Quotes about environment
page 9

“On the Indian front, [the Hindutva movement] should spearhead the revival, rejuvenation and resurgence of Hinduism, which includes not only religious, spiritual and cultural practices springing from Vedic or Sanskritic sources, but from all other Indian sources independently of these: the practices of the Andaman islanders and the (pre-Christian) Nagas are as Hindu in the territorial sense, and Sanâtana in the spiritual sense, as classical Sanskritic Hinduism. (…) A true Hindutvavadi should feel a pang of pain, and a desire to take positive action, not only when he hears that the percentage of Hindus in the Indian population is falling due to a coordination of various factors, or that Hindus are being discriminated against in almost every respect, but also when he hears that the Andamanese races and languages are becoming extinct; that vast tracts of forests, millions of years old, are being wiped out forever; that ancient and mediaeval Hindu architectural monuments are being vandalised, looted or fatally neglected; that priceless ancient documents are being destroyed or left to rot and decay; that innumerable forms of arts and handicrafts, architectural styles, plant and animal species, musical forms and musical instruments, etc. are becoming extinct; that our sacred rivers and environment are being irreversibly polluted and destroyed…”

Shrikant Talageri (1958) Indian author

Talageri in S.R. Goel (ed.): Time for Stock-Taking, p.227-228.

Pain, Art, Music, Feeling

“Its is important, too, to realize that deadly violence among primitives is not even remotely comparable to modern warfare. When primitives fight, two little bands of men shoot arrows or swing war-clubs at one another because they want to fight; or because they are defending themselves, their families, or their territory. In the modern world soldiers fight because they have been brainwashed into believing in some kook ideology such as that of Nazism, socialism, or what American politicians choose to call "freedom". In any case the modern soldier is merely a pawn, a dupe who dies not for his family or his tribe but for the politicians who exploit him. If he's unlucky, maybe he does not die but comes home horribly crippled in a way that would never result from an arrow- or a spear-wound. Meanwhile, thousands of non-combatants are killed or mutilated. The environment is ravaged, not only in the war zone, but also back home, due to the accelerated consumption of natural resources needed to feed the war machine. In comparison, the violence of primitive man is relatively innocuous.”

Theodore Kaczynski (1942) American domestic terrorist, mathematician and anarchist

"The Truth about Primitive Life"
The Road to Revolution (2008)

Men, War, World, Family

“A real-time computer system may be defined as one which controls an environment by receiving data, processing them, and taking action or returning results sufficiently quickly to affect the functioning of the environment at that time.”

James Martin (author) (1933–2013) British information technology consultant and writer

Martin (1967) Design of real-time computer systems; cited in: John R. Ellis (1998) Objectifying Real-Time Systems. p. 249

Time

“Minds are in limited supply, and each mind has a limited capacity for memes, and hence there is considerable competition among memes for entry in as many minds as possible. This competition is the major selective force in the memosphere, and, just as in the biosphere, the challenge has been met with great ingenuity. For instance, whatever virtues (from our perspective) the following memes have, they have in common the property of having phenotypic expressions that tend to make their own replication more likely by disabling or preempting the environmental forces that would tend to extinguish them: the meme for faith, which discourages the exercise of the sort of critical judgment that might decide that the idea of faith was, all things considered a dangerous idea; the meme for tolerance or free speech; the meme of including in a chain letter a warning about the terrible fates of those who have broken the chain in the past; the conspiracy theory meme, which has a built-in response to the objection that there is no good evidence of a conspiracy: "Of course not — that's how powerful the conspiracy is!" Some of these memes are "good" perhaps and others "bad"; what they have in common is a phenotypic effect that systematically tends to disable the selective forces arrayed against them. Other things being equal, population memetics predicts that conspiracy theory memes will persist quite independently of their truth, and the meme for faith is apt to secure its own survival, and that of the religious memes that ride piggyback on it, in even the most rationalistic environments. Indeed, the meme for faith exhibits frequency-dependent fitness: it flourishes best when it is outnumbered by rationalistic memes; in an environment with few skeptics, the meme for faith tends to fade from disuse.”

Daniel Dennett book Consciousness Explained

Consciousness Explained (1991)

Fate, Truth, Faith, Exercises

“There are two important factors to consider in the emergence of social change. One is that a society develops through changes in its institutions, which are blends of culture and genetically shaped social behavior. The other is that the genes and culture interact. This may seem paradoxical to anyone who considers genes and culture to be entirely separate realms. But it is scarcely surprising from an evolutionary perspective, given that the genome is designed to respond to the environment, and a major component of the human environment is society and its cultural practices.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Behavior, Change

“I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete.… This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

The Curves of Time: The Memoirs of Oscar Niemeyer (2000), p. 62.

Women, World, Beauty, Mountain

“Social Darwinism and eugenics are unscientific in two aspects. First, they commit the naturalistic fallacy, which is the assumption that what is, must be. The fact that the natural environment selects for reproductive advantage does not mean that we, as humans, should be forcibly selecting people according to some preconceived notions. The second nonscientific aspect of these movements was their narrow interpretation of the meaning of fitness. In evolution, this simply means fitness to survive and reproduce, not fitness according to some externally imposed criteria.
Darwin himself never engaged in these speculations, nor did he support these perversions of his theory.”

Mordechai Ben-Ari (1948) Israeli computer scientist

Source: Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3, “Words Scientists Don’t Use: At Least Not the Way You Do” (p. 58)

People, Support, Nature

“Because I believe we are made the way God made man and woman and man and woman come together to have a union to produce children which keeps civilization going and provide the best environment for children to be raised. I think that is something society should value and should give privileged status over a group of people who want to have a relationship together.”

Rick Santorum (1958) American politician

on same-sex marriage
Santorum Draws Boos From College Crowd for Opposing Gay Marriage
Julianna
Goldman
2012-01-12
San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/10/bloomberg_articlesLXCV300D9L35.DTL#ixzz1jeLR1ECw
2012-01-16
http://web.archive.org/web/20120112222601/http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2012/01/10/bloomberg_articlesLXCV300D9L35.DTL#ixzz1jeLR1ECw
2012-01-12

God, Children, People, Way

“["Do you see a tie in between being a vegetarian and helping the environment?"] All of our cleaning products, lotions, shampoos, and toothpaste are organic and non-chemical, non-animal tested. You don’t have to be a vegetarian to be against animal testing, but it goes hand in hand. You know the rainforest that’s cut down or the land that’s cleared for cattle and factory farm animals, the destruction of the rain forest specifically for beef cattle is mind boggling to the both of us that they would destroy a very precious eco system just so cows have a place to eat grass. The people in South America don’t even really get to eat that beef but the land is being destroyed for it, and definitely the methane that’s produced from the cows and pigs. It’s definitely contributing to global warming. It’s hard for people to wrap their minds around the fact that their cheeseburger is making global warming worse. I think it’s an important message for people to get, but it’s hard for people to put the two together and make the connection.”

Susie Feldman (1982) American actress

"Watch “The Two Coreys” this Sunday", interview with PETA (27 July 2007) https://www.peta.org/blog/watch-two-coreys-sunday/.

People, Thinking, Grass, Help

“Heredity is not the dark specter which some people have thought—merciless and unchangeable, the embodiment of Fate itself. This dark, pessimistic belief which tinges even the literature of to-day comes, no doubt, from the general lack of knowledge of the laws governing the interaction of these two ever-present forces of heredity and environment wherever there is life.
My own studies have led me to be assured that heredity is only the sum of all past environment, in other words environment is the architect of heredity; and I am assured of another fact: acquired characters are transmitted and—even further—that all characters which are transmitted have been acquired…”

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

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Life, Fate, People, Law

“The nasty thing about the availability bias is that it insidiously distorts our view of the world by distorting our perception of past events and our environment.”

Leonard Mlodinow book The Drunkard's Walk

Source: The Drunkard's Walk, Chapter 2, The Laws Of Truths And Half - Truths, p. 28

World, Past

“Yeah. ‘Environment’ was very big for a while. Ecology Now stickers on the windshields of cars belonging to hairy young men—cars which dripped oil wherever they parked and took off in clouds of smoke thicker than your pipe can produce…Before long, the fashionable cause was something else, I forget what. Anyhow, that whole phase—the wave after wave of causes—passed away. People completely stopped caring…
I feel a moral certainty that a large part of the disaster grew from this particular country, the world’s most powerful, the vanguard country for things both good and ill…never really trying to meet the responsibilities of power.
We’ll make halfhearted attempts to stop some enemies in Asia, and because the attempts are halfhearted we’ll piss away human lives—on both sides—and treasure—to no purpose. Hoping to placate the implacable, we’ll estrange our last few friends. Men elected to national office will solemnly identify inflation with rising prices, which is like identifying red spots with the measles virus, and slap on wage and price controls, which is like papering the cracks in a house whose foundations are sliding away. So economic collapse brings international impotence…As for our foolish little attempts to balance what we drain from the environment against what we put back—well, I mentioned that car carrying the ecology sticker.
At first Americans will go on an orgy of guilt. Later they’ll feel inadequate. Finally they’ll turn apathetic. After all, they’ll be able to buy any anodyne, any pseudo-existence they want.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (pp. 53-54)

Men, People, World, Hope

“Let's split open our figures and place the environment inside them.”

Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) Russian artist

Quote before 1920; ac cited by Christina Lodder, in Russian Constructivism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 17
Quotes, 1910 - 1925

“New technological environments are commonly cast in the molds of the preceding technology out of the sheer unawareness of their designers.”

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

Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 47

“Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist

Worldfest video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnhqmF-RBu4

Intelligence

“Plowboy: In your opinion, what are mankind's prospects for the near future?
Asimov: To tell the truth, I don't think the odds are very good that we can solve our immediate problems. I think the chances that civilization will survive more than another 30 years—that it will still be flourishing in 2010—are less than 50 percent.
Plowboy: What sort of disaster do you foresee?
Asimov: I imagine that as population continues to increase—and as the available resources decrease—there will be less energy and food, so we'll all enter a stage of scrounging. The average person's only concerns will be where he or she can get the next meal, the next cigarette, the next means of transportation. In such a universal scramble, the Earth will be just plain desolated, because everyone will be striving merely to survive regardless of the cost to the environment. Put it this way: If I have to choose between saving myself and saving a tree, I'm going to choose me.
Terrorism will also become a way of life in a world marked by severe shortages. Finally, some government will be bound to decide that the only way to get what its people need is to destroy another nation and take its goods … by pushing the nuclear button.
And this absolute chaos is going to develop—even if nobody wants nuclear war and even if everybody sincerely wants peace and social justice—if the number of mouths to feed continues to grow. Nothing will be able to stand up against the pressure of the whole of humankind simply trying to stay alive!”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Mother Earth News interview (1980)

Life, War, People, Truth

“Capital is mobile. It goes where it is welcomed and stays where it is well-treated, so states compete to create tax and regulatory environments conducive to job creation. Liberals call this a "race to the bottom."”

George Will (1941) American newspaper columnist, journalist, and author

Conservatives call it a race to rationality. Column, February 18, 2014, "Breaking the grip of the unions" http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-breaking-the-grip-of-the-unions/2014/02/18/39beb794-98d4-11e3-b88d-f36c07223d88_story.html at washingtonpost.com. 2010s

“Only within the 20th Century has biological thought been focused on ecology, or the relation of the living creature to its environment. Awareness of ecological relationships is — or should be — the basis of modern conservation programs, for it is useless to attempt to preserve a living species unless the kind of land or water it requires is also preserved. So delicately interwoven are the relationships that when we disturb one thread of the community fabric we alter it all — perhaps almost imperceptibly, perhaps so drastically that destruction follows.”

Rachel Carson (1907–1964) American marine biologist and conservationist

"Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958)

Communication, Water

“A democratic and equitable international order can only flourish in a peaceful environment. With conflict prevention being the overarching raison d’être of the United Nations, the hundreds of wars since 1945 indicate that the Organization must reform in order to live up to its purposes and principles.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2018, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

War, Peace

“The issue before us is whether the 21st century belongs to China. And I would say that China will be preoccupied with enormous problems internally, domestically with its immediate environment, and that I have enormous difficulty imagining it will be dominated by China, and indeed, as I will conclude, I believe that the concept that some country will dominate the world, is in itself a misunderstanding of the world in which we now live… In the geopolitical situation, China historically has been surrounded by a group of smaller countries, which themselves were not individually able to threathen China, but which united, could cause a threat to China, and therefore historically, Chinese foreign policy can be described as "barbarian management". So China had never had to deal in a world of countries of approximately equal strength, and so to adjust to such a world, is in itself a profound challenge to China, which now has 14 countries on its borders, some of which are small, but can project their nationality into China, some of which are large, and historically significant, so that any attempt by Chinese to dominate the world, would evoke a counter-reaction that would be disastrous for the peace of the world.”

Henry Kissinger (1923–2023) United States Secretary of State

Munk debates – “21st Century will belong to China” – Kissinger, Zakaria, Ferguson, Li http://www.livestream.com/munkdebates/video?clipId=pla_937b4cf4-e0ea-4ed5-a458-6a3ba43769b8 2000s

World, Peace, Imagination, Problem

“Consider Every Battle a Life and Death Struggle. This principle focuses on commitment and determination. When your life is at stake, you make an absolute commitment of all your power to your survival. For a shaman, the proper way to approach every task it with absolute commitment. The shaman realizes that a predator is not automatically successful because it is equipped with sharper teeth or stronger muscles. A predator can be seriously injured or even killed during the hunt. The lion kicked in the jaw by a zebra might be unable to hunt and die of starvation. So in every hunt, the hunter must be prepared to die. But this threat gives the hunter the advantage because it ensures that they will operate at peak performance level, completely at attention, keenly observant of everything in their environment, and fully in charge at the moment of action.”

Jose Stevens

The Power Path: The Shaman's Way to Success in Business and Life. Dr. Jose Stevens and Lena Stevens. ISBN 978-1577312178.

Life, Death, Way, Success

“Simulation is the use of models and/or the actual conditions of either the thing being modeled or the environment in which it operates, with the models or conditions in physical, mathematical, or some other form. The purpose of simulation is to explore the various results which might be obtained from the real system by subjecting the model to representative environments which are equivalent to, or in some way representative of, the situations it is desired to understand or investigate. Simulation may involve system hardware and the actual physical environment, or it may involve mathematical models subjected to mathematical forcing or disturbance functions representative of the systems conditions to be studied.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), p. 111 as cited in

Way, Mathematics, Understanding, Study

“We are at the helm of not only our own physicality but our environment and other species, too, as sentient, conscious beings who can think of future and affect consequence, and create progeny with our minds as well as our bodies.”

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

Vanna Bonta Talks Sex in Space (Interview - Femail magazine)

Thinking, Future

“The rhythmic pattern of the poem, which forces continuity of attention – incites a pleasurable compulsion to ‘follow’ – is either a tried metrical suasion-contrivance or a specially invented pattern of physical insistences, equally, if not more, binding in its effect on the reader. From a straight linguistic point of view, there is room for wonder if there is not latent vice in this environment in which pleasurable physically-compelled responses, produced by incidents of poetic utterance, are identified with the Good.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Promise of Words" in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 17, p. 23

Pleasure

“His [Marcel Duchamp's] idea was that anything could be art by focusing the mind to think of it as art. My images are similar but at the time my work was first being shown, 1958-'59, I was unfamiliar with Duchamp and Dada. Everyone said my work was Dada, so I read on it, went to Philadelphia to see the Arensberg Duchamp collection, was delighted by it and later met him (Duchamp)... But it was all more a coincidence. Perhaps it’s that certain ideas get into the air, ideas that come out of our living and out of the environment automatically.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

Daily Close-up, after the Flag, Roberta Brandes Gratz, New York Post, 30 December 1970, p. 25
1970s

Art, Idea, Thinking, Time

“Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simply truthful combination of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities, and the finest exemplars of private virtue, forms a picture of most fearful aspect, and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counterbalanced by no consolatory result. We endure in beholding it a mental torture, allowing no defence or escape but the consideration that what has happened could not be otherwise; that it is a fatality which no intervention could alter. And at last we draw back from the intolerable disgust with which these sorrowful reflections threaten us, into the more agreeable environment of our individual life the Present formed by our private aims and interests. In short we retreat into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore, and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of "wrecks confusedly hurled." But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised the question involuntarily arises to what principle, to what final aim these. enormous sacrifices have been offered.”

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel book Lectures on the Philosophy of History

Geschichte Als Schlachtbank
Pt. III, sec. 2, ch. 24 Lectures on the History of History Vol 1 p. 22 John Sibree translation (1857), 1914
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1

Life, Wisdom, Happiness, People

“The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all humanity.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

1980s

Lie, Freedom

“The common sense of people will surely prove to them someday that mutual support and cooperation are only sensible for the security and happiness of all. Such faith keeps me continually ready and purposeful with energy to do what one person can towards shaping the environment in which the human being can grow with freedom.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

This I Believe (1951)

Happiness, People, Faith, Support

“These words are being written in reply to the verbal message sent by you. I have been asked (by you) to tell (you) about suppression of the rebellion of Jats in the environs of Delhi.
The fact is that this recluse (meaning himself) has witnessed in the occult world the downfall of the Jats in the same way as that of the Marhatahs. I have also seen it in a dream that Muslims have taken possession of the forts and the country of the Jats, and that Muslims have become masters of those forts and that country as in the past. Most probably, the Ruhelas will occupy those Jat forts. This has been determined and decided in the most secret world. This recluse has not the shadow of a doubt about that. But the way that victory will be achieved is not yet clear. What is needed is prayers from those special servants of Allah who have been chosen for this purpose.
…But keep one thing in your mind, namely, that the Hindus who are apparently in your’s and your government’s employ, are inclined towards the enemies in their hearts. They do not want that the enemies be exterminated. They will try a thousand tricks in this matter, and endeavour in every way to show to your honour that the path of peace is more profitable.
Make up your mind not to listen to this group (the Hindu employees). If you disregard their advice, you will reach the height of fulfilment. This recluse knows of this (fulfilment) as if he is seeing it with his own eyes.”

Shah Waliullah Dehlawi (1703–1762) Indian muslim scholar

To Najibuddaulah Translated from the Urdu version of K.A. Nizami, Shãh Walîullah Dehlvî ke Siyãsî Maktûbãt, Second Edition, Delhi, 1969, pp. 106-07.
From his letters

Secret, World, Peace, Dreams

“I don't think it's a good idea for politicians to design television programmes, but what we can do is design policies - and by implementing those policies we help to create an environment in which talented people can do great things, and significant and dynamic creative companies can be built for this generation and the next generation. That means having the infrastructure, the skills, and the education. We need a clear vision. We need to identify the opportunities and provide the resources.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Broadcasting Speech (August 8, 2007)

People, Education, Idea, Thinking

“For some time now it has been clear that intermedia art is trending toward that point at which all the phenomena of life on earth will constitute the artist’s palette. It is the purpose of this chapter to illuminate the direction of that trend and to cite a few pertinent examples. As with all other Paleocybernetic phenomena, the direction is simultaneously toward inner and outer space, the microcosm and the macrocosm. On the one hand, intermedia environments turn the participant inward upon himself, providing a matrix for psychic exploration, perceptual, censorial, and intellectual awareness; on the other hand technology has advanced to the point at which the whole earth itself becomes the “content” of aesthetic activity. The term “light show” must now be expanded virtually to include the aurora borealis, since hemispherical lumia displays are possible in the creation of artificial plasma clouds in space (see color plates), the launching of rockets to generate atmospherical events, or urban environmental generators such as Nicholas Schoffer’s monumental Cybernetic Light Tower, which transforms the skies of Paris into panoramic fantasias of color.”

Gene Youngblood book Expanded Cinema

Source: Expanded Cinema, 1970, p. 348; The Artist as Ecologist http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/11/the-artist-as-ecologist/

Life, Art, Color, Light

“Different subunits within an organization may confront different external demands. To cope with these various environments, organizations create specialized subunits with differing structural features. For example, some subunits may exhibit higher levels of formalization than others; some may be more centralized in decision making; some may be oriented to longer planning horizons. The more varied the types of environments confronted by an organization, the more differentiated its structure needs to be.”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Institutions and Organizations., 1995, p. 89 (2001: 103)

Decision

“Languages are environments to which the child related synesthetically.”

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. 166

“One massive issue is that [in government] we did not promote regional flourishing. To put it bluntly there was not enough private sector growth in the north east, the north west, the midlands and south west, and the south east was financially driven which had its own problems. I share your disposition about capitalism, but I look at Tesco and think, it’s cheap, healthy food, and it has transformed the lives of the poor. Yet we hate them. When London Citizens did a living wage campaign against Tesco what we found was enormous middle class loathing while the working class had a love for Tesco. They love the fact that the food was fresh and cheap and the environment was safe. And when they bought a small package of mince they didn’t have a butcher going, ‘Ah, tough week, eh?’ They didn’t feel humiliated. That’s just a tough example I put out there to say we’ve got to build alliances and relationships with the powers. We’ve got to look at how we can get Tesco to foster regional diversity.”

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman (1961) British philosopher

Interview with Independent Labour, 2 December 2011 http://www.independentlabour.org.uk/main/2011/12/02/a-conversation-with-maurice-glasman-pt-2/

Love, Hate, Food, Feeling

“For continued system cohesion, the mean rate of system adaptiation must equal or exceed the mean rate of change of environment.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Putting systems to work (1992), p. 63 Cited in: Lars Skyttner (2005) General Systems Theory: Problems, Perspectives, Practice. p. 103

Change

“Contemporary institutional theorizing in the field of organizations dates back thirty-odd years. This particularly describes what are called new or neo-institutionalisms. These terms evoke contrasts with earlier theories of the embeddedness of organizations in social and cultural contexts, now retrospectively called the ‘old institutionalism’ (Hirsch & Lounsbury, 1997; Stinchcombe, 1997). They went through a period of inattention, so that when institutional thinking came back in force after the 1960s, it seemed quite new.
Institutional theories, as they emerged in the 1970s, received much attention in the field, along with other lines of thought emphasizing the dependence of modern organizations on their environments. Perhaps surprisingly, they continue to receive attention, and seem to retain substantial measures of vigor.”

John W. Meyer (1935) Sociologist and professor at Stanford University

Source: "Reflections on institutional theories of organization,." 2008, p. 790

Thinking, Dependency

“Skinner … decrees … the abolition of freedom by way of behavior modification and a souped-up environment, in the name of a new “scientific” value—survival. The irony is that freedom and individuality have only existed in their mangled bourgeois form; to propose junking them in the name of survival is to propose the very society we now have, one that subsists exactly by an ethos of survival, paying lip service to freedom and the individual while rewarding the victors and punishing the victims. Freedom and individuality have never been more than adornments for an ugly environment of survival of the fittest.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 70-71

Way, Behavior, Freedom

“I once asked a distinguished biologist to explain to me the genetic imprint, the famous double helix which differentiates one being from another. He called it "the graffito of God", because it can never be erased. All other imprints — of memory, environment, experience — he called "human graffiti."”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

Pope Leo XIV in Ch. XV
Lazarus (1990)

God, Memory

“Every man shall be entitled to a sound and objective education and there shall be genuine equality of opportunity. Education shall be a matter of environment as well as of instruction, and everyone shall be entitled to an education untouched by the interests of any party or religion.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for? (1940)

Education, Religion

“The action outcome, x, may then be said to be dependent upon a combination of effective personal force and effective environmental force, thus:
x = f (ff person, ff environment).
One is tempted to formulate the underlying relation between the two independent variables as an additive one, for if the effective environmental force is zero (which would mean that the combination of environmental factors neither hinders nor furthers the result at), then x will depend only on the effective personal force.”

Fritz Heider (1896–1988) German psychologist

Source: The psychology of interpersonal relations, 1958, p. 82

Dependency, Personality

“People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knowledge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn on our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which ‘primitive’ peoples don’t have because they don’t need them.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 2 : ‘Primitive’ Thinking and the ‘Civilized’ Mind

People, Knowledge, Training

“What is learning but a set of sensory signals from the environment, with different forms of learning resulting from different types or patterns of sensory signals?”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

Learning

“The stability of the internal medium is a primary condition for the freedom and independence of certain living bodies in relation to the environment surrounding them.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Leçons sur les Phénomènes de la Vie Communs aux Animaux et aux Végétaux (1878-1879).

Freedom

“People have finally realized that human knowledge can never grow unless all opinions are respected. it’s the only way for them to interact in a crucial environment for new ideas to be born”

Ali Al-Wardi (1913–1995) Iraqi sociologist

People, Way, Idea, Knowledge

“One is to know that art is not national, that to be merely an American or a French artist is to be nothing; to fail to overcome one's initial environment is never to reach the human... Thus when we say one of the ideals of modern art has been internationalism, it is.... as a natural consequence of dealing with reality on a certain level.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

quote in 1946
As quoted in Abstract Expressionist Painting in America, W.C, Seitz, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1983, p. 439
1940s

Art, Quotes, Nature, Reality

“The outbreak of cholera in Zimbabwe became a symbol of that country's collapse — but who noticed the spread of cholera across Iraq? The McCainiacs chorused that "the surge worked" — but a study by the journal Environment and Planning found the truth. Between 2003 and 2007, Iraq was ripped by a massive ethnic cleansing. The mixed Sunni-Shia areas were destroyed. By the time the surge started, there was nobody left to purge: the country was carved into ethnically homogeneous neighbourhoods. All the surge did was build vast concrete walls between the collapsing hoods, cementing the cleansing. That's success?”

Johann Hari (1979) British journalist

"What did we misjudge in 2008?," http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-what-did-we-misjudge-in-2008-1202269.html The Independent (2008-12-18).

Truth, Study, Time, Success

“The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance.”

José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955) Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist

Source: History as a System (1962), p. 17

Appearance, Change

“In order not to be misunderstood, I want 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.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Environmentalism as a Religion (2003)

People, Way

“Better information awareness does not mean less personal freedoms. Feeling safe in school is a prerequisite for a conducive learning environment. Everyone should be free to express their opinions, voice their concerns, and become better informed.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Source: Facebook Nation: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2014

School, Feeling, Freedom, Learning

“In South Korea, which is a much less conservative environment, politicians do not take their wives around with them as much as their American counterparts do. Showing pride in your wife is thought of as juvenile bad form. There's a special pejorative for people who do it.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

As quoted in "The Top North Korean Expert Explains What Happened to Kim Jong Un's Uncle" https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115948/br-myers-purge-kim-jong-uns-uncle (16 December 2013), by Isaac Chotiner, New Republic 2010s

People

“Great leaders recognize that companies must innovate to remain competitive, and they nurture environments that encourage creative thinking… Innovation is rarely accidental — it takes an organizational commitment that starts at the executive level. The idea is not enough. As Thomas Edison said, innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Too often companies forget the ‘perspiration’ or execution part of the equation.”

Gregory Balestrero (1947) American industrial engineer

Balestrero (2008) quoted in: "America the Innovator The New Rules for Global Market Growth" http://www.forbesspecialsections.com/SectionPDFs/PMIAmericaInnov.pdf By Karen A. Edelman. Forbes : A Special Advertising Section. Accessed 3 Dec 2008. 2000s

Idea, Thinking, Parting, Forgetting

“What we have to ask is not what we have got out of it, but what we have been able to get for the poor and the oppressed. For one, equity is now on the national agenda. No party can ignore it. They now enumerate how many candidates, chief ministers, Rajya Sabha members they have fielded from the deprived sections. The same is true of the choice of President or vice-president. So we have changed the political environment.”

V. P. Singh (1931–2008) Indian politician

On his party losing elections on the issue of reservations for backward class.
We are ruled by an upper caste Hindu raj

Change

“All the vital mechanisms, varied as they are, have only one object, that of preserving constant the conditions of life in the internal environment.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Leçons sur les Phénomènes de la Vie Communs aux Animaux et aux Végétaux.

Life

“The Ymir and Kong before him are both creatures wrenched from their natural environment against their will and finally killed by man. Although these creatures must always die, they should go out with a touch of pathos.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 98

Nature

“Those of us concerned with developing new technology should consider ourselves to have a major undertaking to try to meet the expanding needs of the increasing number of people in the world with its finite resources and environments constraints.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Chestnut (1981) attributed in: Dr. Harold Chestnut: 1981 Honda Prize Laureate http://www.hondafoundation.jp/library/pdfs/ourdream_e.pdf in: Honda Prize Ecotechnology Quote

People, World

“Early human beings… filled a special ecological niche: they were carnivorous primates of the African plains. …When agriculture permitted the increase of population density, game was no longer abundant… carnivorism remained a basic dietary impulse, with cultural aftereffects that varied according to the special conditions of the environment in which the society evolved.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.4 Emergence

Game

“The work of managing a natural environment is inescapably a work of local knowledge.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Nature, Knowledge

“Likewise, police officers on patrol in our nation’s cities often work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color. Something happens to people of good will working in that environment. After years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel.”

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

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Men, People, Color, Feeling

“I have always found it a little strange that the majority of schools are utilizing filters. It seems to me that this is the environment where filters would not be used because the students are so carefully monitored, the activities in which they engage all go toward the same goals of education, and this is the very place where young people should be learning about information and its uses, in other words, where they should be learning information literacy.A recent National Research Center report, commissioned by Congress, clearly stated that information and media literacy are the most important things we can teach our children in order to truly protect them. Instead of placing barriers around the swimming pool, we must teach children to swim. We must teach children to find and use accurate information.”

Judith Krug (1940–2009) librarian and freedom of speech proponent

"Children's Internet Protection Act" http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/02/washtech_policy060302.htm by Brian Krebs, The Washington Post (June 3, 2002 )

Children, People, Education, School

“The Management Process School : This approach to management theory perceives management as a process of getting things done through and with people operating in organized groups. It aims to analyze the process, to establish a conceptual framework for it, to identify principles underlying it, and to build up a theory of management from them. It regards management as a universal process, regardless of the type that the environment of management differs widely between enterprises and levels. It looks upon management theory as a way of organizing experience so that practice can be improved through research, empirical testing of principles, and teaching of fundamentals involved in the management process.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: "The Management Theory Jungle," 1961, p. 175-6

People, School, Way, Universe

“When a man's work is full of life and in harmony with his environment, it becomes a work worth studying.”

Wahbi Al-Hariri (1914–1994) Artist, architect, author

Wahbi al-Hariri-Rifai (1984), Traditional Architecture of Saudi Arabia-Drawings by Wahbi Al-Hariri-Rifai http://books.google.nl/books?id=iAr71OT2S10C&redir_esc=y - Smithsonian Exhibit Booklet - 1984, Washington, D.C.: GDG Exhibits Trust, GGKEY:XRBJ2X83K1K, retrieved on 24 June 2013. Quoted from the back cover of the book.

Life, Study

“Biodiesel seems to be the answer to a lot of our prayers. Not only can it help the U. S. economy, our unwanted dependence on foreign oil, and the gasping environment, it could also help the family farmers out of this tragic dilemma they have found themselves in through no fault of their own.”

Willie Nelson (1933) American country music singer-songwriter.

[On the Clean Road Again: Biodiesel and the Future of the Family Farm, 37, Nelson, Willie, Fulcrum Publishing, 2007, 9781555916244]

Family, Help, Dependency

“The Penan do not have many possessions. They have lived for generations in the Borneo forests in harmony with their environment, taking what they need from the jungle, leaving no footprint but that of bare feet on muddy earth washed away with each rain. It was not difficult for them to regroup and move deeper into the forest. They would not be missed and traces of their ephemeral presence would soon be erased.”

Shamini Flint book Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder, Cap 9

“Issues that once divided Conservatives from Liberal Democrats are now issues where we both agree. Our attitude to devolution and localisation of power. Iraq. The environment. I'm a liberal Conservative.”

David Cameron (1966) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Letter to constituents in Dunfermline and West Fife by-election http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/feb/08/houseofcommons.uk2 (7 February 2006) 2000s, 2006

“Boris Johnson has real contempt for Londoners. He hates that we celebrate each other's heritage; he hates that we try to pass on a healthy environment to our children; he hates that we look after our most vulnerable neighbours; and most of all he hates that we all expect to share in our city's financial success.”

Siân Berry (1974) British politician

calling on her voters to give Ken Livingstone their second preference in the 2008 London Mayoral election http://london.greenparty.org.uk/news/657

Hate, Children, Success

“Race jokes are kind of like orcas: powerful and entertaining, but you put them on display in the wrong environment and people are going to get hurt, and the joke might die. Like this one just did. (12 April 2016”

Trevor Noah (1984) South African comedian

The Daily Show Source: Visibile in Bill de Blasio's Questionable Joke http://www.cc.com/video-clips/g0ng5b/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-bill-de-blasio-s-questionable-joke, CC.com, 12 aprile 2016.

People, Hurt

“One great mystery is why sexual reproduction became dominant for higher life-forms. Optimization theory says it should be otherwise.
Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflage—whatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world. Despite all this, she cannot pass on her perfect characteristics. After sex, her offspring will be jumbles, getting only half of their program from her and half their re-sorted genes somewhere else.
Sex inevitably ruins perfection. Parthenogenesis would seem to work better—at least theoretically. In simple, static environments, well-adapted lizards who produce duplicate daughters are known to have advantages over those using sex.
Yet, few complex animals are known to perform self-cloning. And those species exist in ancient, stable deserts, always in close company with a related sexual species.
Sex has flourished because environments are seldom static. Climate, competition, parasites—all make for shifting conditions. What was ideal in one generation may be fatal the next. With variability, your offspring get a fighting chance. Even in desperate times, one or more of them may have what it takes to meet new challenges and thrive.
Each style has its advantages, then. Cloning offers stability and preservation of excellence. Sex gives adaptability to changing times. In nature it is usually one or the other. Only lowly creatures such as aphids have the option of switching back and forth.”

David Brin book Glory Season

Introduction to Chapter 8 (pp. 123-124)
Glory Season (1993)

Life, World, Sex, Optimism

“Earlier, the hon. Member for Halesowen and Stourbridge (Mr. Stokes) spoke. He probably represents the more honest and truer face of the Tory party when he spoke the usual racist pap about immigration causing problems and pretending that the unemployment figures in the west midlands were caused by immigration. He was in effect saying that the cultural changes that have taken place because of immigration are unacceptable. I find his remarks offensive and unacceptable, as do people in many parts of the country, who live happily in a multicultural, multiracial environment and who are not prepared to put up with that kind of bigotry.”

Jeremy Corbyn (1949) British Labour Party politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1984/mar/05/immigration-rules in the House of Commons (5 March 1984). 1980s

People, Problem, Change, Parting

“Recognizing that the current form of globalization is nothing more than a generalized downward leveling in which global corporations are extracting more and more of the wealth, power, and productive energies from communities and the environment is the right approach. Recognizing that our response must be nothing less than upward leveling that does entail the transfer of resources, power, wealth, and knowledge from the world's haves to the world's have-nots is the right approach.”

Robin Hahnel (1946) American economist

Source: Panic Rules!: Everything You Need to Know about the Global Economy, 1999, p. 103

World, Communication, Knowledge, Wealth

“Some years ago, the planning group at Shell surveyed 30 companies that had been in business for more than 75 years. What impressed us most was their ability to live in harmony with the business environment, to switch from a survival mode when times were turbulent to a self-development mode when the pace of change was slow. And this pattern rang a familiar bell because Shell’s history is similarly replete with switches from expansion to self-preservation and back again to growth.”

Arie de Geus (1930) Dutch businessman

Arie P. de Geus, " Planning as learning https://hbr.org/1988/03/planning-as-learning/ar/1." Harvard Business Review, March/April 1988: 70-74.

History, Business, Change, Time

“In a modern society, where large organizations have acquired unprecedented importance, social scientists have increasingly sought to understand the nature of organizational goals - what they are, what shapes or determines them, what their impact is upon the environment, and how they change.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Perrow (1968), "Organizational goals," in: International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: The Macmillan Co. p. 305
1960s

Understanding, Nature, Change

“[Abraham Lincoln believed that] [t]he only reason people do not succeed in a capitalist environment is because they are improvident, they are lazy, they are good for nothing, or they experience some incredible turn of bad luck—that’s why "better luck next time." That may seem like vanishingly small consolation to people who’ve just come through a depression, but for Lincoln, that kind of hardship paled beside slavery. Slavery says that there is a category of people that can never be allowed to rise, that cannot improve themselves no matter how hard they try because they will always be slaves. It’s very much the classic disjuncture between the Enlightenment and feudalism. Feudalism talks about people being born with status, and everyone comes into this world equipped with a status. This status is either free or slave, serf or nobility, elect or damned, whatever. For the Enlightenment people come into this world armed with rights, and the ideal political system is the system that allows them to realize those rights, to use those rights in the freest and most natural fashion possible.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

Bad luck, People, World, Fashion

“Most of our beliefs about complex organizations follow from one or the other of two distinct strategies. The closed-system strategy seeks certainty by incorporating only those variables positively associated with goal achievement and subjecting them to a monolithic control network. The open-system strategy shifts attention from goal achievement to survival and incorporates uncertainty by recognizing organizational interdependence with environment. A newer tradition enables us to conceive of the organization as an open system, indeterminate and faced with uncertainty, but subject to criteria of rationality and hence needing certainty.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Source: Organizations in Action, 1967, p. 13 (in 2011 edition)

“Playing in shows all around the world takes tons of energy. Being a vegetarian has made a huge difference. Not only is a vegetarian lifestyle healthier, it's better for the animals and for the environment. And no matter where you find yourself on the planet, you can always find a great veggie meal.”

Phil Collen (1957) British musician

"Phil Collen: Vegetarian Testimonial," video ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (26 August 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-JsYIujaAM.

World, Animals

“This is the last programme in this natural history, and it's very different from all the others because it's been devoted to just one animal: ourselves. And that may have been a very misleading thing to have done. It may have given the impression that somehow man was the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all those thousands of millions of years of development had no purpose other than to put man on Earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for such a belief. No reason to suppose that man's stay on Earth should be any longer than that of the dinosaurs. He may have learned how to control his environment, how to pass on information from one generation to another, but the very forces of evolution that brought him into existence here on these African plains are still at work elsewhere in the world, and if man were to disappear, for whatever reason, there is doubtless somewhere some small, unobtrusive creature that would seize the opportunity and, with a spurt of evolution, take man's place. But although denying a special place in the world may be becomingly modest, the fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is very largely up to him.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
Life on Earth (1979)

World, History, Nature, Learning

“In the new environment and markets it is not enough to only promote the export of Finland. We need the political view where the countries are developing and political abilities to contribute the direction of development, e. g. in the human rights and security issues.”

Pekka Haavisto (1958) Finnish politician

Source: Pekka Haavisto: Moninapaista arvokeskustelua http://www.ulkopolitiikka.fi/article/910/pekka_haavisto_moninapaista_arvokeskustelua/ Ulkopolitiikka 4/2011” ”Uusissa toimintaympäristöissä ja uusilla markkinoilla ei riitä, että edistetään Suomen vientiä. Pitää olla myös poliittinen näkemys siitä, mihin maat ja alueet ovat kehittymässä, sekä poliittisia valmiuksia vaikuttaa kehityksen suuntaan, esimerkiksi ihmisoikeus- ja turvallisuuskysymyksiin.”

Country

“This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions, and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted beneath the many social and political changes of the last two thousand years”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 31: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People, Sense, Nostalgia, Change

“Every single man, woman and child on the planet must, to the best of their capacity, become activists for the environment if we are to reverse our royal collective march to oblivion”

Krishna Kant Shukla (1959) Indian Classical musician

“Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch (1967), who coined the label “contingency theory,” argue that different environments place differing requirements on organizations: specifically, environments characterized by uncertainty and rapid rates of change in market conditions or technologies present different challenges—both constraints and opportunities—to organizations than do placid and stable environments”

W. Richard Scott (1932) American sociologist

Source: Institutions and Organizations., 1995, p. 89 (2001: 103)

Change

“Almost 1,000 new seats to replace the mini building and the rundown trailers will help our students learn in the environment they deserve. It will give them a better opportunity to succeed.”

Jose Peralta (1971–2018) American politician

Learning, Help

“Considering enterprises as "open socio-technical systems" helps to provide a more realistic picture of how they are both influenced by and able to act back on their environment. It points in particular to the various ways in which enterprises are enabled by their structural and functional characteristics (“system constants”) to cope with the “lacks” and “gluts” in their available environment.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: Organizational choice, (1963), p. 6

Way, Help

“We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier…
Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity. A few unusual spirits among the ancient Greeks perceived that the earth was a sphere. It was only with the circumnavigations and the geographical explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, that the fact that the earth was a sphere became at all widely known and accepted. Even in the thirteenth century, the commonest map was Mercator's projection, which visualizes the earth as an illimitable cylinder, essentially a plane wrapped around the globe, and it was not until the Second World War and the development of the air age that the global nature of tile planet really entered the popular imagination. Even now we are very far from having made the moral, political, and psychological adjustments which are implied in this transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.”

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

Source: 1960s, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966, p. 3

Men, War, Age, World

“We can regard the vector ci as representing certain physical, social, and psychological attributes of player i himself in that it summarizes some crucial parameters of player i's own payoff function Ui as well as the main parameters of his beliefs about his social and physical environment… the rules of the game as such allow any given player i to belong to any one of a number of possible types, corresponding to the alternative values of his attribute vector c i could take… Each player is assumed to know his own actual type but to be in general ignorant about the other players' actual types.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information Played by “Bayesian” Players," 1967, p. 171; As quoted in: Mertens, Jean-Francois, and Shmuel Zamir. " Formulation of Bayesian analysis for games with incomplete information http://jeremy-chen.org/sites/default/files/files/convexset/2013_01/formulation_of_bayesian_analysis_for_games_with_incomplete_information_mertens_and_zamir_1985.pdf." International Journal of Game Theory 14.1 (1985): p. 1-2

Game

“Even the widespread resort to shifting cultivation with burning and light hoeing was not as childish as the first European colonialists supposed. That simple form of agriculture was based on a correct evaluation of the soil potential, which was not as great as initially appears from the heavy vegetation; and when the colonialists started upsetting the thin topsoil the result was disastrous. The above remarks show that when an outsider comes into a new ecological system, even if he is more skilled he does not necessarily function as effectively as those who have familiarized themselves with the environment over centuries; and the newcomer is likely to look more ridiculous if he is too arrogant to realize that he has something to learn from the “natives.””

Walter Rodney book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 63.

Light, Learning, Appearance

“It takes a full sixty years for the Cold Arrow Bamboo to go through the cycle of flowering, seeding, dying and for the seeds to sprout, grow, and flower. According to Buddhist teachings on transmigration this would be exactly one kalpa. "Man follows earth, earth follows sky, sky follows the way, the way follows nature, don’t commit actions which go against the basic character of nature, don’t commit acts which should not be committed." "Then what scientific value is there in saving the giant panda?" I ask. "It’s symbolic, it’s a sort of reassurance―people need to deceive themselves. We are preoccupied with saving a species which no longer has the capacity for survival and yet on the other hand we’re changing ahead and destroying the very environment for the survival of the human species itself."”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 8, p. 47

People, Way, Flowers, Nature

“The environment is located in the mind of the actor and is imposed by him on experience in order to make that experience more meaningful. It is seldom dawns on organizational theorists to look for environments inside of heads rather than outside of them.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Karl. E. Weick (1977, p. 273), as cited in: James R. Taylor, Elizabeth J. Van Ever. The Emergent Organization: Communication As Its Site and Surface. (1999), p. 285
1970s

“It affected me so much having to adapt to different parenting environments.”

Usama Mukwaya (1989) Ugandan screenwriter

Source: " Mukwaya, the self made filmmaker http://www.observer.ug/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=18171:mukwaya-the-self-made-filmmaker" at The Observer. 12 April 2012 written by Polly Kamukama

Parent

“You must take proactive action now to ensure you have the right leadership that will bring the right environment so that when your kids get bigger they have a better working environment in Kenya.”

Peter Kenneth (1965) politician

Addressing parents at Loreto Convent high school in Mombasa in June 2012. allAfrica.com: Kenya: Kenneth Accuses State of Neglecting Sports, Brian, Otieno, allafrica.com, 2012 [26 June 2012 http://allafrica.com/stories/201206270168.html,, 16 July 2012]

“[I have] all respect for that neoclassicism [of Piet Mondrian ], but it would sacrifices me too much to architecture. That kind of art does indeed fit perfectly in very modern rooms of modern buildings in equally modern cities, but never again a handcart can drive in there and never again someone can speak or think of a white dog cart in the fog. I am longing for a painting that can hang in a modern environment and still have its 'personal' life.”

Roger Raveel (1921–2013) painter

version in original Flemish (citaat van Roger Raveel, in het Vlaams): Al mijn respect voor dat neo-klassicisme [van Mondriaan], maar dat offert me teveel aan de architectuur. Dat werk past inderdaad gegoten in zeer moderne vertrekken van moderne gebouwen in even moderne steden maar er kan dan nooit meer een stootkar in rijden en nooit kan nog iemand spreken of denken aan een witte hondenkar in de mist. Ik verlang een schilderij die kan hangen in een moderne omgeving en die toch een ‘eigen’ leven heeft.
Quote of Raveel, in a letter to his friend Hugo Claus, from Machelen aan de Leie, after February 1951; as cited in Hugo Claus, Roger Raveel; Brieven 1947 – 1962, ed. Katrien Jacobs, Ludion; Gent Belgium, 2007 - ISBN 978-90-5544-665-0, p. 133 (translation: Fons Heijnsbroek)
1945 - 1960

Life, Dogs, Art, Thinking

“"Information" in most, if not all, of its connotations seems to rest upon the notion of selective power. The Shannon theory regards the information source, in emitting the signals (signs), as exerting a selective power upon the ensemble of messages. for example, observes that what people value in a source of information (i. e., what they are prepared to pay for) depends upon its exclusiveness and prediction power; he cites instances of a newspaper editor hoping for a "scoop" and a racegoer receiving information from a tipster. "Exclusiveness" here implies the selecting of that one particular recipient out of the population, while the "prediction" value of information rests upon the power it gives to the recipient to select his future action, out of the whole range of prior uncertainty as to what action to take. Again, signs have the power to select responses in people, such responses depending upon a totality of conditions. Human communication channels consist of individuals in conversation, or in various forms of social intercourse. Each individual and each conversation is unique; different people react to signs in different ways, depending each upon their own past experiences and upon the environment at the time. It is such variations, such differences, which gives rise to the principal problems in the study of human communication.”

Colin Cherry (1914–1979) British scientist

Source: On Human Communication (1957), Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Information, p. 244-5 Source: See Weaver's section of reference 297. Source: (1951). Lectures on Communication Theory, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Ref: en.wikiquote.org - Colin Cherry / Quotes / On Human Communication (1957) / Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic Information

People, Hope, Way, Communication