Quotes about environment
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“I am not the ruler of Gujarat, I'm a servant of Gujarat. The environment in which I grew up, sewa is treated as a dharma, not power.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2002, Modi election campaign speech, 2002

“According to a stagist conception of progressive history (which is usually blind to its implicit teleology), the work of figures like Foucault, Derrida and other cutting-edge French theorists is often intuitively affiliated with a form of profound and sophisticated critique that presumably far surpasses anything found in the socialist, Marxist or anarchist traditions. It is certainly true and merits emphasis that the Anglophone reception of French theory, as John McCumber has aptly pointed out, had important political implications as a pole of resistance to the false political neutrality, the safe technicalities of logic and language, or the direct ideological conformism operative in the McCarthy-supported traditions of Anglo-American philosophy. However, the theoretical practices of figures who turned their back on what Cornelius Castoriadis called the tradition of radical critique—meaning anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist resistance—surely contributed to the ideological drift away from transformative politics. According to the spy agency itself, post-Marxist French theory directly contributed to the CIA’s cultural program of coaxing the left toward the right, while discrediting anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, thereby creating an intellectual environment in which their imperial projects could be pursued unhindered by serious critical scrutiny from the intelligentsia.”

Gabriel Rockhill (1972) philosopher

"The CIA reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left" (2017)

History, Support, Falseness

“I think it would be great to have a mall that looked like stores but you weren't selling things. You were just going to hang out or do things. Or if somebody bought a mall and turned it into a house that people could kind of come to and you could build rooms, and it's all orange furniture. Or you could just build environments. Reclaim a mall just in the name of aesthetics or to make something beautiful or something that has no real purpose. Wouldn't that be amazing?”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

Black Book magazine, Fall 2002

People, Beauty, Thinking, Housing

“The Irishman, finding himself in another environment, outside Ireland, very often knows how to make his worth felt. The economic and intellectual conditions of his homeland do not permit the individual to develop. The spirit of the country has been weakened by centuries of useless struggle and broken treaties. Individual initiative has been paralyzed by the influence and admonitions of the church, while the body has been shackled by peelers, duty officers and soldiers. No self-respecting person wants to stay in Ireland. Instead he will run from it, as if from a country that has been subjected to a visitation by an angry Jove.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

"Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," lecture, (27 April 1907), Università Popolare, Trieste, printed in James Joyce: Occasional, Critical and Political Writing (2002) edited by Kevin Barry [Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-192-83353-7], p. 123

Personality, Country

“The biggest issue in this election is something called flip-flopping, and all candidates are accused of doing it. A strong leader is expected to maintain steadfast resolve in his opinion even if the environment changes or he gets new information. In any other context, that would be considered the first sign of a brain tumor. When presidents do it, it's called leadership, and frankly, we can't get enough of it.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

DNRC Newsletter #57, 2004-10-28 http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/dnrc/html/newsletter57.html,

Strong, Change

“Salvation is not in the manipulation of man’s environment: it is the regeneration of man’s heart, and hence … the apostles were clearly forewarned against proclaiming a social (or socialist) gospel in place of the atoning, redemptive work of the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Writings, The Mediator: Christ or the Church? The Witness of Jesus Christ (n. d.)

Heart, Christ

“For any given system, the environment is the set of all objects whose behaviour is influenced by the behaviour of the primary system, and those objects whose behaviour influences the behavior of the primary system.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Definition of System, 1956, p. 20 cited in: Baleshwar Thaku eds. (2003) Perspectives in resource management in developing countries. p. 54

Behavior

“People in new environments always produce the new preceptual modality without any difficulty or awareness of change. It is later that the psychic and social realignments baffle societies.”

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

ARTnews annual, Volume 31, Art Foundation, 1966, p. 56
1960s

People, Change

“I love dressing up. I’m from a huge African family and grew up in a really colorful place. The way I dress reflects my environment and wanting to take people into a fantasy world for half an hour.”

Shingai Shoniwa (1981) British musician

http://venuszine.com/stories/music/4102.php

Love, People, World, Family

“District lines assure that the student population is somewhat homogeneous, and that there can be some schools that create an actual learning environment.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: "Jack Kemp, American Socialist" by Jeffrey Tucker, The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, September 1996, UNZ.org, 2016-05-22 http://www.unz.org/Pub/RothbardRockwellReport-1996sep-00001,

School, Learning

“Education in Chile has been modeled as a "consumer good" and this was accepted with much resignation by a broad layer of society for many years, they believed that education and health were to be treated like any other topic…. For this reason we cannot fail to recognize the intervention that the student movement made on the consciousness of thousands of Chileans who today are dissatisfied with the reality of today's education model, to whom a change of the outdated constitution makes sense, who understand the need to reform the taxation system, who no longer put up with the overexploitation of our natural resources, to benefit foreign capital, i. e. Chile awoke and once again came to believe in the possibility of building a different country. One which is more just, a country where education and health are guaranteed, a country where workers have dignified working conditions, where young people are not exploited nor ill-treated in their work-place, where women are integrated with rights and equal opportunities, a country where the environment is protected, where natural resources are exploited to improve the living condition of its people, a country were culture develops freely, where there is access to literature, a country where children don't suffer discrimination because they don't have any money, a country where a walk down your street doesn't mean constant fear of being assaulted, a country where the most disadvantaged youth don't have to resort to drugs or delinquency to give sense to their lives, a country where grandparents are not made to feel as burdens, a country where the development of knowledge becomes a task of society as a whole, where advances in science are placed at the service of the people. We are once again beginning to dream of this beautiful country …because we are not the same that we were a year ago, hope has resurfaced despite the elaborate effort of those who foster neoliberal ideology and who are trying to eternalize capitalism in a process of permanent auto-reproduction, excluding all possibility of a social revolution.”

Karol Cariola (1987) Chilean politician

Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, La Jota de Ingenieria, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.jotainjenieria.cl/ser-un-joven-comunista-por-karol-cariola, Ser un joven comunista, por Karol Cariola, Oceansur.com, November 2011, 2013-10-03 http://www.oceansur.com/media/uploads/documents/files/prologo-karol.pdf, Original: La educación en Chile ha sido modelada como un “bien de consumo”, hecho que fue aceptado por un amplio sector de la sociedad, con mucha resignación durante años, ellos creyeron que la Educación y la Salud debían ser tratados como cualquier otro tema.... Por esto no podemos dejar de reconocer el gran acierto del movimiento estudiantil al intervenir en las conciencias de miles de chilenos que hoy , ya no se conforman con la realidad del actual modelo de educación, que le hace sentido el cambio de esta añeja constitución, que entendieron necesaria una reforma tributaria, que ya no aguantan la sobre explotación de nuestros recursos naturales en beneficio de capitales extranjeros, es decir, Chile despertó y volvió a creer en la posibilidad de construir un país distinto, un país más justo, un país donde la educación y la salud estén garantizadas, un país donde los trabajadores tengan condiciones laborales dignas, donde los jóvenes no sean explotados ni mal tratados en su fuente laboral, donde las mujeres sean integradas con igualdad de derechos y oportunidades, un país donde se proteja el medio ambiente, en que los recursos naturales sean explotados para mejorar las condiciones de su pueblo, un país donde la cultura se desarrolle libremente, un país en el que haya acceso a la literatura, un país donde los niños no sufran la discriminación desde que nacen por no tener dinero, un país donde caminar por las calles no sean un temor constante de ser asaltados, un país donde los jóvenes más desposeídos no tengan que recurrir a las drogas y la delincuencia para dar sentido a sus vidas, un país donde los abuelos no se sientan un estorbo, un país donde el desarrollo del conocimiento sea una tarea de la sociedad en su conjunto, un país donde el avance de la ciencia se ponga al servicio del pueblo, ese hermoso país es el que hoy estamos volviendo a soñar, porque con emoción lo vuelvo a mencionar, Chile está cambiando, hoy no somos los mismos que hace un año atrás, las esperanzas han resurgido a pesar del esmero de aquellos que propician la ideología neoliberal y que pretenden eternizar el capitalismo en un proceso de auto reproducción permanente, excluyendo toda posibilidad de una revolución social.

Women, Money, Children, People

“I believe honestly and deeply that the treatment of whales is an example of the evil intelligence of humankind in relation to the rest of the natural world. We have seen greed of the most impossible kind descending on the Arctic and the Antarctic to destroy the most intelligent and beautiful creatures that the planet can produce…We are in the process of destroying much of the planet through destruction of the ozone layer, leading to the greenhouse effect, and the destruction of life. The whale is an example of how such destruction happens. As the ozone layer is destroyed the plankton in the Southern ocean will die and the whales will lose much of their food. Last year we opposed the Antarctic Minerals Bill because we feared that it would lead to pollution of the Southern ocean and damage the whales' food supply. The Government must oppose any extension of whaling of any type, scientific or otherwise, and I hope and trust that they will do so. But we must go further. Countries which engage in the barbarity of so-called scientific whaling, which in reality is crude commercialism of the nastiest kind, deserve retribution from us all and we must bring every possible sanction to bear against them. If we do not take care of our planet and our environment, and of animals such as the whale, mankind will suffer and our planet will die because we have not cared for the natural environment that we all share.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/mar/02/whaling in the House of Commons (2 March 1990). 1990s

Life, World, Fear, Food

“Every social system is a functioning entity. That is, it is a system of interdependent structures and processes such that it tends to maintain a relative stability and distinctiveness of pattern and behaviour as an entity by contrast with its - social or other - environment, and with it a relative independence from environmental forces. It "responds", to be sure, to the environmental stimuli, but is not completely assimilated to its environment, maintaining rather an element of distinctiveness in the face of variations in environmental conditions. To this extent it is analogous to an organism”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1942) "Propaganda and Social Control". in: Parsons (1954) Essays in sociological theory http://archive.org/details/sociologicaltheo00pars , p. 143

“Being a veganist is good for your health, it's good for the environment, and it's certainly good for the animals, but it also has a powerful spiritual component. When you begin eating consciously, with compassion and thoughtfulness, you attain a certain lightness and inner peace, a sense of connectedness to the larger world.”

Kathy Freston American self-help writer

Source: Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (2011), p. ix

Health, World, Peace, Sense

“The change from one stable equilibrium to the other may take place as the result of the isolation of a small unrepresentative group of the population, a temporary change in the environment which alters the relative viability of different types, or in several other ways…”

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

Source: The Causes of Evolution (1932), Ch. IV Natural Selection, p. 102.

Way, Change

“Over the past decade, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money ((Bristol-Myers Squibb). Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right-sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. But, in almost every case, the basic goal has been the same: to make fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a new, more challenging market environment.”

John P. Kotter (1947) author of The heart of Change

John P. Kotter, "Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail." in: Harvard Business Review. March-April 1995. p. 59.

Money, Communication, Business, Effort

“Man in the electronic age has no possible environment except the globe and no possible occupation except information-gathering.”

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

1990s and beyond, "The Agenbite of Outwit" (1998)

Age

“Organizations are (1) social entities that (2) are goal-directed, (3) are designed as deliberately structured and coordinated activity systems, and (4) are linked to the external environment.”

Richard L. Daft (1964) American sociologist

Source: Organization Theory and Design, 2007-2010, p. 10; Cited in: Jan A. P. Hoogervorst (2009), Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering, p. 80.

“We have to consider that the foods we ingest let a certain amount of soluble toxic substances dispersed in the environment into our bodies. These polluting substances are harmful if we breathe them in, but they are even more so if we ingest them. By consuming meat, we put ourselves precisely in that position, because such substances in the atmosphere fall back to Earth, and hence, onto the grass that, when eaten by cattle, introduces harmful substances into their adipose deposits and therefore into their flesh, and finally, onto our plates.”

Umberto Veronesi (1925–2016) Italian oncologist and politician

The First Day Without Cancer (2013)

Food, Grass

“Of course, violence is never justified. But seen in this context – amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings, and spurred by illegal and misguided practices – it is not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg. In a sense, members of the community may not have been responding only to a single isolated confrontation, but also to a pervasive, corrosive, and deeply unfortunate lack of trust – attributable to numerous constitutional violations by their law enforcement officials including First Amendment abuses, unreasonable searches and seizures, and excessive and dangerous use of force; exacerbated by severely disproportionate use of these tactics against African Americans; and driven by overriding pressure from the city to use law enforcement not as a public service, but as a tool for raising revenue.”

Eric Holder (1951) 82nd Attorney General of the United States

2010s, Update on Investigations in Ferguson (2015)

Law, Feeling, Imagination, Search

“The world has too many automobiles and televisions. Now the standard is there should be one car and TV for every person. This is not healthy for the environment or our souls.”

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Philosopher

"A hundred years of thinking about God" (1998)

World, Cars, Soul, Personality

“I’ve always said that I believe deeply in creative conflict, and that means passionately arguing–whatever your thoughts are, whatever the point is. Some people love that and it helps them grow, learn, etc. Some people run for the hills. I’ve always said to people, “Look, it’s not a room for everybody. If you like this environment, great. If you don’t, please leave, because it’s not good for any of us.””

Barry Diller (1942) American businessman

Fast Company: "Why Barry Diller believes in cultivating creative conflict" https://www.fastcompany.com/90205552/why-barry-diller-believes-in-cultivating-creative-conflict (8 August 2018)

Love, People, Learning, Passion

“Because a cause was taken to be sufficient for its effect, nothing was required to explain the effect other than the cause. Consequently, the quest for causes was environment-free. It employed what we now call 'closed-system' thinking. Laws. —like that of freely falling bodies—-were formulated so as to exclude environmental effects.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1970s, Redesigning the future, 1974, p. 10.

Law, Thinking

“If someone is frequently under attack by negative entities, it is because of a polluted consciousness that needs to be upgraded. A negative entity dislikes visiting a clean mind as much as a rat dislikes going to a clean place. […] Putting up spiritual paraphernalia around the home and not allowing any negative activity to go on in the environment can help you greatly. This may mean asking friends and loved ones to refrain from drinking, smoking, taking drugs, gossiping, or doing any activity that does not encourage spiritual thought and action.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Spiritual Warrior, Volume I: Uncovering Spiritual Truths in Psychic Phenomena (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: Dreams: A State of Reality, p. 22

Love, Home, Drink, Help

“Populism is at its essence […] just determined focus on helping people be able to get out of the iron grip of the corporate power that is overwhelming our economy, our environment, energy, the media, government. […] One big difference between real populism and what the Tea Party thing is, is that real populists understand that government has become a subsidiary of corporations. So you can't say, let's get rid of government. You need to be saying let's take over government.”

Jim Hightower (1943) Texas author and liberal political activist

Interview by Bill Moyers, Bill Moyers Journal, 30 April 2010 ( transcript http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04302010/transcript2.html, video http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04302010/watch2.html)

People, Understanding, Help, Tea

“My patriotism is subservient to my religion. I cling to India like a child to its mother’s breast, because I feel that she gives me the spiritual nourishment I need. She has the environment that responds to my highest aspiration.”

Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904–1966) The second Prime Minister of the Republic of India and a leader of the Indian National Congress party

Religion, Feeling

“I credit my plant-based diet with giving me the energy and stamina to help carry my teams to four NBA championship wins. … Veganism has become a transformative part of my life and I have made it my mission to share the power of plant-based eating with the world. … Vegan eating is not just a slam dunk for human health; it’s also the most effective way to combat climate change, according to a 2010 report by the United Nations. … going vegan is one of the best things a person can do for their health, for animals, and for the environment.”

John Salley (1964) American basketball player

Letter to Michelle Obama, in “NBA Champ Challenges FLOTUS to Take PETA’s Vegan Pledge,” in PETA.org (29 December 2015) https://www.peta.org/blog/nba-champ-challenges-flotus-to-take-petas-vegan-pledge/.

Life, Health, World, Way

“Modern technologies of warfare have made it possible for an individual or nation to bring total destruction to large segments of our population. And the greatest threat comes from those nations which have the most depriving environments for their children and which are the most repressive of sexual affection and female sexuality. We will have the most to fear when these nations acquire the weapons of modern warfare. Tragically, this has already begun.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Children, Fear

“A knowledge of Mendelism is recognized by me as only the ABC to the broader knowledge of heredity necessary for success in animal and plant improvement, and all variations and all mutations of every nature are responses to environment which, by repetition and combination, are slowly but surely fixed in heredity and at last made tangible, most often through the crossing of varieties, species, or genera, either by nature or that part of nature called man.”

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

Nature, Knowledge, Success, Animals

“Populations with diets with little or no saturated fat have little or no heart disease. The development of heart disease begins in childhood. Not only do unhealthy childhood diets high in saturated fat and low in the protective micronutrients found in unprocessed plant foods accelerate heart disease, but they promote the aging process, and create a cellular environment favorable for the development of cancer. To add insult to injury, much of the processed foods children eat are rich in trans fat, a man-made fat that is also linked to cancer and heart disease. We could not have designed a cancer-causing environment more effectively if we scientifically planned it. We feed our children a diet high in saturated fat, add lots of processed foods with those dangerous (man-made) trans fats, and combine it with an insufficient intake of unrefined plant foods to guarantee sufficient phytochemical deprivation, and presto, we have created a nation rich in autoimmune illnesses, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and finally, heart disease and cancer.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Source: Disease-Proof Your Child (2005), Ch. 1, pp. 11-12

Children, Age, Disease, Food

“Once conclusions about the economic benefits of peace are drawn, it may be possible to transform the world through business-led initiatives, thereby helping to achieve peace and creating the environment that will make future sustainability possible.”

Steve Killelea (1949) Australian businessman

The Study of Industries that Prosper in Peace – the ‘Peace Industry’ http://www.visionofhumanity.org/images/content/Documents/2008%20GPi%20Discussion%20Paper.pdf (2008)

World, Peace, Business, Future

“The bourgeois … necessarily regards all behaviour that bursts ‘spontaneously’ forth from the individual ignorant of its causality, as above all free. Therefore the instincts are conceived as freely striving for unconscious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures of the free instincts in their struggles against the restraints of the environment (in Freud, of society) which impede and cripple their freedom. Out of this struggle cognitive and emotional consciousness is born.Now the only objection to this bourgeois psychology is that it inverts the picture. The instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal. They are, so far as they can be abstractly separated, unconscious necessities, as Kant realised. They are unfree.”

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

Further Studies in a Dying Culture (1949), Chapter IV: Consciousness: A Study in Bourgeois Psychology

Spring, Freedom

“The further development of the open system thinking propounded by von Bertalanffy and Prigogine requires us to characterize the environments within which open systems are functioning. Four levels of environmental organization can be distinguished in terms of their causal texturing…
Coming out from an academic cocoon to work at the Tavistock Institute in London I found myself trying to comprehend the behavior of very large organizations in the face of very devastating winds of change… The conceptual developments in that paper have continued to play a considerable role in my subsequent thinking.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

F. E. Emery (1980) in " This Week’s Citation Classic http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/classics1980/A1980KT80900001.pdf" in: CC. Nr. 52. Dec 29, 1980. p. 292: Emery reflecting on his 1963 article "The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments" with Eric Trist.

Behavior, Thinking, Change

“On Saturday, the 24th January, 1680/2nd Muharram, the Emperor went to view lake Udaisagar, constructed by the Rana, and ordered all the three temples on its banks to be demolished.'…On the 29th January [1680]/7th Muharram, Hasan 'Ali Khan brought to the Emperor twenty camel-loads of tents and other things captured from the Rana's palace and reported that one hundred and seventy-two other temples in the environs of Udaipur had been destroyed. The Khan received the title of Bahadur 'Alamgirshahi'…'Abu Turab, who had been sent to demolish the temples of Amber, returned to Court on Tuesday, the 10th August [1680]/24th Rajab, and reported that he had pulled down sixty-six temples.”

Aurangzeb (1618–1707) Sixth Mughal Emperor

Maasir-i-alamgiri, translated into English by Sir Jadu-Nath Sarkar, Calcutta, 1947, pp. 107-120, also quoted in part in Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers. (Different translation : Abu Tarab, who had been commissioned to effect the destruction of the idol temples in Amber, reported in person on the 24th Rajab, that threescore and six of these edifices had been levelled with the ground.)
Quotes from late medieval histories, 1680s

“A piece of knowledge about boat-building, about whose correctness Crusoe has no doubts at all, will not be seen as a hunch and will be valued according to Menger's Law. It may be said that Crusoe is well aware that he possesses this kind of information; he will deploy and value it in the same way as he may be imagined to deploy and value other resources he believes are definitely at his disposal. But concerning Crusoe's hunches and his visions in the face of a changing, uncertain environment, it cannot be said at all that Crusoe knows he has a hunch or a vision of the future. He does not act by deliberately utilizing his hunch about the future; instead, he finds that his actions reflect his hunches…In other words, it turns out, the essence of entrepreneurial vision, and what sets it apart from knowledge as a resource, is reflected in Crusoe's lack of self-consciousness concerning it…Crusoe may…gradually come to be aware of his vision. When he does, that vision ceases to be entrepreneurial and comes to be a resource. Moreover, Crusoe's realization that he possesses this definite information resource may itself be entrepreneurial. As soon as he 'knows' that he possesses an item of knowledge, that item ceases to correspond to entrepreneurial vision; instead, as with all resources, it is Crusoe's belief that he has the resources at his disposal that may now constitute his entrepreneurial hunch.”

Israel Kirzner (1930) American economist

Israel Kirzner, (1979: 168-169); as cited in: " Israel Kirzner's Entrepreneurship http://www.constitution.org/pd/gunning/subjecti/workpape/kirz_ent.pdf" by the Constitution Society, May 31, 2004

Law, Way, Imagination, Knowledge

“My priorities? The environment, the environment, the environment.”

Menzies Campbell (1941) British Liberal Democrat politician and advocate

Michael White and Tania Branigan, Interview with http://politics.guardian.co.uk/interviews/story/0,,1685651,00.html The Guardian, 13 January 2006.

“Executable UML is at the next higher layer of abstraction, abstracting away both specific programming languages and decisions about the organization of the software so that a specification built in Executable UML can be deployed in various software environments without change.”

Stephen J. Mellor (1952) British computer scientist

Source: Executable Uml: A Foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, 2002, p. 5.

Decision, Change

“Environment is process, not container. (p. 30)”

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

1960s, Counterblast (1969)

“Since Sputnik and the satellites, the planet is enclosed in a manmade environment that ends "Nature" and turns the globe into a repertory theater to be programmed. Shakespeare at the Globe mentioning "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players" (As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7) has been justified by recent events in ways that would have struck him as entirely paradoxical. The results of living inside a proscenium arch of satellites is that the young now accept the public spaces of the earth as role-playing areas. Sensing this, they adopt costumes and roles and are ready to "do their thing" everywhere."”

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

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.9-10

Women, Men, World, Way

“The internal tendencies of every organism, if isolated, lead to its disintegration. But the processes of the wider system sustain and modify those internal tendencies by "nourishing" them and gradually increasing the mutual conformity of organism and environment.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 36

“What had originally been a straightforward battle of ideas between anarchy and fascism had been turned into a kind of ham-fisted parable of 9-11 and the war against terror, in which the words anarchy and fascism appear nowhere. … It struck me that for Hollywood to make V for Vendetta, it was a way for thwarted and impotent American liberals to feel that they were making some kind of statement about how pissed off they were with the current situation without really risking anything. It’s all set in England, which I think that probably, in most American eyes, is kind of a fairytale kingdom where we still perhaps still have giants. It doesn’t really exist; it might as well be in the Land of Oz for most Americans. So you can get set your political parable in this fantasy environment called England, and then you can vent your spleen against George Bush and the neo-conservatives. Those were my feelings, and I must admit those are completely based upon not having seen the film even once, but having read a certain amount of the screenplay. That was enough.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

On the film adaptation of V for Vendetta
Alan Moore on Anarchism (2009)

War, Way, Feeling, Idea

“My journey to veganism began when I was a sophomore in high school. … For a long time before that, I felt a connection to animals and believed it was wrong to eat creatures with personalities, thoughts, and the ability to show love and affection. I grew up on an animal farm … It was in this environment, with direct contact to farm animals, that I decided that eating meat was not in accordance with my values. … There is nothing more effective than tangible results to show people that athletic achievement and substantial muscle growth can be achieved healthfully on a plant-based diet.”

Robert Cheeke (1980) American bodybuilder

"Plant Power: Q & A with Vegan Bodybuilder Robert Cheeke" https://www.vegetariantimes.com/recipes/plant-power-q-a-with-vegan-bodybuilder-robert-cheeke, interview with Vegetarian Times (May 1, 2013).

Love, People, School, Time

“Even if the constants which economists wish to determine were less numerous, and the method of experiment more accessible, we should still be faced with the fact that the constants themselves are different at different times. The gravitation constant is the same always. But the economic constants — these elasticities of demand and supply — depending, as they do, upon human consciousness, are liable to vary. The constitution of the atom, as it were, and not merely its position, changes under the influence of environment.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 4

Change, Time, Dependency

“The role of administration in the modern state is profoundly affected by the general political and cultural environment of the age.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Source: Introduction to the Study of Public Administration, 1926, p. 7, as cited in: Moynihan (2009)

Age

“I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist (1910), pg. 116
1910s

Life, Education, Failure

“In the past, an innovationÕs momentum indicated significance. Now, in the network environment, where biological behaviour reigns, significance precedes momentum.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995), New Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World (1999)

Past

“There is a therapy of self-indulgence and adjustment which is little more than another weapon in the arsenal of social conformity, and there is a therapy which “makes the unconscious conscious, enlarges the scope of awareness.” There is a socialization which turns curious children into adult automatons in a social environment of repressive uniformity, and there is a socialization which turns selfish, impulsive children into self-aware and deliberate participants in a larger community.”

Benjamin R. Barber (1939–2017) US political scientist

Source: Forced to be Free (1971), p. 72, quotation is from Rollo May, Man’s Search for Himself, p. 101

Children, Communication, Selfishness

“The Decision Theory School : Another approach to management theory, undertaken by a growing and scholarly group, might be referred to as the decision theory school. This group concentrates on rational approach to decision-the selection from among possible alternatives of a course of action or of an idea. The approach of this school may be to deal with the decision itself, or to the persons or organizational group making the decision, or to an analysis of the decision process. Some limit themselves fairly much to the economic rationale of the decision, while others regard anything which happens in an enterprise the subject of their analysis, and still others expand decision theory to cover the psychological and sociological aspect and environment of decisions and decision-makers.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: "The Management Theory Jungle," 1961, p. 180

School, Idea, Decision, Personality

“The triplet of specifications - the product-market scope, the growth vector and the competitive advantage - describes the firm's product-market path in the external environment.”

Igor Ansoff (1918–2001) American mathematician

Source: Corporate Strategy, 1965, p. 110

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

Life, Truth, School, Law

“There's a very strong connection between a lot of the evils of the modern world—factory farming, abuse against women—and the environment. We're destroying the female. If you think about the earth as a female organism which it is, in its totality, you know how we're disrespecting and abusing it. … [I have] very strong feelings about factory farming … I’m a vegetarian myself … I don’t want any kind of suffering of any living form but it’s more to do with the awareness that so much of the meat on the planet is being produced by factory farms. Animals are being pumped full of growth hormones which are then getting fed to our kids. And it’s affecting the water, environment. … We are being duped and controlled by huge multinationals that are concerned about the short term, not the long term and don’t care about the individual.”

Thandie Newton (1972) English actress

“The ‘superhero’ in feisty actress Thandie Newton,” interview with Inquirer.net (13 April 2013) http://entertainment.inquirer.net/89505/the-superhero-in-feisty-actress-thandie-newton.

Women, World, Feeling, Thinking

“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

“It is an honour to be invited to address this conference today. For some time the Australian Defence Organisation has formally observed International Women’s Day. That is altogether appropriate. However, as all of you are no doubt aware, such formalities are rendered much less meaningful unless they are underpinned by tangible progress for women. And that necessarily implies cultural change in environments which have not been as conducive as they must be to women realising their full potential.”

David Morrison (1956) Australian army general

Address at the International Women's Day Conference (2013)

Women, Change, Time

“In the past several years, social work has increasingly focused on an ecological model. This model integrates both treatment and reform by conceptualizing and emphasizing the dysfunctional transactions between people and their physical and social environments. Human beings are viewed as developing and adapting through transactions with all elements of their environments. An ecological model gives attention to both internal and external factors. It does not view people as passive reactors to their environments but, rather, as being involved in dynamic and reciprocal interactions with them.”

Charles Zastrow (1942) American sociologist

Source: The practice of social work. (1995), p. 24

People, Past

“We need not only open trading systems, but systems that work for people around the world — taking into account not only the bottom line, but the well-being of working men and women, the protection of children against sweatshop labor, and the protection of the environment.”

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

Quotes, IPI speech (2000)

Women, Men, Children, People

“The practical effects of the Marxian-Federovian cult of technology were ruinous. Inspired by a materialist philosophy, the Soviet Union inflicted more far-reaching and lasting damage on the material environment than any regime in history. Green earth became desert, and pollution rose to life-threatening levels. No advantage to mankind was gained by the Soviet destruction of nature. Soviet citizens lived no longer than people in other countries - many of them a good deal less.”

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

The Unsaved: Nikolai Federov, Bolshevism and the Technological Pursuit of Immortality (p. 138)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Life, People, History, Nature

“The ultimate "causes of price" - to use a Classical term - lie deeply embedded in the psychology and techniques of mankind and his environment, and are as manifold as the sands of the sea. All economic analysis is an attempt to classify these manifold causes, to sort them out into categories of discourse that our limited minds can handle, and so to perceive the unity of structural relationship which both unites and separates the manifoldness. Our concepts of "" and "supply" are such broad categories. In whatever sense they are used, they are not ultimate determinants of anything, but they are convenient channels through which we can classify and describe the effects of the multitude of determinants of the system of economic magnitude.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1944) " A Liquidity Preference Theory of Market Prices http://cas.umkc.edu/econ/economics/faculty/wray/631Wray/Week%207/Boulding.pdf". In: Economica, New Series, Vol. 11, No. 42 (May, 1944), pp. 55-63. C. Brown (2003) " Toward a reconcilement of endogenous money and liquidity preference http://www.clt.astate.edu/crbrown/brownjpke.pdf" in: Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Winter 2003–4, Vol. 26, No. 2. 323 commented on this article, saying: "Boulding (1944) argued that if liquidity preference were divorced from the "demand for money," the former could come into its own as a theory of financial asset pricing. According to this view, rising liquidity preference or a "wave of bearish sentiment" is manifest in a shift from certain asset categories, specifically, those that are characterized by high capital uncertainty (that is, uncertainty about the future value of the asset as a result of market revaluation) to assets such as commercial paper or giltedged securities." 1940s

Lie, Sense, Sea

“Strategic intent describes a process of coping with turbulence through a direct, intuitive understanding of what is occurring in order to guide the work of a school. A turbulent environment cannot be tamed by rational analysis alone so that conventional strategic planning is deemed to be of little use. Yet it does not follow that a school's adaptive response must be left to a random distribution of lone individuals acting opportunistically and often in isolation as in a regime of intrapreneurship. Strategic intent relies on an intuitively formed pattern or gestalt”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

some would call it a vision — to give it unity and coherence
Source: Information Space, 1995, p. 36

School, Understanding

“Without an anti-environment, all environments are invisible.”

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

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 33

“Returning to the moon is an important step for our space program. Establishing an extended human presence on the moon could vastly reduce the costs of further space exploration, making possible ever more ambitious missions. Lifting heavy spacecraft and fuel out of the Earth's gravity is expensive. Spacecraft assembled and provisioned on the moon could escape its far lower gravity using far less energy, and thus, far less cost. Also, the moon is home to abundant resources. Its soil contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement.”

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

Speech on new space exploration initiatives http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040114-3.html (January 14, 2004) 2000s, 2004

Home, Time

“This was the angerless philosophy of Owen, which inspired him with a forbearance that never failed him, and gave him that regnant manner which charmed all who met him. We shall see what his doctrine of environment has done for society, if we notice what it began to do in his day, and what it has done since.
Men perished by battle, by tempest, by pestilence, Faith might comfort, but it did not save them. In every town, nests of pestilence co-existed with the churches, who were concerned alone with worship. Disease was unchecked by devotion. Then Owen asked, "Might not safety come by improved material condition?" As the prayer of hope brought no reply, as the scream of agony, if heard, was unanswered, as the priest, with the holiest intent, brought no deliverance, it seemed prudent to try the philosopher and the physician.
Then Corn Laws were repealed, because prayers fed nobody. Then parks were multiplied because fresh air was found to be a condition of health. Alleys and courts, were begun to be abolished-since deadly diseases were bred there. Streets were widened, that towns might be ventilated. Hours of labour were shortened, since exhaustion means liability to epidemic contagion. Recreation was encouraged, as change and rest mean life and strength. Temperance — thought of as self-denial — was found to be a necessity, as excess of any kind in diet, or labour, or pleasure means premature death. Those who took dwellings began to look, not only to drainage and ventilation, but to the ways of their near neighbours, as the most pious family may poison the air you breathe unless they have sanitary habits.”

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

Memorial dedication (1902)

Life, Death, Men, Health

“When we believe that to any degree, when you have any element of that influence upon you, your whole perspective of both your child and yourself is going to be different. And this is why our parents, the parents of our generation were more mature, very often and capable of receiving responsibilities at an earlier age, because they were not as extensively influenced by evolutionary psychology. And this is why children who are now growing up in a christian school environment, come to maturity more readily than some of us did. An evolutionary psychology does leave you a warped view on man. An evolutionary psychology looks backward to primitive man and his primitive past… Biblical psychology looks to a mature creation, Adam, and to a God given declared purpose ahead for mankind.”

Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001) American theologian

Audio lectures, Creationism and Psychology (n. d.)

God, Children, Age, School

“Cultures and religions do not exist apart from the individual minds that constitute them and the environments that constrain them, any more than biological species and varieties exist independently of the individual organisms that compose them and the environments that conform them. They are not well-bounded systems or definite clusters of beliefs, practices, and artifacts, but more or less regular distributions of causally connected thoughts, behaviors, material products, and environmental objects. To naturalistically understand what "cultures" are is to describe and explain the material causes responsible for reliable differences in these distributions.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 10
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Religion, Behavior, Understanding

“The players in a game are said to be in strategic equilibrium (or simply equilibrium) when their play is mutually optimal: when the actions and plans of each player are rational in the given strategic environment – i. e., when each knows the actions and plans of the others.”

Robert Aumann (1930) Israeli-American mathematician

Source: War and peace (2005), p. 4

Game, Optimism

“# Macrosocial systems. These include systems in communities and industrial sectors, and institutions operating at the overall level of a society. They constitute what I have called "domains". (Trist, 1976a; 1979a). One may regard media as socio-technical systems. McLuhan (1964) has shown that the technical character of different media has far-reaching effects on users. The same applies to architectural forms and the infrastructure of the built environment. Although these are not organizations, they are socio-technical phenomena. They are media in Heider's (1942) as well as McLuhan's sense.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981), p. 11

Communication, Sense

“Organizations need to undergo fundamental changes, both in order to adapt to the new business environment and to become ecologically sustainable.”

Fritjof Capra book The Hidden Connections

Source: The Hidden Connections (2002), p. 86 Ch. 4 Life and Leadership in Organizations http://beahrselp.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Capra-Hidden-Connections-Ch-4.pdf.

Business, Change

“The environment that nutures creative programmers kills management and marketing types - and vice versa.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

How Software Companies Die

“The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the ground rules of the environment. The ground rules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serves as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware.”

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

Source: 1960s, The Medium is the Message (1967), p. 93

“As we look around the organizational world we begin to see that it is possible to identify different species of organization in different kinds of environments. Just as we ﬁnd polar bears in arctic regions, camels in deserts, and alligators in swamps, we notice that certain species of organization are better ‘‘adapted’’ to speciﬁc environmental conditions than others. We ﬁnd that bureaucratic organizations tend to work most effectively in environments that are stable or protected in some way and that very different species are found in more competitive and turbulent regions, such as the environments of high-tech ﬁrms in the aerospace and microelectronics industries.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 39; As cited in as Vivien Martin -(2003) Leading change in health and social care. p. 157: About the organization as organism.

World, Way

“As a matter of fact, the adaptability of a program to changes in its objectives (often called maintainability) and to changes in its environment (nowadays called portability) can be measured primarily in terms of the degree to which it is neatly structured.”

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

Program Development by Stepwise Refinement (1971)

Change

“Youth instinctively understand the present environment – the electric drama. It lives mythically and in depth.”

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)

Youth, Understanding

“CONSIDERABLE attention has recently been devoted to understanding behavior in large organizational systems. Although some of this work has been based on research, it has more typically been general theorizing with little support from research data. Our interest in examining complex organizations is to study more systematically and empirically their internal functioning in relation to the demands of the external environment on the organization and the ability of the organization to cope effectively with these demands, contributing to a theory of the functioning of large organizations based on empirical research.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: "Differentiation and integration in complex organizations," 1967, p. 2

Behavior, Understanding, Support, Study

“The briefest definition of the Islamic order defines it as a unity of religion and law, upbringing and power, ideal and interest, the spiritual community and the state, willingness and force… An Islamic society without an Islamic authority is incomplete and without power; Islamic government without Islamic society is either utopia or violence. Generally speaking, a Muslim does not exist as a sole individual. If he wishes to live and survive as a Muslim, he must create an environment, a community, a system.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: The Islamic Declaration (1970), p. 26.

Religion, Law, Communication

“Give the youth a proper environment. Motivate them. Extend them the support they need. Each one of them has infinite source of energy. They will deliver.”

Dhirubhai Ambani (1932–2002) Indian business tycoon

From interview with Chitralekha

Youth, Motivation, Support

“Negroes could contain their rage when they found the means to force relatively radical changes in their environment. / In the North, on the other hand, street demonstrations were not even a mild expression of militancy. The turmoil of cities absorbs demonstrations as merely transitory drama which is ordinary in city life. Without a more effective tactic for upsetting the status quo, the power structure could maintain its intransigence and hostility.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement (1967)

Life, Hostility, Rage, Change

“Frankly, this is my position: I have been painting for two years, and my only models have been your [ Monet's ] own works; I have been following the wonderful path you broke for us. I have always worked regularly and conscientiously, but without advice or help, for I do not know any impressionist painter who would be able to guide me, living as I am in an environment more or less hostile to what I am doing. And so I fear I may lose my way, and I beg you to let me see you, if only for a short visit. I should be happy to show you five or six studies; perhaps you would tell me what you think of them and give me the advice I need so badly, for the fact is that I have the most horrible doubts, having always worked by myself, without teacher, encouragement, or criticism.”

Paul Signac (1863–1935) French painter

In a letter to Claude Monet, 1880; quoted by Geffroy: Claude Monet, vol. I, p. 175; as quoted by John Rewald, in Georges Seurat', a monograph https://ia800607.us.archive.org/23/items/georges00rewa/georges00rewa.pdf; Wittenborn and Compagny, New York, 1943. p. 15 In 1880 an exhibition of the works of Claude Monet had - as Signac was to say later - 'decided his career,' - and after his first efforts as an impressionist Signac had ventured to appeal to Monet, writing him this sentence in his letter

Hostility, Happiness, Fear, Way

“I’ve just typed myself into a revolutionary fervor again. Every so often the fury at injustice rises up in me and makes me want to smash something or burn something, but nothing in my immediate environment belongs to me so I have to refrain.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

“More complicated, but still a placid environment, is that which can be characterized in terms of clustering: goals and noxiants are not randomly distributed but band together in certain ways. This may be called the placid, clustered environment.”

Fred Emery (1925–1997) Australian psychologist

Source: The Causal Texture of Organizational Environments (1963), p. 28-29.

Way

“Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don't want the same to happen to us.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

context (2) "Editorial Slot"
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

“When learning is in focus, arrangements are made in the environment of the learner that communicate the learning task, and learning resources are made available to learners so that they can explore and master learning tasks.”

Béla H. Bánáthy (1919–2003) Hungarian linguist and systems scientist

Source: Systems Design of Education (1991), p. 110

Communication, Learning

“It is commonly observed — but not commonly enough! — that old folks removed from their homes to hospital settings are put at a tremendous disadvantage, even though their basic bodily needs are well provided for. They often appear to be quite demented — to be utterly incapable of feeding, clothing, and washing themselves, let alone engaging in any activities of greater interest. Often, however, if they are returned to their homes, they can manage quite well for themselves. How do they do this? Over the years, they have loaded their home environments with ultrafamiliar landmarks, triggers for habits, reminder of what to do, where to find the food, how to get dressed, where the telephone is, and so forth. An old person can be a veritable virtuoso of self-help in such a hugely overlearned world, in spite of his or her brain's increasing imperviousness to new bouts of learning… Taking them out of their homes is literally separating them from large parts of their minds — potentially just as devastating a development as undergoing brain surgery.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

World, Food, Home, Learning

“Any system of public administration inevitably reflects its environment.”

Leonard D. White (1891–1958) American historian

Leonard D. White (1932, 22), as cited in: Donald P. Moynihan. " Our Usable Past: A Historical Contextual Approach to Administrative Values https://www.lafollette.wisc.edu/images/publications/facstaff/moynihan/PAR69(5)UsablePast.pdf." Public Administration Review 69.5 (2009): 813-822.

“Observers are men, animals, or machines able to learn about their environment and impelled to reduce their uncertainty about the events which occur in it, by dint of learning… [We] shall examine human observers who, because we have an inside understanding of their observational process, belong to a special category. For the moment, we shall not bother with HOW an observer learns, but will concentrate upon WHAT he learns about, i. e. what becomes more certain.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 18.

Men, Understanding, Learning, Animals

“The Sultan then departed from the environs of the city, in which was a temple of the Hindus. The name of this place was Maharatu-l Hind. He saw there a building of exquisite structure, which the inhabitants said had been built, not by men, but by Genii, and there he witnessed practices contrary to the nature of man, and which could not be believed but from evidence of actual sight. The wall of the city was constructed of hard stone, and two gates opened upon the river flowing under the city, which were erected upon strong and lofty foundations to protect them against the floods of the river and rains. On both sides of the city there were a thousand houses, to which idol temples were attached, all strengthened from top to bottom by rivets of iron, and all made of masonry work; and opposite to them were other buildings, supported on broad wooden pillars, to give them strength.
In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and firmer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted. The Sultan thus wrote respecting it: - "If any should wish to construct a building equal to this, he would not be able to do it without expending an hundred thousand, thousand red dinars, and it would occupy two hundred years even though the most experienced and able workmen were employed."…
The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naptha and fire, and levelled with the ground.”

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

About the capture of Mathura. Elliot and Dowson, Vol. II : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 44-45 Also quoted (in part) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from Tarikh Yamini (Kitabu-l Yamini) by Al Utbi

Men, Support, Nature, Strong

“With us the disguise must be complete. The familiar identity of things has to be pulverized in order to destroy the finite associations with which our society increasingly enshrouds every aspect of our environment.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

Source: after 1970, posthumous, Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics', 1990, p. 168

“Any organization that deals with a changing environment ought not only to process information efficiently, but also create information and knowledge.”

Ikujiro Nonaka (1935) Japanese business theorist

Nonaka, I. (1994) “A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation”, Organization Science, Vol.5, No.1, February, p. 14. Quoted in: Bratianu (2010).
The Knowledge-creating Company, 1995

Knowledge, Change

“There is an issue of vital importance that most well-meaning parents are not aware of: the modern diet that most children are eating today creates a fertile cellular environment for cancer to emerge at a later age. Trying to prevent breast, prostate, and other cancers as an adult may not be totally possible because most risk factors cannot be changed at this late stage. The bottom line is that in order to have a major impact on preventing cancer we must intervene much earlier, even as early as the first ten years of life. In other words, childhood diets create adult cancers.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Introduction, p. xviii
Disease-Proof Your Child (2005)

Life, Children, Age, Parent

“The most common cause of low prices is pessimism — some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.”

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

1990 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1990.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Optimism, Business, Time

“It is probably true that business corrupts everything it touches. It corrupts politics, sports, literature, art, labor unions and so on. But business also corrupts and undermines monolithic totalitarianism. Capitalism is at its liberating best in a noncapitalist environment.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

"Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, Including: 'Absolute Faith Corrupts Absolutely'", The New York Times Magazine (April 25, 1971), p. 50.

Art, Literature, Business, Sport

“For a given system, the environment is the set of all objects outside the system: (1) a change in whose attributes affect the system and (2) whose attributes are changed by the behavior of the system.”

Arthur D. Hall (1925–2006) American electrical engineer

Source: A methodology for systems engineering, 1962, p. 61 cited in: Clute, Whitehead & Reid (1967) Progressive architecture. Vol.48, Nr. 7-9. p. 106

Behavior, Change

“How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvelous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)?… the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness… really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.”

Erwin Schrödinger book What Is Life?

What Is Life? (1944)

Death

“Enterprise Engineering is defined as that body of knowledge, principles, and practices having to do with the analysis, design, implementation and operation of an enterprise. In a continually changing and unpredictable competitive environment, the Enterprise Engineer addresses a fundamental question: “how to design and improve all elements associated with the total enterprise through the use of engineering and analysis methods and tools to more effectively achieve its goals and objectives”…”

Donald H. Liles (1947) American engineer

Source: The Enterprise Engineering Discipline (1996), p. 1

Question, Knowledge, Change

“Today, the growers are like a punch-drunk old boxer who doesn't know he's past his prime. The times are changing. The political and social environment has changed. The chickens are coming home to roost — and the time to account for past sins is approaching.”

Cesar Chavez (1927–1993) American farm worker, labor leader, and civil rights activist

What the Future Holds (1984)

Home, Change, Time, Past

“What does it mean, then, to become part of God’s work in the world? What does it mean to live a Christian life? One way to answer that question is to look back into the life of the Trinity and the original creation. God made us to ever increasingly share in his own joy and delight in the same way he has joy and delight within himself. We share his joy first as we give him glory (worshipping and serving him rather than ourselves); second, as we honor and serve the dignity of other human beings made in the image of God’s glory; and third, as we cherish his derivative glory in the world of nature, which also reflects it. We glorify and enjoy him only as we worship him, serve the human community, and care for the created environment.
Another way to look at the Christian life, however, is to see it from the perspective of the final restoration. The world and our hearts are broken. Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was an infinitely costly rescue operation to restore justice to the oppressed and marginalized, physical wholeness to the diseased and dying, community to the isolated and lonely, and spiritual joy and connection to those alienated from God. To be a Christian today is to become part of that same operation, with the expectation of suffering and hardship and the joyful assurance of eventual success.”

Tim Keller (pastor) book The Reason for God

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008), Ch. 14: The Dance of God

Life, Death, God, World

“I'll say this about nuclear weapons. You know I'm not sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I'm not in on the planning. I'll take it at face value that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff successfully eliminated nuclear weapons in the first phase of the operation.But keep in mind this. That the Bush Administration has built a new generation of nuclear weapons that we call 'usable nukes.' And they have a nuclear posture now, which permits the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons in a non-nuclear environment, if the Commander in Chief deems U. S. forces to be in significant risk.If we start bombing Iran, I'm telling you right now, it's not going to work. We're not going to achieve decapitation, regime change, all that. What will happen is the Iranians will respond, and we will feel the pain instantaneously, which will prompt the Bush administration to phase two, which will have to be boots on the ground. And we will put boots on the ground, we will surge a couple of divisions in, probably through Azerbaijan, down the Caspian Sea coast, in an effort to push the regime over. And when they don't push over, we now have 40,000 troops trapped. We have now reached the definition of significant numbers of U. S. troops in harm's way, and there is no reserve to pull them out! There's no more cavalry to come riding to the rescue. And at that point in time, my concern is that we will use nuclear weapons to break the backbone of Iranian resistance, and it may not work.But what it will do is this: it will unleash the nuclear genie. And so for all those Americans out there tonight who say, 'You know what - taking on Iran is a good thing.' I just told you if we take on Iran, we're gonna use nuclear weapons. And if we use nuclear weapons, the genie ain't going back in the bottle, until an American city is taken out by an Islamic weapon in retaliation. So, tell me, you want to go to war with Iran. Pick your city. Pick your city. Tell me which one you want gone. Seattle? L. A.? Boston? New York? Miami. Pick one. Cause at least one's going. And that's something we should all think about before we march down this path of insanity that George Bush has us headed on.</p”

Scott Ritter (1961) American weapons inspector and writer

October 16, 2006
2006

Pain, War, Way, Feeling

“Unless we address those problems from the point of view of a world where development is genuinely sustainable, where protection of the environment is vital, where the earth's wealth is redistributed in favour of the poorest people in the poorest countries, in the next few years we shall face a growing imbalance between north and south. Ever-increasing numbers of people will flee from environmental destruction—from rain forest destruction, increased desertification and the increased flooding linked to that. Millions of people will have to flee from the places where they grew up and live and there will be growing imbalances in the world, and growing poverty. There has to be a change in the relationship. That means that higher prices must be paid for commodities. It means that there must be an increased aid programme, and an understanding that we are all in this together.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/dec/14/overseas-development in the House of Commons (14 December 1990). 1990s

People, World, Understanding, Problem

“Why can't a Democrat get fired up about protecting the environment and enacting gun control legislation just as right wing republicans get fired up about making sure that children have access to assault weapons and banning 'The catcher in the rye' and 'Harry Potter?”

Moby (1965) Activist, American musician, DJ and photographer

"imo" http://www.moby.com/journal/2002-12-28/imo.html, journal entry (28 December 2002) at moby.com

Children

“What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day when we suddenly change the environment in which some species of living plant is situated.”

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck book Philosophie Zoologique

Ce que la nature fait avec beaucoup de temps, nous le faisons tous les jours, en changeant nous-mêmes subitement, par rapport à un végétal vivant, les circonstances dans lesquelles lui et tous les individus de son espèce se rencontroient.
Philosophie Zoologique, Vol. I (1809), p. 226; translation by Hugh Elliot, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals (1914), p. 109.

Nature, Change

“By historical standards and given the gloomy corporate profits outlook in an environment of high corporate debt and rising interest rates, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is considerably overvalued at late-2006 levels and should be avoided. I say that, even setting aside the imminent prospect of a collapsed dollar and the recession and hyperinflation that would accompany it.”

Peter D. Schiff (1963) American entrepreneur, economist and author

Quotes from Crash Proof (2006)

““Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example…have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 287-288)

People, Idea, Fraud, Problem

Quotes about environment page 3

Quotes about environment
page 3