Quotes about environment
page 5

“While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) American businessman and philanthropist

Source: Wealth, 1889, p. 655

Law, Business, Future

“Well, what is a political film? A film about politicians? Or a film about issues — sexism, racism, the environment, nuclear policy? I decided on the broader definition. If I'd limited myself to films about politicians, it would have been a short list: How many characters in any mainstream American movie seem aware of the political process, or belong to a party?”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Ranking "the 20 best political films of the past two decades" in "The Big Picture: Roger Ebert" in MotherJones (May/June 1996) http://www.motherjones.com/arts/film/1996/05/ebert.html

“President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.”

Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution

Source: Pictures from an Institution (1954) [novel], Ch. 1, p. 11

“Scientific and technological “solutions” which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.”

E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) British economist

Source: Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), p. 31.

“In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment, is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug… that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat.”

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

"The Man Who Named the World" (1990)

Food, Imagination, Game

“In June of 1964 the research group and academic program moved to Penn bringing with it most of the faculty, students, and research projects. Our activities flourished in the very supportive environment that Penn and Wharton provided. The wide variety of faculty members that we were able to involve in our activities significantly enhanced our capabilities. By the mid-1960s I had become uncomfortable with the direction, or rather, the lack of direction, of professional Operations Research. I had four major complaints.
First, it had become addicted to its mathematical tools and had lost sight of the problems of management. As a result it was looking for problems to which to apply its tools rather than looking for tools that were suitable for solving the changing problems of management. Second, it failed to take into account the fact that problems are abstractions extracted from reality by analysis. Reality consists of systems of problems, problems that are strongly interactive, messes. I believed that we had to develop ways of dealing with these systems of problems as wholes. Third, Operations Research had become a discipline and had lost its commitment to interdisciplinarity. Most of it was being carried out by professionals who had been trained in the subject, its mathematical techniques. There was little interaction with the other sciences professions and humanities. Finally, Operations Research was ignoring the developments in systems thinking — the methodology, concepts, and theories being developed by systems thinkers.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture http://booksite.elsevier.com/samplechapters/9780123859150/Front_Matter.pdf. Elsevier, 2011. p. xiii Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985

Way, Mathematics, Support, Problem

“This reduction implies the release of funds for development and a shift of the labour force previously dedicated to military industries toward peaceful activities, protection of human rights, conservation of the environment, the eradication of illiteracy, promotion of education and scientific research together with enhanced efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals and implement the agenda for the post-2015 period.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

CELAC / Zone of Peace: “A key step to countering the globalization of militarism” – UN Expert http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14215&LangID=E. 2014

Education, Peace, Effort

“Whole organization systems. At one limit these would be plants or equivalent self-standing workplaces. At the other, they would be entire corporations or public agencies. They persist by maintaining a steady state with their environment.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981)

“There is no. man, there is no people, without a God. That God may be a visible idol, carved of wood or stone, to which sacrifice is offered in the forest, in the temple, or in the market-place; or it may be an invisible idol, fashioned in a man's own image and worshipped ardently at his own personal shrine. Somewhere in the universe there is that in which each individual has firm faith, and on which he places steady reliance. The fool who says in his heart "There is no God" really means there is no God but himself. His supreme egotism, his colossal vanity, have placed him at the center of the universe which is thereafter to be measured and dealt with in terms of his personal satisfactions. So it has come to pass that after nearly two thousand years much of the world resembles the Athens of St. Paul's time, in that it is wholly given to idolatry; but in the modern case there are as many idols as idol worshippers, and every such idol worshipper finds his idol in the looking-glass. The time has come once again to repeat and to expound in thunderous tones the noble sermon of St. Paul on Mars Hill, and to declare to these modern idolaters "Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you."
There can be no cure for the world's ills and no abatement of the world's discontents until faith and the rule of everlasting principle are again restored and made supreme in the life of men and of nations. These millions of man-made gods, these myriads of personal idols, must be broken up and destroyed, and the heart and mind of man brought back to a comprehension of the real meaning of faith and its place in life. This cannot be done by exhortation or by preaching alone. It must be done also by teaching; careful, systematic, rational teaching, that will show in a simple language which the uninstructed can understand what are the essentials of a permanent and lofty morality, of a stable and just social order, and of a secure and sublime religious faith.
Here we come upon the whole great problem of national education, its successes and its disappointments, its achievements and its problems yet unsolved. Education is not merely instruction far from it. It is the leading of the youth out into a comprehension of his environment, that, comprehending, he may so act and so conduct himself as to leave the world better and happier for his having lived in it. This environment is not by any means a material thing alone. It is material of course, but, in addition, it is intellectual, it is spiritual. The youth who is led to an understanding of nature and of economics and left blind and deaf to the appeals of literature, of art, of morals and of religion, has been shown but a part of that great environment which is his inheritance as a human being. The school and the college do much, but the school and the college cannot do all. Since Protestantism broke up the solidarity of the ecclesiastical organization in the western world, and since democracy made intermingling of state and church impossible, it has been necessary, if religion is to be saved for men, that the family and the church do their vital cooperative part in a national organization of educational effort. The school, the family and the church are three cooperating educational agencies, each of which has its weight of responsibility to bear. If the family be weakened in respect of its moral and spiritual basis, or if the church be neglectful of its obligation to offer systematic, continuous and convincing religious instruction to the young who are within its sphere of influence, there can be no hope for a Christian education or for the powerful perpetuation of the Christian faith in the minds and lives of the next generation and those immediately to follow. We are trustees of a great inheritance. If we abuse or neglect that trust we are responsible before Almighty God for the infinite damage that will be done in the life of individuals and of nations…. Clear thinking will distinguish between men's different associations, and it will be able to render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and to render unto God the things which are God's.”

Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947) American philosopher, diplomat, and educator

Making liberal men and women : public criticism of present-day education, the new paganism, the university, politics and religion https://archive.org/stream/makingliberalmen00butluoft/makingliberalmen00butluoft_djvu.txt (1921)

Life, Men, God, People

“If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.”

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

To Wilfred Watson, October 6 1965. Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p. 325
1960s

Art, Painting

“Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It fragments organisms into “traits,” explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is a product of natural selection operating “for” the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view specific behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual.”

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

"Our Natural Place", p. 243
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

Life, People, Behavior, Question

“I consider that Curie's Principle has two major consequences:
First: It shows that the class of processes which can be isolated for causal representation, not requiring the inference of external causes, is wider than the class of energetically closed systems. One-way processes in which the system loses energy can be isolable, in the sense that they can be given complete representation without taking their environment into account.
Second: It suggests the possibility of a geometrical physics treating 3D spatial relations, i. e., angles or lengths, as primary. Just as statistical mechanics, the theory of crystal symmetry, and Group theory in quantum mechanics, are useful without assumptions about forces, so Curie's principle, with an appropriate model, can determine the path of a one-way process without such assumptions…”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Pierre Curie's Principle of One Way-Process (1970)

Way, Sense

“People, when cognizant, influence their personal growth and their environment by their will.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

State of the Art (2000)

People, Personality

“As the city continues to grow, the costs of congestion – to our health, to our environment, and to our economy – are only going to get worse. The question is not whether we want to pay but how do we want to pay. With an increased asthma rate? With more greenhouse gases? Wasted time? Lost business? And higher prices? Or, do we charge a modest fee to encourage more people to take mass transit?”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/environment_sustainability/mayor_michael_bloomberg_delivers_planyc_a_greener_greater_new_york
Environment

People, Health, Question, Business

“Sexual Harassment Legislation often creates a hostile environment, an environment of female-as-child.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 297.

Hostility

“Look around the world. Wherever you damage the environment, you have conflict. We have had enough conflict in [South Africa] – now is the time for peace.”

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

Speaking & Features, Standing Up To Goliath

World, Peace, Time

“The inductive-reasoning system I have described above consists of a multitude of “elements” in the form of belief-models or hypotheses that adapt to the aggregate environment they jointly create. Thus it qualifies as an adaptive complex system. After some initial learning time, the hypotheses or mental models in use are mutually co-adapted. Thus we can think of a consistent set of mental models as a set of hypotheses that work well with each other under some criterion—that have a high degree of mutual adaptedness. Sometimes there is a unique such set, it corresponds to a standard rational expectations equilibrium, and beliefs gravitate into it. More often there is a high, possibly very high, multiplicity of such sets. In this case we might expect inductive reasoning systems in the economy—whether in stock-market speculating, in negotiating, in poker games, in oligopoly pricing, in positioning products in the market—to cycle through or temporarily lock into psychological patterns that may be non-recurrent, path-dependent, and increasingly complicated. The possibilities are rich.”

W. Brian Arthur (1946) American economist

Source: Inductive Reasoning and Bounded Rationality (The El Farol Problem) (1994), p. 8

Game, Thinking, Learning, Time

“Knowledge management often generates theories that are too general or abstract to be easily testable. In some cases, simulation modeling can help. [WE have developed] an agent-based simulation model derived from a conceptual framework, the Information Space or I-Space and use it to explore the differences between a neoclassical and a Schumpeterian information environment.”

Max Boisot (1943–2011) British academic and educator

Boisot, M. H., Canals, A., & MacMillan, I. (2004). " Simulating I-Space (SIS): An agent-based approach to modeling knowledge flows http://entrepreneurship.wharton.upenn.edu/research/simispace3_200405.pdf." Working papers of the Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Knowledge, Help

“Canada is a great country, one of the hopes of the world. We can be a better one – a country of greater equality, justice, and opportunity. We can build a prosperous economy and a society that shares its benefits more fairly. We can look after our seniors. We can offer better futures for our children. We can do our part to save the world’s environment. We can restore our good name in the world. We can do all of these things because we finally have a party system at the national level where there are real choices; where your vote matters; where working for change can actually bring about change. In the months and years to come, New Democrats will put a compelling new alternative to you. My colleagues in our party are an impressive, committed team. Give them a careful hearing; consider the alternatives; and consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.”

Jack Layton (1950–2011) Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada

"A letter to Canadians from the Honourable Jack Layton." https://pdf.yt/d/RKyhnDdu-DXG3J6s 20 August 2011. Released upon his death.

Children, World, Justice, Hope

“These days there are painters that go inside a factory in order to be inspired by the noise of machines, so that it affects their works. Of course, artists need sensibility; sensibility towards their environment and their community, but when they are stirred enough by their experiences in their society they can create their art in small studios.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Negin (1971), p. 57

Art, Communication

“Nigel Barton (On TV): I feel I don't belong here, that's my trouble.
Interviewer (on TV): Well, where do you belong? At home?
Harry Barton: Of course!
Nigel Barton (on TV): No, I'm afraid I don't. Now it hurts to say this, of course, but it's the truth. Back at home, in the village, in the workingmen's club, with people I went to school with, I'm so much on the defensive, you see. They suspect me of making qualitative judgments about their environment, you understand, but it's not that I wish to do so. Yet I even find my own father looking at me oddly some times, waiting to pounce on some remark, some expression in my face, watching me like a hawk. I don't feel at home in either place. I don't belong. It's a tightrope between two different worlds, and I'm walking it.
Harry Barton: You're a bloody liar, Nigel!”

Dennis Potter (1935–1994) English television dramatist, screenwriter and journalist

Stand up, Nigel Barton (1965)

People, Truth, World, School

“When the environs of Orchha became the site of the royal standards, an ordinance was issued authorising the demolition of the idol temple, which Bir Singh Deo had erected at a great expense by the side of his private palace, and also the idols contained in it…”

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Orchha (Madhya Pradesh) Shahjahan-Nama The Shahjahan Nama of ‘Inayat Khan, translated by A.R. Fuller and edited and compiled by W.E. Beyley and Z.A. Desai, OUP, Delhi, 1090, p. 161.

“One should not shy away from creating an environment of adaptability.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Stay calm during turbulent times: Indra Nooyi

“The corpses of water-dwelling animals often sink to the bottom and become covered with sediment. The sediment tends to protect the dead body and even at times retain an impression of its shape and external anatomical details. This environment then provides the means by which the bones of the skeleton are mineralized. …most land animals die and fall to the ground, without any chance of a freak flood casting them into an environment more favorable to fossilization.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Water, Chance, Time, Animals

“Both the old and new approaches share a scepticism toward rational-actor models of organisation, and each views institutionalisation as a state-dependent process that makes organisations less instrumentally rational by limiting the options they can pursue. Both emphasise the relationship between organisations and their environments, and both promise to reveal aspects of reality that are inconsistent with organisations’ formal accounts. Each approach stresses the role of culture in shaping organisational reality.”

Paul DiMaggio (1951) American sociologist

Source: Introduction to The New Institutionalism and Organizational Analysis, 1991, p. 12

Reality, Dependency

“Of course, going vegetarian is a positive step to help stop animal suffering; it's also great for your health and the environment. I just feel better since I stopped eating meat, and when you feel better, I think you look better too.”

Pippa Black (1982) actress

Interview with PETA Asia Pacific; quoted in "TV Star Goes Green for PETA's Ad Campaign" http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/GE0711/S00107.htm, Scoop (20 November 2007).

Health, Feeling, Thinking, Suffering

“Where the environment is too soft and luxurious and no strife is required for survival, not only are weak strains and individuals allowed to survive and encouraged to breed but the strong types also grow fat mentally and physically.”

Madison Grant book The Passing of the Great Race

Page 20.
The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Strong

“What we kids didn't understand was that we were living in a commercial, commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold. As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 56

World, Understanding, Parting

“It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. My prison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whose cursed touch turns everything to the brutal service of Mammon.”

Alexander Berkman book Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist

Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), Ch. 18: "The Solitary".

Housing

“Models of bounded rationality describe how a judgement or decision is reached (that is, the heuristic processes or proximal mechanisms) rather than merely the outcome of the decision, and they describe the class of environments in which these heuristics will succeed or fail.”

Reinhard Selten (1930–2016) German economist

Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten eds. Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox. MIT Press, Cambridge MA. (2001), p. 4

Decision

“As Akins observes, it is not the point of our sensory systems that they should detect "basic" or "natural" properties of the environment, but that they should serve our "narcissistic" purposes in staying alive; nature doesn't build epistemic engines.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

citing Kathleen Akins. "On Piranhas, Narcissism and Mental Representations: An Essay on Intentionality and Naturalism" (1989)
Consciousness Explained (1991)

Nature

“People regard their environment in terms of objects. Therefore it is simple to think in the same way when it comes to designing a model.”

Ivar Jacobson (1939) Swedish computer scientist

Source: Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use Case Driven Approach (1992), p. 42; cited in: Sten Carlsson and Benneth Christiansson. (1999) " The Concept of Object and its Relation to Human Thinking: Some Misunderstandings Concerning the Connection between Object-Orientation and Human Thinking http://www.vits.org/publikationer/dokument/289.pdf." Informatica, Lith. Acad. Sci. 10.2. p. 147-160.

People, Way, Thinking

““You’ll find God among the poor,” they say. Is that true anymore? Is the connection between poverty and divinity simply a panacea for the world’s destitute, an assurance that they’ll be rewarded in the hereafter? Or does a material deficit provide space for God? My love of God elevates the intention of this book beyond the dry and admirable establishment of collectivized communities. I am enraptured by the magnetic pull of evolution: What is this energy that heals the body and escalates one cell to two, that repairs and creates and calculates in harmony with environment, outside of time? Where is evolution trying to go? Evolutionary psychologists would likely say the imposition of an anthropocentric concept like “trying” or “intending” is naïve, but I’m not going to ask one, they get enough airtime, the killjoys. I remain uncharmed by the incessant rationalization that requires the spirit’s capitulation. The infusion of the scientific with the philosophical is materialism. The manifesto for our salvation is not in this sparse itinerary.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Love, God, Books, World

“No less incommensurable with the working-world than the philosophical question is the sound of true poetry. […] The lover, too, stands outside the tight chain of efficiency of this working world, and [so does] whoever else approaches the margin of existence through some deep existential disturbance (which always brings a "shattering" of one's environment), or through, say, the proximity of death.”

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) German philosopher

Source: Leisure, the Basis of Culture (1948), The Philosophical Act, pp. 67–68

Death, World, Lovers, Question

“My approach is simply to seek out very talented people, ensure that the environment at SpaceX is as motivating & enjoyable as possible and establish clear & measurable objectives.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

People, Motivation

“The truth is, Homo sapiens sapiens is pretty much the same the world over, regardless of skin color or technological development. Racists and provincial types have problems with this fact, but it is a fact. All mortals have the same potential, and only chance determines who’s playing a spinet or who’s clubbing dinner to death with a big rock. And, you know what? Mortals adapt to the environment in which they’re placed. Switch babies between savages and technologicals, and nobody notices! I know, because I’ve seen it done. I’ve seen the son of a club-carrying cave dweller fuming because his accounting software wasn’t quite adequate for his needs. All humans have the same brain package.”

Kage Baker book Sky Coyote

Source: Sky Coyote (1999), Chapter 11 (p. 72)

Death, Truth, World, Color

“At the present we have no adequate scientific method for representing the psychological life span. In accord with the general methods of psychology, the study of environmental influences began with classification and statistics… they gave us excellent descriptions of the home environment. The method of representation is partly akin to that of the novelist i. e., one trying to make as lifelike picture of the situation as possible by choosing expressive words and bringing out significant traits with examples. In general, the descriptions that have been made valuable to science have not been those made by scientific methods. Where theoretical concepts have been introduced with the concrete description, they often stand out as something alien. In stead of scientific descriptions they are nothing more than speculative interpretation.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 12-13.

Life, Home, Study, Science

“The present is always invisible because its environmental. No environment is perceptible, simply because it saturates the whole field of attention.”

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

Mademoiselle: the magazine for the smart young woman, Volume 64, 1966, p. 114
1960s

“Part of the unknown reality, then, is hidden beneath language and the enforced pattern of accustomed words-so, for an exercise, look about your environment. Make up new, different 'words' for the objects that you see about you. Pick up any object, for example. Hold it for a few seconds, feel its texture, look at its color, and spontaneously give it a new name by uttering the sounds that come into your mind. See how the sounds bring out certain aspects of the object that you may not have noticed before. The new word will fit as much as the old one did. It may, in fact, fit better. Do this with many objects, following the same procedure. You can instead say the name of any object backwards. In such ways you break up to some extent the automatic patterning of familiar phrases, so that you can perceive the individuality that is within each object.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 726, p. 460
The “Unknown” Reality: Volume Two, (1979)

Color, Way, Feeling, Exercises

“By giving women training to sue a company for a ‘hostile environment’ if someone tells a dirty joke, we are training women to run to the Government as Substitute Husband (or Father). This gets companies to fear women, but not to respect women. The best preparation we can give women to succeed in the workplace is the preparation to overcome barriers rather than to sue: successful people don’t sue, they succeed.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 351.

Women, Hostility, People, Fear

“When we invent a new technology, we become cannibals. We eat ourselves alive since these technologies are merely extensions of ourselves. The new environment shaped by electric technology is a cannibalistic one that eats people. To survive one must study the habits of cannibals.”

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

Source: 1960s, Hot & Cool (1967), p. 261

People, Study

“I want to make it perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to conduct our lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our actions, including the consequences to other people, and the consequences to the environment. I believe it is essential to act in ways that are sympathetic to the environment, now and in the future. I believe that the world has genuine problems and I believe they must be addressed effectively.
But I also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is immensely difficult, and I believe the consequences of our actions are often difficult to know in advance.”

Michael Crichton book State of Fear

State of Fear (2004)

People, World, Way, Problem

“Darwinian natural selection only yields adaptation to changing local environments, and better function in an immediate habitat might just as well be achieved by greater simplicity in form and behavior as by ever-increasing complexity.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

Source: Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998) Triumph of the Root-Heads, p. 355

Behavior, Nature, Change

“The essence of formulating strategy is relating a company to its environment.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

Source: Competitive strategy, 1980, p. 3

“Are there people who simply can't change their diet? There certainly are. Now, you have to ask, ‘Are they given all the information? Are they given all the motivation? Do they have the opportunity and the environment to support this?’ Most of the time, when I have a patient who can't change their diet, it's because of their surroundings. Environment is huge. Culture is huge.”

Kim A. Williams (1955) American cardiologist

Interview in the book What the Health https://books.google.it/books?id=FIY8DgAAQBAJ&pg=PT0 by Eunice Wong (Xlibris, 2017).

People, Motivation, Support, Change

“ Citizens of a modern society need […] more than that ordinary "common sense" which was defined by Stuart Chase as that which tells you that the world is flat. They need to be systematically aware of the powers and limitations of symbols, especially words, if they are to guard against being driven into complete bewilderment by the complexity of their semantic environment. The first of the principles governing symbols is this: The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; the map is NOT the territory it stands for. (editor's link)”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

See also: The Meaning of Meaning (1923)
See also: Science and Sanity (1933)
Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Word Is Not the Thing, pp. 29-30

World, Sense

“Haiku reading and writing can lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of life and our environment.”

William J. Higginson (1938–2008) American writer

Haiku Handbook Mcagraw Hill Books 1985 ISBN 0070287864

Life, Understanding, Reading

“The philosophy of the impossible has been the dominant motive in human affairs for the past two centuries. We have pursued the mastery of nature as if we ourselves were not a portion of that nature. We have boasted of our command over our physical environment while we ourselves have done our urgent best to destroy it.”

Robert Ardrey book The Social Contract

The Social Contract: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins of Order and Disorder (1970)

Motivation, Nature, Past

“Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.5 Aggression

Behavior

“There will have to be three objects for farming and farm products. First, we must end over-production. The over-production that is taking place in Europe and the United States is damaging and obscenely wasteful. It is damaging to the environment, and it is obviously obscenely wasteful when products that are the result of over-production are being burnt in an attempt to maintain prices…Secondly, we must end export dumping. Instead, we must promote aid and trade policies that encourage self-reliant production, which is more protective of the local economy and less dependent on the economies of western Europe and of the United States…Thirdly, what happens to the political sovereignty of poor countries that do not have the infrastructure that is available in Europe and north America when they are told that, because of the debt crisis, they must open up their economies to multinational capital to do whatever it will, and when the IMF and the World bank tell them that they must cut social expenditure? They are now told that they must pursue free trade policies for farm products. Those policies add up to disaster for poor countries.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1990/nov/23/general-agreement-on-tariffs-and-trade-1 in the House of Commons (23 November 1990). 1990s

World, Dependency, Country

“For wide classes of organizations there are very strong inertial pressures on structure arising from both internal arrangements (for example, internal politics) and from the environment (for example, public legitimation of organizational activity). To claim otherwise is to ignore the most obvious feature of organizational life. Failing churches do not become retail stores nor do firms transform themselves into churches.”

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

Source: "The Population Ecology of Organizations," 1977, p. 957

Life, Strong

“Adam Warlock, a being who wished nothing more than to spend the rest of his days within the peaceful environment of the Soul Gem. He now possesses the Infinite Power and the responsibility that goes with it. While I, whose entire life was dedicated to the pursuit of power, now find myself scraping out a living from the soil. Irony worthy of the drama.
Yet strangely enough though, I envy not Adam Warlock.
Somehow I feel, that in the long run, Thanos of Titan came out ahead in this particular deal.”

Jim Starlin (1949) Comic creator

Thanos, in The Infinity Gauntlet (1991), Issue 6 : The Final Confrontation

Life, Peace, Feeling, Soul

“There are people who grew up in rough environments, and you just don't hear about it. And they make it in business. They're doctors. They're lawyers. But we're not talking about that. I don't think that makes me what I am. What makes me what I am is that you have success, but you keep your head on straight and you make the right decisions in life.”

Marshall Faulk (1973) All-American college football player, professional football player, running back, Pro Football Hall of Fame memb…

Sports Illustrated January 2002.

Life, People, Business, Thinking

“I am an American. Black. Conservative. I don't use "African American", because I'm American, I'm black and I'm conservative. I don't like people trying to label me. "African American" is socially acceptable for some people, but I am not some people. … Barack Obama is more of an international. I think he's out of the mainstream and always has been. Look, he was raised in Kenya, his mother was white from Kansas and her family had an influence on him, it’s true, but his dad was Kenyan, and when he was going to school he got a lot of fellowships, scholarships, he stayed in the academic environment for a long time. He spent most of his career as an intellectual.”

Herman Cain (1945) American writer, businessman and activist

[Herman Cain on Why ‘The Black Guy Is Winning’: Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg View, 2011-06-13, Jeffrey, Goldberg, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-13/herman-cain-on-why-the-black-guy-is-winning-jeffrey-goldberg.html, 2011-10-07]

People, School, Family, Thinking

“It is hard to say whether increasing complexity is the cause or the effect of man's effort to cope with his expanding environment. In either case a central feature of the trend has been the development of large and very complex systems which tie together modern society. These systems include abstract or non-physical systems, such as government and the economic system. They also include large physical systems like pipe line and power distribution systems, transportation and electrical communication systems. The growth of these systems has increased the need not only for over-all planning, but also for long-range development of the systems. This need has induced increased interest in the methods by which efficient planning and design can be accomplished in complex situations where no one scientific discipline can account for all the factors. Two similar disciplines which emerged about the time of World War II to cope with these problems are called systems engineering and operations research.”

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

Source: A methodology for systems engineering, 1962, p. 5: About the evolution of systems engineering; Partly cited in: Allen B. Rosenstein (1965) " Systems engineering and Modern Engineering Design http://books.google.com/books?id=HDp9ReqM314C&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false"

War, World, Communication, Problem

“The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free.”

Julian Assange (1971) Australian editor, activist, publisher and journalist

Julian Assange answers your questions, The Guardian, December 3, 2010, 2010-12-14 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/dec/03/julian-assange-wikileaks,

Bird, Change

“All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.”

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

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 84

“Our world is not an optimal place, fine tuned by omnipotent forces of selection. It is a quirky mass of imperfections, working well enough (often admirably); a jury-rigged set of adaptations built of curious parts made available by past histories in different contexts. […] A world optimally adapted to current environments is a world without history, and a world without history might have been created as we find it. History matters; it confounds perfection and proves that current life transformed its own past.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Flamingo's Smile

"Only His Wings Remained", p. 54
The Flamingo's Smile (1985)

Life, World, History, Optimism

“The government is making another mistake, although purely ideological this time, by thinking about the responsibility pact in terms of contracts that would give rise to reciprocal concessions from companies. Indeed, the government cannot negotiate with companies because the decisions of business leaders are always individual. They are not civil servants working to orders, but free and lucid agents who make their decisions, particularly on investment and job creation, by individually assessing their risks based on the stability of the environment and the favourable outlook for returns on investment. By contrast, an effective government can, and must, create the right circumstances for investment decisions to generate the conditions for growth.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Le programme de stabilité et le pacte de responsabilité : la trajectoire des finances publiques de 2014 à 2017 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2499496 Article in Revue de Droit Fiscal n31-35 (2014). Budgetary policy, The 2014 French Responsibility and Solidarity Pact

Business, Thinking, Decision, Time

“In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

This related misquote http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/six-things-darwin-never-said appeared in The Living Clocks (1971) by Ritchie R. Ward. Misattributed

“There were three men whose lives became confused in history and merged, and whose composite history became known as the life of Christ... Each was highly gifted psychically, knew of his role, and accepted it willingly. The three men were a part of one entity, gaining physical existence in one time. They were not born on the same date, however. There are reasons why the entity did not return as one person. For one thing, the full consciousness would be too strong for one physical vehicle. For another, the entity wanted a more diversified environment than could otherwise be provided.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 271-272

Life, Men, History, Strong

“Parallelism: Propositions about the behavior of individuals and the performance of institutions that have been tested in laboratory microeconomies apply also to nonlaboratory environments where similar ceteris paribus conditions prevail.”

Vernon L. Smith (1927) American economist

Source: "Relevance of laboratory experiments to testing resource allocation theory," 1980, p. 349.

Behavior

“[Life space was defined as] the totality of facts which determine the behavior (B) of an individual (or group/organization) at a certain moment. The life space (L) represents the totality of possible events. The life space includes the person (P) and the environment (E). B = f(L) = f”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

P.E
Source: 1930s, Principles of topological psychology, 1936, p. 216 as cited in: David Boje, Bernard Burnes, John Hassard (2012) The Routledge Companion to Organizational Change. p. 34.

Life, Behavior, Personality

“SPAN ID=Whether_he_realizes>Whether he realizes it or not, however, Mr. Mets is affected every hour of his life not only by the words he hears and uses, but also by his unconscious assumptions about language. […] Such unconscious assumptions determine the effect that words have on him -- which in turn determines the way he acts, whether wisely or foolishly. Words -- the way he uses them and the way he takes them when spoken by others -- largely shape his beliefs, his prejudices, his ideals, his aspirations. They constitute the moral and intellectual atmosphere in which he lives -- in short, his semantic environment.”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), The Niagara of Words, p. 18

Life, Way

“The first living organisms on Earth doubtless arose in an aqueous environment, and the course of evolution has been shaped by the proper ties of the aqueous medium in which life began.”

Albert L. Lehninger (1917–1986) American biochemist

Principles of Biochemistry, Ch. 2 : Water

Life

“The results were clear: the new environment inhibited recognition.”

Elizabeth Loftus (1944) American cognitive psychologist

Source: Eyewitness Testimony (1979), p. 90

“Democracy has failed to dampen the right/left ideological schism, which is historically rooted in the early years of separate state creation. And neither the right nor the left is fully able to provide a convincing alternative vision of how democracy in Korean society can robustly develop and thereby enhance its quality. The rightists/conservatives, who continue to retain their predominant power and influence over the state and civil society, still cling to an old-fashioned, outmoded black-and-white ideology derived from the Cold War period. That ideology can no longer provide a political vision and values and norms pertinent to the post-Cold War era as well as a democratized, highly modernized and globalized social environment. Thereby they have failed to play a leading role in enhancing autonomy of civil society vis-à-vis the state, respecting rule of law, and contributing to bringing social integration and inclusiveness.
On the other hand, the leftists have disappointed many people who expected that the entirely new generations which appeared on the political center stage in the course of democratization could play a decisive role in changing Korean politics. In recent years we have witnessed a growing disillusionment with the radical discourses and ideas as well as with their inability to develop a new type of party politics, deal with the socio-economic problems and provide a certain substantive model for ethical life.”

Choi Jang-jip (1943) South Korean political scientist

"The Fragility of Liberalism and its Political Consequences in Democratized Korea" (2009)

Life, War, People, Law

“By moving to London I removed myself from the madness of the entertainment industry. I love the city and the culture, and it was an opportunity to bring my children up in a more sane environment.”

Gillian Anderson (1968) American-British film, television and theatre actress, activist and writer

John Hiscock (July 25, 2008) "Mulder and Scully: the truth is here Anderson on Duchovny David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, stars of the new 'X-Files' movie, talk to Will Lawrence and John Hiscock about their on-screen chemistry", The Daily Telegraph.
2000s

Love, Children, Madness

“It is not just for the security of Iraq and the freedom of Iraq. It is for the security of the entire Middle East and for the freedom of the entire Middle East…. We are creating an environment that is threatening to the rest of the fundamentalist regimes in the area. This is an honorable goal on our part, but it is worrisome to the extreme. We do not know what they will do, nor what they have to do it with.”

Tom Tancredo (1945) American politician

http://www.vote-smart.org/speech_detail.php?speech_id=55399 (June 15, 2004).

Freedom, Parting

“This book undertakes the study of management by utilizing analysis of the basic managerial functions as a framework for organizing knowledge and techniques in the field. Managing is defined here as the creation and maintenance of an internal environment in an enterprise where individuals, working together in groups, can perform efficiently and effectively towards the attainment of group goals. Managing could, then, be called ""performance environment design."" Essentially, managing is the art of doing, and management is the body of organized knowledge which underlies the art.
Each of the managerial functions is analyzed and described in a systematic way. As this is done, both the distilled experience of practicing managers and the findings of scholars are presented., This is approached in such a way that the reader may grasp the relationships between each of the functions, obtain a clear view of the major principles underlying them, and be given the means of organizing existing knowledge in the field.
Part 1 is an introduction to the basis of management through a study of the nature and operation of management principles (Chapter 1), a description of the various schools and approaches of management theory (Chapter 2), the functions of the manager (Chapter 3), an analytical inquiry into the total environment in which a manager must work (Chapter 4), and an introduction to comparative management in which approaches are presented for separating external environmental forces and nonmanagerial enterprise functions from purely managerial knowledge (Chapter 5)…”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: Principles of management, 1968, p. 1 (1972 edition)

Books, School, Art, Way

“Will you encourage your workers to be innovative, or will you promote an environment where the status quo is good enough? Do you have mechanisms to allow all employees to voice opinions and provide feedback without fear of retaliation? Are you accessible, or are you insulated from your people? Good leaders motivate by being seen, by communicating, by engaging, and by taking care of their employees.”

Ann E. Dunwoody (1953) U.S. Army, first four-star general in U.S. military history

Source: A Higher Standard (2015), p. 166

People, Fear, Communication, Motivation

“I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft — a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

"Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson," 1999

People, Way, Thinking, Success

“The ancient educational thinking also emphasized the importance of a certain atmosphere in which alone any worthwhile education is possible. First, there must be a complete rapport between the teacher and the taught. "May we study together. May God protect us both. May we never spite each other", that is the prayer of the teacher and the pupil with which several Upanishads open. There must be an atmosphere of serious inquiry, of hankering for truth for its own sake, of affection, deference, service and respect. Hindus believed that without this environment, no higher education is possible.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

God, Truth, Education, Thinking

“The right hon. Gentleman should be aware that, two weeks ago, I had an interesting meeting with an environmental campaigning group from the Soviet Union who openly admitted that the industrial policies followed in the past by the Soviet Union and many countries in central and eastern Europe had done a great deal of environmental damage. The difference is that those people felt that they had the power to change the policies to stop the destruction of their own environment. The policies of free-market economies which the right hon. Gentleman propounds have led to the pollution of the North sea and the Irish sea, the destruction of the rain forests in Brazil and Malaysia and long-term serious environmental damage by multinational companies all over the southern countries of this planet.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1989/dec/15/future-of-socialism in the House of Commons (15 December 1989). 1980s

People, Change, Past, Sea

“I’ve been vegan for 10 years now, and there’s nothing in my life that hasn’t become better as a result. … To perform my sports and to stay alive in high risk environments, I need to be at top level athletic fitness. I also need to be highly attuned to the natural environment, and able to listen to myself and any outside messages. I have found that eating a vegan diet gives me optimum physical and mental awareness. … A vegan diet keeps consumer dollars out of the marketplace that supports factory farming, which I believe to be evil.”

Steph Davis (1973) American rock climber

"An interview with Steph Davis, the world's leading vegan climber" https://www.vegansociety.com/whats-new/blog/interview-steph-davis-worlds-leading-vegan-climber, The Vegan Society (July 29, 2016).

Life, Support, Nature, Sport

“Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 95

Law, Nature, Personality

“Blast Sputnik for closing terrestrial nature in a man-made environment that transfers the evolutionary process from biology to technology.”

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

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 85

Nature

“There is nothing new or unusual about the Tory commitment to protect the environment. The last thing we want is to leave environmental debts for our children to clear up…It's we Conservatives who are not merely friends of the Earth—we are its guardians and trustees for generations to come. The core of Tory philosophy and for the case for protecting the environment are the same. No generation has a freehold on this earth. All we have is a life tenancy—with a full repairing lease. This Government intends to meet the terms of that lease in full.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Party Conference (14 October 1988) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107352 Third term as Prime Minister

Life, Children

“The present industrial era brought with it a new governing class, as every considerable change in human environment must bring with it a governing class to give it expression. Perhaps, for lack of a recognized name, I may describe this class as the industrial capitalistic class, composed in the main of administrators and bankers. I conjecture that this class attained its acme of popularity and power, at least in America, toward the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Almost at the opening of the present century a progressively rigorous opposition found for its mouthpiece the President of the Union himself. If Mr. Roosevelt became, what his adversaries are pleased to call, an agitator, his agitation had a cause which is as deserving of study as is the path of a cyclone.”

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) American political writer

Source: The Theory of Social Revolutions,, pp. 2-3, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 9-10

Study, Change

“Reptiles and amphibians are sometimes seen as simple, primitive creatures. That's a long way from the truth. The fact that they are solar-powered means that their bodies require only 10% of the energy that mammals of a similar size require. At a time when we ourselves are becoming increasingly concerned about the way in which we get our energy from the environment and the wasteful way in which we use it, maybe there are things that we can learn from "life in cold blood."”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life in Cold Blood (2008)

Life, Truth, Way, Learning

“… what could have brought him to Dalton. There were no chalybeate-springs, warranted to cure every disease under the sun; no ruins in the neighbourhood, left expressly for antiquarians and pic-nic parties; no fine prospects, which, like music, people make it matter of conscience to admire; no celebrated person had ever been born or buried in its environs; there were no races, no assizes—in short, there was “no nothing."”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Part 1
Other Gift Books

People, Disease, Music, Spring

“We all know what the negro has been as a slave. In this relation we have his experience of two hundred and fifty years before us, and can easily know the character and qualities he has developed and exhibited during this long and severe ordeal. In his new relation to his environments, we see him only in the twilight of twenty years of semi-freedom; for he has scarcely been free long enough to outgrow the marks of the lash on his back and the fetters on his limbs. He stands before us, today, physically, a maimed and mutilated man. His mother was lashed to agony before the birth of her babe, and the bitter anguish of the mother is seen in the countenance of her offspring. Slavery has twisted his limbs, shattered his feet, deformed his body and distorted his features. He remains black, but no longer comely. Sleeping on the dirt floor of the slave cabin in infancy, cold on one side and warm on the other, a forced circulation of blood on the one side and chilled and retarded circulation on the other, it has come to pass that he has not the vertical bearing of a perfect man. His lack of symmetry, caused by no fault of his own, creates a resistance to his progress which cannot well be overestimated, and should be taken into account, when measuring his speed in the new race of life upon which he has now entered.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

Life, Birth, Sleep, Freedom

“Every time we sit down to eat, we make a choice. Please choose vegetarianism. Do it for the animals. Do it for the environment, and do it for your health.”

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

From the documentary film Meet Your Meat (2002), last sentence of the documentary.

Health, Time, Animals

“The life space of Lewin, - the environment as seen by the subject, including the field forces or valences between him and objects in the environment, which can account for his immediately subsequent behavior.”

James Grier Miller (1916–2002) biologist

Living Systems: Basic Concepts (1969)

Life, Behavior

“He existed in all the many dimensions of the multiverse. Yet he, in common with all others, was bound by the dimension of Time. He had cast off the chains of space but was tied, as perhaps all denizens of the multiverse would always be, by the imperturbable prowl of Time, which brooked no halt, which condoned no tampering with its movement, whether to slow it or to speed it.
Time, the changer, could not be changed. Space, perhaps, the material environment, could be conquered. Time, never.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Source: The Sundered Worlds (1965), Chapter 15 (p. 290)

Change, Time, Speed

“Two small and rather unappealing animals possess patterns of behaviour that have great relevance for the student of intelligent systems. These are the wood louse and the maggot of the common housefly, and it is the difference in their behaviour which is so illuminating. It has to do with the way in which they orient themselves to their environment. Wood lice like moist places and succeed in aggregating there by the simple device of slowing down their otherwise random movements as the humidity increases. The maggot, which, during a certain stage of its development needs to come out of the dark, finds light by a slightly more sophisticated system. It has a single, non-directional light-sensing organ at the forward end of its body and as it moves along it swings this end left and right, allowing the amount of light gathered during each swing to determine the extent of its forward motion. In this way it keeps altering its course until the amounts of light sensed are equal for both sides, by which time it must be heading straight for the light.”

Edward Ihnatowicz (1926–1988) Cybernetic sculptor

Edward Ihnatowicz. " MAGGOTY INTELLIGENCE http://www.senster.com/ihnatowicz/articles/maggoty_intelligence.pdf," Unpublished. Date unknown: pre 1988. at senster.com, 2015

Way, Intelligence, Sense, Light

“It was this event that shattered my faith in my religion and my country. I had spent the mid-'60s as a successful student in a virtually white environment. I had learned Latin, physics and chemistry. I had accepted the loneliness that came with being "the integrator," the first and the only. But this event, this trauma I could not take, especially when one of my fellow seminarians, not knowing that I was standing behind him, declared that he hoped the S. O. B. died. This was a man of God, mortally stricken by an assassin's bullet, and one preparing for the priesthood had wished evil upon him.”

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

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

God, Faith, Religion, Hope

“Good science makes a clean environment.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[B2, Legislature: Science guy tells rally: Vote, The Columbian, Vancouver, Washington, February 3, 2000, Karen Gaudette, Associated Press, NewsBank]

Science

“Difficulties arise when an attempt is made to acclimatize the theory to an alien environment and, in particular, to adapt the analysis of the expansion of the innovating multi-product, ‘flesh and blood’ organisations that businessmen call firms.”

Edith Penrose (1914–1996) economist

Source: The Theory of the Growth of the Firm, 1959, p. 13

“I come back to speed, and I want my last words to be on speed. I see a danger ahead that our people may become mechanised, not only in body, but mechanised in mind. I dread the mass mind. I dread the loss of that independent individualist character which has made this nation what it is. I dread the growth of that materialistic view of life which, to my mind, is a danger both to body and to soul. We must see to it that in some way we can preserve the character of our people to meet the changed conditions of the age, and see that our character triumphs over our environment.”

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

Speech to the Federation of British Industries (13 April 1937), quoted in Service of Our Lives (1937), pp. 116-117.
1937

Life, People, Age, Way

“Ansoff (1965) gives only some indication of what he means by environment. This can be explained by Ansoff's classification of decisions into strategic. administrative and operating decisions. He (1965, p. 8) defines these types of decision as follows:
Strategic - to choose product-market mix
Administrative to structure the firm's resources for optimum performance
Operating - to optimize the realization of the profitability potential with the present strategy.”

Igor Ansoff (1918–2001) American mathematician

Göran Asplund (1975), Strategy formulation: an intervention study of a complex group decision process. p. 22

Optimism, Decision

“He is lucky who, in the full tide of life, has experienced a measure of the active environment he most desires. In these days of upheaval and violent change, when the basic values of to-day are the vain and shattered dreams of to-morrow, there is much to be said for a philosophy which aims at living a full life while the opportunity offers. There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experience of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.”

Eric Shipton (1907–1977) British explorer

Shipton, in Upon That Mountain, 1943

Life, Fate, Dreams, Way

“Attribution theory concerns the process by which an individual interprets events "as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment" (Heider, p. 297). Consideration of attribution theory is relevant for a symposium on motivation in several respects. The theory describes processes that operate as if the individual were motivated to attain a cognitive mastery of the causal structure of his environment.”

Harold Kelley (1921–2003) American psychologist & academic

Source: "Attribution theory in social psychology." 1967, p. 193

Motivation, Parting

“Marriage is about banality. Its purpose is banality, to create an environment of surpassing safety and predictability for young children to grow up in, the foundation of life, the root of inner peace.”

Orson Scott Card Enchantment

Enchantment (1999)

Life, Marriage, Children, Peace

“The whole picture is complicated by the stockists and merchants who will try to exploit any shortages that may appear.
The result is this. The feedback information from the industry's environment consists, first and foremost, of a forward order load. Much of this "demand for steel" will be bogus.”

Anthony Stafford Beer (1926–2002) British theorist, consultant, and professor

Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 4, An Alphabet of Models, p. 96.

Appearance

“Contrary to what is often thought, excessive hygiene, that is staying in an antibacterial environment, does not necessarily lead to a better health, sometimes it even causes health deterioration. Indirect proof may be that among children of rural backgrounds allergic diseases is less than in urban children. This is because children in the countryside are in contact with a lot more bacteria. You can see that exaggeration is unhealthy in every respect.”

Włodzimierz Ptak (1928–2019) immunologist

Borejza, Tomasz (January 2018): Trochę bakterii nie zaszkodzi https://www.tygodnikprzeglad.pl/troche-bakterii-zaszkodzi/. Przegląd (4/2018): pp. 54–55.

Children, Health, Disease

“For nation-building, the first requisite is peace— peace with our neighbours and peace in the world. Our security environment has been vitiated.”

Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991) sixth Prime Minister of India

Broadcast to the Nation, 12 November 1984
Extracts from Speeches

World, Peace

“Organizations under norms of rationality seek to place their boundaries around those activities which if left to the task environment would be crucial contingencies.
The implication of this proposition is that we should expect to find organizations including within their domains activities or competencies which, on a technological basis, could be performed by the task environment without damage to the to the major mission of the organization. For the hotel, for example, provision of rooms and meals would be the major mission, and the operation of a laundry would be excluded; yet we find hotels operating laundries. On the other hand, provision of rooms and meals would not be within the major mission of the hospital, although hospitals commonly include these activities within their domains.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Organizations in Action, 1967

“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do — after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)

People, World, Strong, Learning

“Buchnera only have 600 genes, compared to about 4,000 or 5,000 for E. coli … This is a recurring pattern in the genomes of both bacterial symbionts and pathogens, but why do they get so small? … while part of the reduction is due to adaptation, a lot of it just reflects genetic drift … It's just a consequence of long-term evolution in a restricted environment with small population sizes.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

as quoted by Nick Zagorski in: [Profile of Nancy A. Moran, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 22 November 2005, 102, 47, 16916–16918, 10.1073/pnas.0508498102, http://www.pnas.org/content/102/47/16916]

Parting

Quotes about environment page 5

Quotes about environment
page 5