Quotes about structure
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José Martí photo
Richard K. Morgan photo

“Society is, always has been and always will be a structure for the exploitation and oppression of the majority through systems of political force dictated by an élite, enforced by thugs, uniformed or not, and upheld by a wilful ignorance and stupidity on the part of the very majority whom the system oppresses.”

Richard K. Morgan (1965) British writer

Richard Morgan (2002) in: "Never Mind the Cyberpunks: An Interview with Richard Morgan" at SaxonBullock.com, published by SlateMagazine.co.uk, 2002
Morgan discussing his "take away" of his novel Altered Carbon

“But besides relatedness and influence I should like to see that my colors remain, as much as possible, a 'face' –their own 'face', as it was achieved – uniquely — and I believe consciously - in Pompeian wall-paintings - by admitting coexistence of such polarities as being dependent and independent — being dividual and individual.
Often, with paintings, more attention is drawn to the outer, physical, structure of the color means than to the inner, functional, structure of the color action... Here now follow a few details of the technical manipulation of the colorants which in my painting usually are oil paints and only rarely casein paints.
On a ground of the whitest white available – half or less absorbent – and built up in layers – on the rough side of panels of untempered Masonite – paint is applied with a palette knife directly from the tube to the panel and as thin and even as possible in one primary coat. Consequently there is no under or over painting or modeling or glazing and no added texture – so-called... As a result this kind of painting presents an inlay (intarsia) of primary thin paints films – not layered, laminated, nor mixed wet, half or more dry, paint skins.
Such homogeneous thin and primary films will dry, that is, oxidize, of course, evenly – and so without physical and/or chemical complication – to a healthy, durable paint surface of increasing luminosity.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

4 quotes from: 'The Color in my Painting'
Homage to the square' (1964)

Hovhannes Bagramyan photo
Ellsworth Kelly photo

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. Process replaces product in importance, just as system supersedes structure.”

Roy Ascott (1934) British academic

Behaviourables and Futuribles, manifesto, 1967; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf." 2002

Kenneth Arrow photo
Jacques Derrida photo
David Baboulene photo
Peter M. Senge photo
Roland Barthes photo
Patrick White photo
David Morrison photo
Richard Salter Storrs photo
Rickard Falkvinge photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Perry Anderson photo
David Allen photo

“GTD gives freedom to the right, structure to the left”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

brains, that is!
12 April 2010 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/12042191961
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Peter Greenaway photo
Marcel Marceau photo
Robert Venturi photo
Jordan Peterson photo

“The structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals.”

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

Other

C. Wright Mills photo

“The overriding crucial implication of the structural adjustment policies was that the villagers would have to fend for themselves in all conceivable respects.”

Lars Rudebeck (1937)

Source: Politics and Structural Adjustment in a West-African Village (1990). AKUT, Uppsala universitet, p. 19; About villagers of Adjadja, Guinea-Bissau in the 1990s.

“The longwall method [can be] regarded as a technological system expressive of the prevailing outlook of mass-production engineering and as a social structure consisting of the occupational roles that have been institutionalized in its use.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Long Wall Method of Coal-Getting", 1951, p. 5

Jane Roberts photo
Fred Brooks photo
Mario Vargas Llosa photo
Alfred Russel Wallace photo

“I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while, on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual, and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. This consideration must surely tell us that all living things were not made for man. Many of them have no relation to him. The cycle of their existence has gone on independently of his, and is disturbed or broken by every advance in man’s intellectual development; and their happiness and enjoyments, their loves and hates, their struggles for existence, their vigorous life and early death, would seem to be immediately related to their own well-being and perpetuation alone, limited only by the equal well-being and perpetuation of the numberless other organisms with which each is more or less intimately connected.”

The Malay Archipelago (1869)

Ervin László photo
Melanie Joy photo
Jane Roberts photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Gerhard Richter photo
Victor Klemperer photo

“An ordered set of assertions about a generic behavior or structure assumed to hold throughout a significantly broad range of specific instances.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, "Theory construction as disciplined imagination," 1989, p. 517

Jordan Peterson photo
A. James Gregor photo
Georg Simmel photo
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan photo

“History presents a series of cultural epochs. Each is a span of years within which knowledge presents a more or less unified structure which can be expressed in a classification, but each new epoch requires a new classification.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Other Chapters, p. 147 Cited in: Madeline M. Henderson (1966) Cooperation, convertibility, and compatibility among information systems: a literature review. p. 72.

Grady Booch photo

“Structured design does not scale up well for extremely complex systems, and this method is largely inappropriate for use with object-based and object-oriented programming languages.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 19

William H. Starbuck photo
Boris Sidis photo

“The general tendency of evolution is from structure to function, from bondage to freedom of the individual elements.”

Boris Sidis (1867–1923) American psychiatrist

Source: Multiple Personality: an Experimental Investigation into Human Individuality (1904), p. 26

Heinz Isler photo

“…I do not say any form which you construct this way is a good form, or must lead to a good solution; but there are forms which can lead to good solutions, and of course that is only the first link in a whole chain of investigations, and the other links in the investigation, model tests, measuring of the first structure, or a model test in scale 1:1 as we have it out here, these are of primary importance. So the engineer[‘s] problem is remaining all the same, but it is the first link, here, the shaping which has been lacking up to now, and this method can lead to a very nice solution.”

Heinz Isler (1926–2009) engineer

First Congress of the International Association of Shell Structures (now IASS), Madrid (1959) discussion following presentation of his paper paper ‘New Shapes for Shells’, as quoted by John Chilton, "39 etc… : Heinz Isler’s infinite spectrum of new shapes for shells" (2009) Proceedings of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) Symposium 2009, Valencia, Evolution and Trends in Design, Analysis and Construction of Shell and Spatial Structures, 28 September – 2 October 2009, Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain, eds. Alberto Domingo, Carlos Lazaro.

Frank Herbert photo

“We are questioning more than the philosophy behind our dependence upon limited and limiting systems. We question the power structures that have grown up around such systems.”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

Without Me, You're Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers (1981), co-written with Max Barnard
General sources

Ervin László photo

“Yet while they exist, regardless of how long, each system has a specific structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Variant: Each system has a specific structure made up of certain maintained relationships among its parts, and manifests irreducible characteristics of its own.
Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 12.

John C. Baez photo
Julian Assange photo
Kurt Lewin photo
Jane Roberts photo
Talcott Parsons photo
Koila Nailatikau photo
John Kenneth Galbraith photo
Vitruvius photo
Charles Lyell photo
Daniel Dennett photo
Reinhard Selten photo
Richard L. Daft photo

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

Richard L. Daft (1964) American sociologist

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

Manuel Castells photo
Rahul Gandhi photo
Ward Cunningham photo

“A wiki works best where you're trying to answer a question that you can't easily pose, where there's not a natural structure that's known in advance to what you need to know.”

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

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Exploring with Wiki

Francis Heylighen photo

“[S]elf-organization [is] the appearance of structure or pattern without an external agent imposing it.”

Francis Heylighen (1960) Belgian cyberneticist

Cited in: Christoph Schmitz (2007) Self-Organized Collaborative Knowledge Management. p.9
The science of self-organization and adaptivity (2001)

Wilhelm Reich photo

“It is sexual energy which governs the structure of human feeling and thinking.”

Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian-American psychoanalyst

Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf [The Sexual Revolution] (1936)

Albert Einstein photo

“Don't think about why you question, simply don't stop questioning. Don't worry about what you can't answer, and don't try to explain what you can't know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren't you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind—to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.”

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

Variant transcription from "Death of a Genius" in Life Magazine: "Then do not stop to think about the reasons for what you are doing, about why you are questioning. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity."
Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 138

Mark Rothko photo
Richard Leakey photo
John Ralston Saul photo
Chris Hedges photo

“All human paternity comes internally structured by fratricide and, as paternity, is incapable of truth, because it will always be protecting itself against the 'other.”

James Alison (1959) Christian theologian, priest

Source: Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001), " Theology amidst the stones and dust http://girardianlectionary.net/res/alison_elijah.htm", p. 48.

El Lissitsky photo
Ta-Nehisi Coates photo
Paul DiMaggio photo
Marsden Hartley photo
William John Macquorn Rankine photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Daniel Dennett photo

“Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. … This information doesn't have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn't have to be "represented" in "data structures" in the nervous system. It can be exploited by the nervous system, however, which is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information in the hormonal systems just as it is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information embodied in your limbs and eyes. So there is wisdom, particularly about preferences, embodied in the rest of the body. By using the old bodily systems as a sort of sounding board, or reactive audience, or critic, the central nervous system can be guided — sometimes nudged, sometimes slammed — into wise policies. Put it to the vote of the body, in effect….When all goes well, harmony reigns and the various sources of wisdom in the body cooperate for the benefit of the whole, but we are all too familiar with the conflicts that can provoke the curious outburst "My body has a mind of its own!" Sometimes, apparently, it is tempting to lump together some of the embodied information into a separate mind. Why? Because it is organized in such a way that it can sometimes make independent discriminations, consult preferences, make decisions, enact policies that are in competition with your mind. At such time, the Cartesian perspective of a puppeteer self trying desperately to control an unruly body-puppet is very powerful. Your body can vigorously betray the secrets you are desperately trying to keep — by blushing and trembling or sweating, to mention only the most obvious cases. It can "decide" that in spite of your well-laid plans, right now would be a good time for sex, not intellectual discussion, and then take embarrassing steps in preparation for a coup d'etat. On another occasion, to your even greater chagrin and frustration, it can turn a deaf ear on your own efforts to enlist it for a sexual campaign, forcing you to raise the volume, twirl the dials, try all manner of preposterous cajolings to persuade it.”

Daniel Dennett (1942) American philosopher

Kinds of Minds (1996)

Marshall McLuhan photo

“Speech structures the abyss of mental and acoustic space…it is a cosmic, invisible architecture of the human dark.”

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

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 13

Hans Reichenbach photo

“Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than “terror” and “terrorism.” These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive both in scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. The usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked (“retaliation,” “protective reaction,” etc.), not the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U. S. power has supported is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence – wholesale as opposed to retail terror – during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not “terror,” although one terminological exception may be noted: while Argentinian “security forces” only retaliate and engage in “police action,” violence carried out by unfriendly states (Cuba, Cambodia) may be designated “terroristic.””

Edward S. Herman (1925–2017) American journalist

The status of proper usage is settled not merely by the official or unofficial status of the perpetrators but also by their political affiliations.
Source: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, with Noam Chomsky, 1979, p. 6.

Elisha Gray photo
Pierre Trudeau photo
Jussi Halla-aho photo
Slavoj Žižek photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo