_Systems_in_Physics_and_Biology.pdf" In: Science, January 13, 1950, Vol. 111. p. 23
1950s

Change

“Man had dominated the Earth by virtue of a single assumption: that an effect could be traced to a cause, itself the effect of a previous cause. Manipulation of this basic law yielded rich results; there seemed no need for any other tool or instrumentality. Man congratulated himself on his generalized structure. He could live on desert, on plain or ice, in forest or in city; Nature had not shaped him to a special environment.
He was unaware of his vulnerability. Logic was the special environment; the brain was the special tool.”

Jack Vance (1916–2013) American mystery and speculative fiction writer

Infinity Science Fiction (July 1957)
Short fiction, The Men Return (1957)

Law , Nature

“Would you send your children into any hostile environment like the moon, a battlefield, or the bottom of the ocean without proper protection? To send them to the bottom of the ocean without properly working equipment like a submarine or scuba gear would be murder. The same would be true about sending them into battle or to the moon without training and protection. Be sure they are properly trained and equipped to handle the errors they are sure to face in the public school system.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: Are you being brainwashed?: Propaganda in science textbooks (2007), p. 27

Hostility , Children , School , Error

“"The environment has to be balanced against the economy." This quote portrays environmental concerns as a luxury, views measures to solve environmental problems as incurring a net cost, and considers leaving environmental problems unsolved to be a money-saving device. This one-liner puts the truth exactly backwards. Environmental messes cost us huge sums of money both in the short run and in the long run; cleaning up or preventing those messes saves us huge sums in the long run, and often in the short run as well. In caring for the health of our surroundings, just as of our bodies, it is cheaper and preferable to avoid getting sick than to try to cure illnesses after they have developed.”

Jared Diamond book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Source: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Chapter "The world as a polder: what does it all mean to us today?", section "One-liner objections" (Penguin Books, 2011, page 503, .

Money , Health , Truth , Quotes

“Power to vary in plants or animals is itself a feature as readily transmissible as is stability of character. The quality of varying to meet varying environments is therefore one of the hereditary traits which the plant breeder must consider, and which may itself be extended or overcome by the processes of crossing and selection.”

Luther Burbank (1849–1926) American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultural science

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 1 Plant Breeding

Animals

“I am disappointed by the president's decision to continue pushing forward on the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that will cost American jobs, harm the environment, increase the cost of prescription drugs and threaten our ability to protect public health. This treaty is opposed by every trade union in the country and virtually the entire grassroots base of the Democratic Party. … Secretary Clinton made her strongest statement to date against this deal. In my view, it is now time for the leadership of the Democratic Party in the Senate and the House to join Secretary Clinton and go on the record in opposition to holding a vote on this job-killing trade deal during the lame-duck session of Congress and beyond. We need to defeat this treaty and fundamentally rewrite our trade policies to create good-paying jobs in this country and throughout the world and end the race to the bottom. I will continue to do everything I can to make sure that the TPP does not get implemented.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Sanders Statement on Push to Pass Pacific Trade Pact http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-push-to-pass-pacific-trade-pact (12 August 2016)
2010s, 2016

Health , World , Disappointment , Decision

“Aesthetic hygiene is necessary for collective societies, for any social group residing together on a large scale. How? By programming environments that obey rigorous aesthetic criteria. Each time the inhabitant walks around in the city, he must bathe in a climate that creates in him a specific feeling of well-being, invoked by the massive presence of aesthetic products in the environment”

Nicolas Schöffer (1912–1992) French sculptor and plastician

Source: Douglas Davis, “Nicolas Schöffer: The Cybernetic Esthetic,” in Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Science, Technology and Art. New York: Praeger, 1973, pages 121–122; cited in: Hervé Vanel. " Visual Muzak and the Regulation of the Senses. Notes on Nicolas Schöffer https://www.academia.edu/11283475/_Visual_Muzak_and_the_Regulation_of_the_Senses_Notes_on_Nicolas_Sch%C3%B6ffer_in_Audio_Visual_-_On_Visual_Music_and_Related_Media_Cornelia_Lund_Holger_Lund_eds._Arnoldsche_Verlagsanstalt_Stuttgart_p._58-75_July_2009._galley_proof_." July 2009.

Feeling , Time

“Life has to take charge of its environment and evolve with it.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Life

“It's clear that other problems such as religious fundamentalism, overpopulation, damage to the environment, and the domination of business over government, science, thought, and society, are much bigger than non-free software. But many other people are already working on them, and I don't have any great aptitude or ideas for how to address them. So it seems best for me to keep working on the issue of free software. Besides, free software does counter one aspect of business domination of society.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, Thus Spake Stallman (2000)

People , Idea , Business , Problem

“The huge human brain, approximately 1,350 cubic centimeters, is the most complex organic structure in the known world. Understanding the human mind/brain mechanisms in evolutionary perspective is the goal of the new scientific discipline called evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology focuses on four key questions: (1) Why is the mind designed the way it is—that is, what causal processes created, fashioned, or shaped the human mind into its current form? (2) How is the human mind designed—what are its mechanisms or component parts, and how are they organized? (3) What are the functions of the component parts and their organized structure—that is, what is the mind designed to do? (4) How does input from the current environment interact with the design of the human mind to produce observable behavior?”

David M. Buss (1953) American psychologist

Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (6th ed., 2019), Chap. 1: The Scientific Movements Leading to Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology, 2005

World , Way , Behavior , Fashion

“[If] we equip the programmed computer with transducers so it can interact freely with a natural environment and a linguistic one, as well as the power to make inferences, it is far from obvious what if any latitude the theorist (who knows how the transducers operate and therefore what they respond to) would still have in assigning a coherent interpretation to the functional states so as to capture psychologically relevant regularities in behavior. If the answer is that the theorist is left with no latitude beyond the usual inductive indeterminism all theories have in the face of finite data, it would be perverse to deny that these states had the semantic content assigned to them by the theory.”

Zenon Pylyshyn (1937) Canadian philosopher

Source: Computation and cognition, 1984, p. 44

Behavior , Nature

“We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979)

Life , Optimism

“The most important thing is that we need to be a party that is inclusive and tolerant. We can be those things and be the party we always have been. We need to think about the environment. Teddy Roosevelt was a great environmentalist and people forget Reagan was the one who dealt with the ozone layer with the Montreal protocol. We also need to talk about healthcare honestly. Nixon almost passed universal healthcare. We need to have an talk about immigration and realize you can't just deport people. We need a comprehensive answer. We also need to stay out of people's bedrooms. The party that is for small government shouldn't be over-reaching into people's private lives. Mainly, we need to be a party where people know what we are for, not just what we are against.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) actor, businessman and politician of Austrian-American heritage

Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/16mq0g/iamarnold_ask_me_anything/c7xg9aa (2013)
2010s

People , Thinking , Universe , Forgetting

“Mathieu Golovinski was born in the Simbirsk region of Russia in 1865 during the reign of the Romanov dynasty. His family, a part of the fading Russian aristocracy, provided him with a fragile social standing. He grew up in a leisured environment typical of families of that class.
His father, Basil Golobinski, died, however, when Mathieu was 10 years old.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.31

Family , Parting

“In my view, most human beings are innately neither moral nor immoral but rather amoral. They are driven by emotional self-interest and have the potential to be either moral or immoral, depending on what their self-interest dictates, and will be influenced in their choices by emotions and socio-cultural contexts. Circumstances will determine the survival value of humankind’s moral compass in that being highly moral in an immoral environment may be detrimental to one’s survival and vice versa. Indeed, our neuronal architecture is pre-programmed to seek gratification and feel good regardless of the reason. All apparently altruistic behaviour serves self-interest at some level.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Emotional amoral egoism (2008), p.16

Feeling , Dependency

“The next level of causal texturing we have called the disturbed reactive environment. It may be compared with Ashby's ultra-stable system or the economists' oligopolic market.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 29.

“Increasingly, politics is not about "who gets what, when, how" but about values, each of them considered to be absolute. Politics is about "the right to life"…It is about the environment. It is about gaining equality for groups alleged to be oppressed…None of these issues is economic. All are fundamentally moral.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

About how government can function
1990s and later, "The Age of Social Transformation." 1994

Life

“While our view of the world is filtered through our senses, evolution has, by and large, molded those senses to perceive the world accurately, for there’s a severe penalty to be paid for seeing things wrongly. That holds not only for the external environment, but also for the character of others. Without accurate perceptions, we couldn’t find food, avoid predators and other dangers, or form harmonious social groups. And following those perceptions is indeed the pursuit of “true beliefs”: beliefs based on evidence. Natural selection doesn’t mold true beliefs; it molds the sensory and neural apparatus that, in general, promotes the formation of true beliefs.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 182

World , Food , Penalty , Nature

“The fourth model of mind, closely related to the previous one, is the structuralist model, as represented by Piaget, Chomsky, Levi-Strauss, and the structural-developmental version of the psychoanalytical theory. This model assumes the presence of innate structures or potentialities to develop such structures. These structures are not directly experienced or observed; rather, they are inferred from the organization of cognitive processes and behaviour and also from the regularity and orderliness of development. The development proceeds through The development proceeds through well defined stages. There are two versions of the structuralist development model. In the preformist version, the structures exist in potential form at birth and only actualize themselves in the maturation-development process. In the epigenetic version, the structures develop in a dialectic interaction with the environment. The final outcome us not completely determined at births but also depends on the environmental factors.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Models of Mental Illness (1984), p. 102-103

Birth , Dependency

“Our ethnicity is part of us, however, it should not isolate or distance us from the community in which we live. People of different cultures cannot not live peacefully together unless they have respect for each other. I accept that seeking further integration is a challenge and it cannot be imposed or done under duress; the feeling has to come from within ourselves. To create an environment for that to happen, we have to develop situations and opportunities that place people in a position to make choices and this is one of them. And unless we begin to see our neighbours as people, as human beings rather than by ethnicity, it is difficult to shed our stereotypes of each other.”

Joni Madraiwiwi (1957–2016) Fijian politician

Opening address to the Leadership Fiji 2006 program, 9 March 2006.

People , Feeling , Communication , Parting

“They are the basic mechanism of control of the external environment available to managers and entrepreneurs. Organizational fields are not generally benign and cooperative arrangements held in place by a sense of duty or honor the rhetoric and ideology of their proponents might lead one to think so. Instead, they are set up to benefit their most powerful members.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: The transformation of corporate control, 1993, p. 6

Thinking , Sense

“Cartography as a discipline has a significant stake in the evolving role of maps within systems for scientific visualization, within spatial decision support systems, within hypermedia information access systems, and within virtual reality environments.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: Exploratory cartographic visualization: advancing the agenda (1997), p. 1

Support , Reality , Decision

“The classical support for as-if models in the social sciences stems from the economist Milton Friedman (1953), who, like the psychologist B. F. Skinner, saw little value in modeling cognitive processes. In contrast, our aim is to understand actual decision processes, not only the outcomes. There is a good reason for this. Without modeling the cognitive blade of Simon's scissors, it is utterly impossible to determine in what environments heuristics succeed, that is, their ecological rationality.”

Gerd Gigerenzer Heuristics

Gerd Gigerenzer, Ralph Hertwig, and Thorsten Pachur, Heuristics: The Foundations of Adaptive Behavior, 2015.

Understanding , Support , Decision , Science

“I have come to believe that you can get along without anyone — that is, without the close contact of any one person. That is a terrible shock to me, but I think it is true. You do need companionship, but wherever you go, in whatever new environment, you will find people who, to a large degree, take the place of those you left…The intimate companionship goes, I think, when you leave a friend, but friendship stays. It is an inherent possibility of relationship that, once admitted — well, there it is.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

Bring Me a Unicorn (1971)

Friendship , People , Thinking , Personality

“We made fracking a civil rights issue. Because that is what it is. We all have a right to a healthy environment and to clean water. And so do our children.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

Against fracking in the Karoo, 3 May 2011
Speaking & Features

Children , Water

“One is not quite certain that creativeness in the arts, literature, and science functions best in an environment of absolute freedom. Chances are that a relatively mild tyranny stimulates creativeness.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Entry (1956)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)

Art , Literature , Freedom , Science

“Members, you and I will work together in the months ahead on other issues: productive farm policy, a cleaner environment, broader home ownership, especially among minorities, and ways to encourage the good work of charities and faith-based groups. I ask you to join me on these important domestic issues in the same spirit of cooperation we've applied to our war against terrorism.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2002, State of the Union address (January 2002)

War , Faith , Way , Home

“My growing environmental awareness only added more fuel to the argument for having no children. And the logic of never-ending consumption didn't just harm the environment, it killed people too.”

Xiaolu Guo (1973) Chinese-British novelist and film director

Once Upon A Time in the East: A Story of Growing up, Chatto & Windus, 2017, page 305 (ISBN 9781784740689).
Memoir, 2017

Children , People

“Unbelievable! Unbelieveable! No stem-cell research. Can't have stem-cell research. Can't have reproductive rights. But by God we can bomb the shite out of anybody in the world! And we can have policies that are put forth by the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, and CAFTA and NAFTA that will destroy lives. That will destroy the environment. That will harm fetal development. I mean is it not insanity? Is it not so obvious at this point to some people, to most people rather that this Bush administration is now uh- comically! comically uhm --I don't even know what the word is! I can't think of the word! I can't think of words!”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

Majority Report, June 3, 2005 broadcast
Majority Report

God , People , World , Thinking

“Nourished people, people who love and care for themselves, are also more efficient and nicer to be around. When you give yourself permission to relax, people will feel more relaxed around you; your environment will become more harmonious. Balance—between work and pleasure, giving and receiving, seriousness and levity—creates a happy healthy life.”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

Quantum Wellness (2008)

Love , Life , People , Pleasure

“Our contribution to the study of organisations will be greatly enriched if we are able to discern the sources of institutional patterns, their subsequent elaboration and potency, the degree to which these forces are sustained, and the kinds of settings where they operate with the greatest resonance. This agenda is consonant with the core insights of the institutional approach: modern organisations are more likely to arise, expand, and survive in those settings where the social environment creates and sustains the basic building blocks of formal, rational organisation.”

Walter W. Powell (1948) American sociologist

Walter W. Powell, "Expanding the scope of institutional analysis." The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (1991) In P. J. DiMaggio and W. Powell (eds.) The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 183-203. p. 188

Study

“In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

pg 486
The City in History (1961)

People , Age , Food , Communication

“I think that everybody tries to produce what Marshall McLuhan called a ‘counter environment.’ That is, you set yourself in opposition to the kind of mass tendencies which the media set up. That’s what’s so important about the humanities in the university…There’s something of a personal dialogue between one human being and another. And the fact that this dialogue is being carried out in the teeth of all the mass emotion techniques of the electronic media is a very important side of the humanities.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

"Canadian Energy: Dialogues on Creativity: Northrop Frye." Descant 12, no. 32-3 (1981).
"Quotes", Interviews with Northrop Frye (2008)

Thinking , Personality

“A main problem in the study of organizational change is that the environmental contexts in which organizations exist are themselves changing, at an increasing rate and towards increasing complexity. This point, in itself, scarcely needs laboring. Nevertheless, characteristics of organizational environments demand consideration for their own sake if there is to be an advancement of understanding in the behavioral sciences of a great deal that is taking place under the impact of technological change, especially at the present time.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 21

Behavior , Understanding , Problem , Study

“It has been decided according to our Canon Law that long standing temples should not be demolished, but no new temple allowed to be built… Information has reached our... court that its environs and certain Brahmans who have the right of holding charge of the ancient temples there, and that they further desire to remove these Brahmans from their ancient office. Therefore, our royal command is that you should direct that in future no person shall in unlawful ways interfere with or disturb the Brahmans and other Hindus resident in those places.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Aurangzeb's Benares farman to Abdul Hasan in 1659, see History of Aurangzib: Mainly Based on Persian Sources, Volume 3 by Jadunath Sarkar, p. 281; Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals https://books.google.com/books?id=04ellRQx4nMC&pg=PA397 by Abraham Eraly, p. 387, Mughal Rule in India https://books.google.com/books?id=4aqU9Zu7mFoC&pg=PA115 by Stephen Meredyth Edwardes & Herbert Leonard Offley Garrett], p.115 Mughal Empire in India: A Systematic Study Including Source Material, Volume 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=1wC27JDyApwC&pg=PA468 by Shripad Rama Sharma, p. 268. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.62677/page/n295
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1650s and earlier

Law , Way , Future , Personality

“It's not just about the current economic environment. History shows that slashing budgets always leads to recession.”

Ha-Joon Chang (1963) Economist

"Austerity has never worked" http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jun/04/austerity-policy-eurozone-crisis, The Guardian, 4 June 2012.

History

“So many young men of color become part of that officer’s life experience because so many minority families and communities are struggling, so many boys and young men grow up in environments lacking role models, adequate education, and decent employment—they lack all sorts of opportunities that most of us take for granted. A tragedy of American life—one that most citizens are able to drive around because it doesn’t touch them—is that young people in “those neighborhoods” too often inherit a legacy of crime and prison. And with that inheritance, they become part of a police officer’s life, and shape the way that officer—whether white or black—sees the world. Changing that legacy is a challenge so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately, easier to talk only about the cops. And that’s not fair.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Life , Men , People , World

“[O]n the whole, given that the environment of the U. S. in the middle of the 19th century is so white supremacist in its assumptions, Lincoln is actually quite remarkable for standing apart from that.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

“Our world model was built specifically to investigate five major trends of global concern – accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment. The model we have constructed is, like every model, imperfect, oversimplified, and unfinished… Our conclusions are : (1.) If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity…”

Eduard Pestel (1914–1988) scholar

The Limits to Growth, abstract established by Eduard Pestel http://www.unav.es/adi/UserFiles/File/80963990/The%20Limits%20to%20Growth%20Informe%20Meadows.pdf, 1972, by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis l. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W. Behrens III.

World , Food

“Children's health depends on the mothers, so if we can scale up the achievement of the MDGs, it would benefit people in Africa. We should also look at how we can empower women to leverage their resources and their creativity and become change agents. We have seen example after example where women who are appropriately motivated and given the right environment can make changes, not only to themselves but also to their families and their communities.”

Margaret Chan (1947) Director-General of the World Health Organization

WHO Interview on taking office as Director-General http://www.who.int/dg/chan/interviews/taking_office/en/, Frontlines, 4 January 2007.

Women , Children , People , Health

“From microchips to corn chips, software to soft drinks, and packaged goods to package delivery services, executives have watched the intensity and type of competition in their industries shift during the last few years. Industries have changed from slow moving, stable oligopolies to environments, characterized by intense and rapid competitive moves, in which competitors strike quickly with unexpected, unconventional means of competing. They now confront “hypercompetitors” who continuously generate new competitive advantages that destroy, make obsolete, or neutralize the industry leader’s advantages, leaving the industry in disequilibrium and disarray.”

Richard D’Aveni (1953) American economist

Richard A. D’Aveni (1997). " Waking up to the New Era of Hypercompetition https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233454654_Waking_Up_to_the_New_Era_of_Hypercompetition". The Washington Quarterly, Sept. 3, 1997. p. 183–195. Lead paragraph.

Drink , Change

“The strong environmental position should not be and cannot be to do nothing, and to put our heads in the sand and pretend that the problem does not exist. It would be nice if Texas had no low-level radioactive waste, or Vermont or Maine or any other State. That would be great. That is not the reality. The environmental challenge now is, given the reality that low-level radioactive waste exists, what is the safest way of disposing of that waste. Leaving the radioactive waste at the site where it was produced, despite the fact that that site may be extremely unsafe in terms of long-term isolation of the waste and was never intended to be a long- term depository of low-level waste, is horrendous environmental policy. What sense is it to say that you have to keep the waste where it is now, even though that might be very environmentally damaging? That does not make any sense at all. No reputable scientist or environmentalist believes that the geology of Vermont or Maine would be a good place for this waste. In the humid climate of Vermont and Maine, it is more likely that groundwater will come in contact with that waste and carry off radioactive elements to the accessible environment. There is widespread scientific evidence to suggest, on the other hand, that locations in Texas, some of which receive less than 12 inches of rainfall a year, a region where the groundwater table is more than 700 feet below the surface, is a far better location for this waste. This is not a political assertion, it is a geological and environmental reality. … From an environmental point of view, I urge strong support for this legislation.”

Bernie Sanders (1941) American politician, senator for Vermont

Speaking at the House of Representatives on the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact, in 7 October 1997. https://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/1997/10/7/house-section/article/h8512-1?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22%5C%22all+that+Texas+and+Maine+and+Vermont+are+asking+for+today%5C%22%22%5D%7D&r=1
1990s

Way , Support , Problem , Reality

“We continue to assert the principles of no political preconditions, mutual respect and openness to innovation as the basis of talks with Beijing, while showing goodwill and creating a friendly environment for communication.”

Tien Hung-mao (1938) Taiwanese Minister of Foreign Affairs

Source: Tien Hung-mao (2017) cited in " SEF invites ARATS to Kinmen Island http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2017/01/19/2003663387" on Taipei Times, 19 January 2017.

Communication

“The physical and social environment is important in determining the actions of individuals, although it is not solely responsible for the outcome.”

Joel Mokyr (1946) Israeli American economic historian

Source: The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress, 1992, p. 155

“Capitalism imposes its laws of motion on the environment, irrespective of the biogeochemical cycles of the planet and the earth’s metabolism, so that it creates rifts or ruptures in the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth system, disrupting ecosystem relations in ways that transcend the mere scale-effects of economic growth. It is this problem of the metabolic rift that is our deepest challenge. Sustainability is more and more compromised at ever higher levels—a continually accelerating threat to civilization and life itself.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice (2017)

Life , Law , Way , Problem

“What I've learned in my life, it's a very interesting social study for me, to go back and forth between being the guy at home and being the guy on the road and being the guy in studio and being the guy in the interview. The environment around you has so much to do with your character, and when I'm home, my character really changes quite a bit. I become very domesticated, it becomes riding my bike, and the music thing — the music thing doesn't leave but it's kind of less put upon me by other people as a musician.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

On whether or not he misses being home with friends and family when he is on tour.
Savino, Jessi, et al (2007) "John Mayer talks life on the road, latest album" http://media.www.nu-news.com/media/storage/paper600/news/2007/02/14/TheInside/John-Mayer.Talks.Life.On.The.Road.Latest.Album-2718892.shtml NU-News.com (accessed February 14, 2007)

Life , People , Music , Guy

“Most people define learning too narrowly as mere “problem-solving”, so they focus on identifying and correcting errors in the external environment. Solving problems is important. But if learning is to persist, managers and employees must also look inward. The need to reflect critically on their own behaviour, identify the ways they often inadvertently contribute to the organisation’s problems, and then change how they act.”

Chris Argyris (1923–2013) American business theorist/Professor Emeritus/Harvard Business School/Thought Leader at Monitor Group

Chris Argyris "Teaching smart people how to learn" in: Peter F. Drucker (1998) Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. p. 82

People , Way , Error , Problem

“[20th Century has been called] the century of extremes, […] in which human vices reached unfathomable depths. [She notes that it has been] a century of great progress [and in some places of] unprecedented economic growth. [At the same time, however, poor urban areas face a bleak future of] overcrowding and a disease pattern linked to poverty and an unhealthy environment.”

Gro Harlem Brundtland (1939) Norwegian politician

Awake! magazine 1999, 12/8, article: The Most Profound Changes.

Disease , Time , Future

“Today, organizations are competing in complex environments so that an accurate understanding of their goals and the methods for attaining those goals is vital. The Balanced Scorecard translates an organization’s mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures that provides the framework for a strategic measurement and management system.”

Robert S. Kaplan (1940) American accounting academic

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2

Understanding

“Environments are invisible. Their groundrules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967)

“Yeah just so back to being Governor of New Mexico. I vetoed a bill that I think the label of the bill was Bringing Competition to the Telecommunications Industry of New Mexico… I vetoed it because the reality was that was the title but the reality was just the opposite. It was gonna actually make the environment less competitive. It was going to empower Quest communications to have more of a monopoly they it all ready had. That wasn’t the label of the bill. So net neutrality the notion is that it’s going to create a freer environment when the reality is.. is there really an issue now? And if you get government involved in getting its nose in the tent isn’t this ultimately gonna make things a lot worse and cost us a lot more than just doing nothing? So all of my free market friends, all of my computer savvy people that are advising me, say that net neutrality is anything but. All of what’s it supposed to accomplish that actually by supporting it you’re creating the opposite.”

Gary Johnson (1953) American politician, businessman, and 29th Governor of New Mexico

Statement made to representatives of the Pagan Newswire Collective (PNC)
2011-10-16
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganswithdisabilities/2011/10/full-transcript-of-qa-with-presidential-candidate-gary-johnson/
2012-02-24
2011

People , Communication , Support , Thinking

“Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence. We have not yet found the right road to conquering ourselves and our environment.”

Dora Russell (1894–1986) author, feminist, socialist campaigner

Source: The Right to Be Happy (1927), p. 241

Marriage , Law

“It appears that the evolutionary process promotes its own progress: learning about the environment (which demands a certain intelligence) means living in a stable social mileau (which demands at least an equal and possibly a greater intelligence); as social intelligence increases, so too will the ability to learn; this in turn encourages an even longer social apprenticeship; and longer group living leads to more social intelligence.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins (1977)

Intelligence , Learning , Appearance

“I was born in New York, then I went to the UK, then I went to Brazil, then I went to France, then I studied in Italy. My life was always about being confronted with an environment where you had to adapt.”

John Elkann (1976) Italian businessman

"Unlikely heir who saved the family jewels" http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0693507a-4830-11e0-b323-00144feab49a.html#axzz1GZU7VVRA, Financial Times, 03-06-11

Life , Study

“Organization theory is the branch of sociology that studies organizations as distinct units in society. The organizations examined range from sole proprietorships, hospitals and community-based non-profit organizations to vast global corporations. The field’s domain includes questions of how organizations are structured, how they are linked to other organizations, and how these structures and linkages change over time. Although it has roots in administrative theories, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy, the theory of the firm in microeconomics, and Coase’s theory of firm boundaries, organization theory as a distinct domain of sociology can be traced to the late 1950s and particularly to the work of the Carnegie School. In addition to sociology, organization theory draws on theory in economics, political science and psychology, and the range of questions addressed reflects this disciplinary diversity. While early work focused on specific questions about organizations per se – for instance, why hierarchy is so common, or how businesses set prices – later work increasingly studied organizations and their environments, and ultimately organizations as building blocks of society. Organization theory can thus be seen as a family of mechanisms for analysing social outcomes.”

Gerald F. Davis (1961) American sociologist

Gerald F. Davis (2013). "Organizational theory," in: Jens Beckert & Milan Zafirovski (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, p. 484-488

School , Family , Communication , Question

“What do you think of Spinoza? For me he is the ideal example of the cosmic man. He worked as an obscure diamond cutter, disdaining fame and a place at the table of the great. He tells us the importance of understanding our emotions and suggests what causes them. Man will never be free until he is able to direct his emotions to think clearly. Only then can he control his environment and preserve his energy for creative work.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 26

Understanding , Thinking

“When either sex suppresses the expression of feelings, it’s almost always b/c they don’t feel there is a safe environment to express them.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 16.

Sex , Feeling

“I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh book Gift from the Sea

Gift from the Sea (1955)

Life , Search , Learning

“I was never really in love with acting. I always love movies and going to the theater. But did I love being in this business? Not for five minutes. I did it because I needed a job. For the first year or two, it's like a poison that enters your body. It's like a virus, and your body has to release antidotes. But it would be very unfair to say that it's that way all the time. It's just like anything this overwhelming that you enter suddenly. It's like being a contact at West Point. You're thrown into an intense environment. From the word go, you realize it's sink or swim.”

Alec Baldwin (1954) American actor, writer, producer, and comedian

As quoted in "The Hunt for Alec Baldwin", by Phoebe Hoban, in New York magazine, Vol. 23, No. 9 (5 March 1990).

Love , Way , Business , Time

“Our new aim is the organisation of the material environment, i. e. of contemporary industrial production, and all active artistic creativity must be directed towards this.”

Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) Russian artist

Quote, End of 1921, from; Liubov Popova, untitled manuscript, cited by A. Adaskina in 'Liubov' Popova. Put' stanovleniia khudozhnika-konstruktora', 'Tekhnicheskaia estetika', no.11, 1978, p.19; as quoted by Christina Lodder in Tate Papers no. 14: Liubov Popova: From Painting to Textile Design http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubov-popova-from-painting-to-textile-designhttp://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/liubov-popova-from-painting-to-textile-design

“When the theory performs well you also think, “Are there parallel results in naturally occurring field data?” You look for coherence across different data sets because theories are not specific to particular data sources. Such extensions are important because theories often make specific assumptions about information and institutions which can be controlled in the laboratory, but which may not accurately represent field data generating situations. Testing theories on the domain of their assumptions is sterile unless it is part of a research program concerned with extending the domain of applications of theory to field environments”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Source: "Theory, experiment and economics," 1989, p. 151.

Nature , Thinking , Parting

“Traditional guerrilla activity such as bombings, snipings and kidnappings complete with printed manifestos seem like so many ecologically risky short change feedback devices compared with the real possibilities of portable video, maverick data banks, acid metaprogramming, Cable TV, satellites, cybernetic craft industries, and alternative lifestyles. Yet the guerrilla tradition is highly relevant in the current information environment. Guerrilla warfare is by nature irregular and non-repetitive. Like information theory, it recognizes that redundancy can easily become reactionary and result in entropy and defeat.”

Paul Ryan (video artist) (1943–2013) American video artist

Paul Ryan, "Cybernetic Guerilla Warfare," Radical Software 3 (Spring 1971): 1

Nature , Change

“Love of my home, my wife and my children./ Love for the earth that helps me live./ Love for education and of work./ Love of others who work for the common good./ Love of justice as the instrument that provides equilibrium for human dignity./ Love of peace in order to enjoy one's life./ Love of freedom, but not the freedom acquired at the expense of others’ freedom, but rather the freedom of all./ Love of freedom to live and exist, for the existence of my children, in my home, in my town, my city, among neighbouring people./ Love for freedom in the environment in which we are required to forge our destiny./ Love of freedom without yokes: nor ours nor foreign.”

Víctor Jara (1932–1973) Pro teacher, theatre director, poet, singer-songwriter, and political activist

When asked, four days before the military coup of September 11, 1973, what the word ‘Love’ meant to him.
Section: Biography/Victor y el amor of http://www.fundacionvictorjara.cl/ 10/04/2007

Love , Life , Children , People

“Did I tell you that I had quite a nice letter from Winston [Churchill]? I thought I ought to send him a line but I wasn't sure whether I should get an acknowledgement! I think he is the right man at the moment and I always did feel that war would be his opportunity. He thrives in that environment.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to J. C. C. Davidson (22 June 1940), quoted in Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Memoirs of a Conservative: J. C. C. Davidson's Memoirs and Papers, 1910-1937 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 427.
1940s

War , Feeling , Thinking

“It is possible to build a virtual-reality generator whose repertoire includes every possible environment.”

David Deutsch book The Fabric of Reality

Source: The Fabric of Reality (1997), Ch. 6

Reality

“Thanks to the doctrine of national environment which Owen was the first to preach — Knowledge is greater; Life is longer; Health is surer; Disease is limited; Towns are sweeter; Hours of labour are shorter; Men are stronger; Women are fairer; Children are happier; Industry is held in more honour, and is better rewarded; Co-operation carries wholesome food and increased income into a million homes where they were unknown before, and has brought us nearer and nearer to that state of society which Owen strove to create — in which it shall be impossible for men to be depraved or poor.”

George Holyoake (1817–1906) British secularist, co-operator, and newspaper editor

Memorial dedication (1902)

Life , Women , Men , Children

“The metaphor suggests that different environments favor different species of organizations based on different methods of organizing and that congruence with the environment is the key to success.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 35 (Morgan, 1998)

Success

“The management of a system has to deal with the generation of the plans for the system, i. e., consideration of all of the things we have discussed, the overall goals, the environment, the utilization of resources and the components. The management sets the component goals, allocates the resources, and controls the system performance.”

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

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 44

“The dinosaur is for most people the epitome of extinctness, the prototype of an animal so maladapted to a changing environment that it dies out, leaving fossils but no descendants.”

Robert T. Bakker (1945) American paleontologist

"Dinosaur Renaissance", Scientific American 232, no. 4 (April 1975), 58—78
Dinosaur Renaissance (1975)

People , Change , Animals

“With wiki, you have to trust people more than you have any reason to trust them. In 1995, it was a safer environment, don’t know if I could have launched wiki today.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

Crucible of Creativity (2005)

People

“Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability to price shocks in the oil market. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our values, and to our democracy.”

Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr. (1954) American activist

In "Crimes against nature" in Rolling Stone magazine (11 December 2003).

Life , Law , Democracy , Home

“My Impossible Five would be: Cape mountain leopard, aardvark, pangolin, riverine rabbit and (naturally occurring) white lion. These animals had survived into our modern age largely due to their elusiveness. Their ‘impossibility’ was their tenuous insurance against extinction. They were still wild and free, most of them living outside national parks, still occupying the same territories they had for millennia. As such, they were symbols of wilderness – that wildness once everywhere, and which is now drastically curtailed and shrinking by the day.
Their continued presence, even if never seen, was a comfort, a kind of ecological money in the bank. If they disappeared or were driven into contained environments, our human species would be far poorer for it. I began to think of my creatures’ impossibility as their saving grace – our saving grace. In this light, it didn’t matter if I found none of them, and my mission was a complete failure. As long as I knew – we knew – they were still out there, that would be enough.”

Justin D. Fox (1967) South African author, photojournalist, lecturer and editor

The Impossible Five (2015)

Money , Age , Mountain , Failure

“So black people, you are subjects of white people. Even under ANC, even under the so-called democracy, you are subject, you are servant of white people. No white man will be served by me. I do not serve white masters. … I am here to disturb the white man's peace. … The white man has been too comfortable for too long. We are here unashamedly to disturb the white man's peace, because we have never known peace. We don't know what peace looks like. … They have been swimming in a pool of privilege. They have been enjoying themselves because they always owned our land. We, the rightful owners, our peace was disturbed by white man's arrival here. They committed a black genocide. They killed our people during land dispossession. … They found peaceful Africans here. They killed them. They slaughtered them like animals. We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now. What we are calling for is for peaceful occupation of the land. And we don't owe anyone apology about that. … Revolution is about making those who are comfortable uncomfortable. … Revolution is about disturbing the peace of those who are swimming in a peaceful environment through exploitation of the working class. … Our strategic objective is the defeat of white monopoly capital. And that defeat […] means the ownership of property must change and be transferred into the hands of the people. Their mines must be nationalized, the banks must be nationalized, the land must be expropriated without compensation. … But white minority be warned, we will take our land no matter what.”

Julius Malema (1981) South African political activist

To EFF supporters after appearing in the Newcastle Magistrates court on 7 November 2016, for allegedly contravening the Riotous Assemblies Act, “We are not calling for the slaughtering of white people, at least for now.” Malema http://www.thesouthafrican.com/we-are-not-calling-for-the-slaughtering-of-white-people-at-least-for-now-malema/, Ezra Claymore, The South African, 8 November 2016, and a video https://twitter.com/tshidi_lee/status/795572416290443264/video/1 by Matshidiso Madia. See also: Malema addresses supporters after appearing in court, 7 November 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjBi3z-1yAs, SABC News, YouTube

People , Peace , Democracy , Change

“My belief in how plant-based nutrition could boost athletic performance while also reducing the strain on the environment was, at the time, considered fringe at best. … Ten years later, it's now common for people to speak of their “plant-based diet.” Even “vegan” is a familiar word, seen on the most conventional restaurants' menus. The importance of avoiding animal products in our diet, whether for heath, physical and mental performance, environmental, ethical, or a combination of these reasons, is now well understood and widely accepted.”

Brendan Brazier (1975) Canadian triathlete, publisher, writer, editor

Preface to the 10th Anniversary Edition
The Thrive Diet

People , Time , Animals

“Scanned by the eyes of this intelligence, your path will be without pits to swallow, or snares to entangle you. Environed by the arms of this protection, all artifices will be frustration, and all malice repelled.”

Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) American novelist, historian and editor

Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798)

Intelligence

“The fact that a reasonable hypothesis has not been rigorously proved does not mean that it should be summarily dismissed. It only means that we need more appropriate research for putting it to the test. I believe such definitive research is entirely possible but has not yet been done. So all we are left with are various lines of evidence, no one of which is definitive alone, but which, viewed all together, make it a not unreasonable hypothesis that genetic factors are strongly implicated in the average Negro-white intelligence difference. The preponderance of the evidence is, in my opinion, less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis, which, of course, does not exclude the influence of environment or its interaction with genetic factors.”

Arthur Jensen (1923–2012) professor of educational psychology

p. 82 of How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement? (1969) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Can_We_Boost_IQ_and_Scholastic_Achievement%3F, the invited paper that created much hostility towards Jensen.

Intelligence

“It was no more nor less than true. You do things by doing things, not by not doing them. No more crazy upsidedownness, he resolved. Good was better than bad. Good environments are better than bad environments.”

Walker Percy book The Last Gentleman

The Last Gentleman (1966)

“System' is the concept that refers both to a complex of interdependencies between parts, components, and processes, that involves discernible regularities of relationships, and to a similar type of interdependency between such a complex and its surrounding environment.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1968) "Systems Analysis: Social Systems" in: David L. Sills ed. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. p. 458; Cited in: Ida R. Hoos (1972) Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique.

Parting

“Any system that insulates itself from diversity in the environment tends to atrophy and lose its complexity and distinctive nature”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 47

Nature