Quotes about structure (1753 quotes, page 4)

“In the next five years, molecular Darwinism—the idea that Darwinian processes can produce complex molecular structures at the subcellular level—will be dead. When that happens, evolutionary biology will experience a crisis of confidence because evolutionary biology hinges on the evolution of the right molecules. I therefore foresee a Taliban-style collapse of Darwinism in the next ten years. Intelligent design will of course profit greatly from this.”

William A. Dembski (1960) American intelligent design advocate

" Measure of Design: A Conversation About the Past, Present & Future of Darwinism & Design http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=17-06-060-i#ixzz2elFILC9O|The" Touchstone, volume 17, issue 6, pages 60-65, at page 64 (July/August 2004).
2000s

Confidence , Intelligence , Idea , Dead

“There is no place for concern that it would change the structure and operation of the EU in a radical way. 90% of the constitution agreement is already in the current agreements. The innovations in the draft will clarify the structure of the EU and make its activity more efficient, as well as strengthen citizens’ rights.”

Egils Levits (1955) Latvian judge, jurist and politician

Egils Levits (Latvian ECJ Judge), Quoted in “Latvijas avize”, 21 June 2004

Way , Change

“Here we are more likely to come across fields that are structured in an agonistic manner, fields which are characterized by deep divisions between alternative schools of thought rather than by the achievement of a general working consensus.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 471

School

“George Orwell once wrote: "And it's not a matter of whether the war is not real or if it is. Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact."”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

The quote is almost identical to a block of narration from the 1984 movie version of "1984", which is excerpted from various parts of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four with some paraphrasing.
2004, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

War , Effort , Past , Victory

“It is clearly apparent that in building the best results should accrue in proportion as every element in the structure is fitted both to the function it has to perform and the materials of which it is made. It follows from this that disguise and complication are hindrances, both to good construction and good design, and as complication and disguise are expensive and wasteful, that the interests of good art and true economy run on parallel lines.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Introduction
Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Art

“The Basic Argument In its simplest form, the argument goes like this: when the tasks people perform are well understood, predictable, routine, and repetitive, a bureaucratic structure is the most efficient. Things can be "programmed," to use March and Simon's term. Where tasks are not well understood, generally because the 'raw material' that each person works on is poorly understood and possibly reactive, recalcitrant or self activating. the tasks are non-routine. Such units or organizations are difficult to bureaucratize.”

Charles Perrow (1925–2019) American sociologist

Source: 1970s, Complex organizations, 1972, p. 166

People , Personality

“We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask--and to answer--the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.”

Matthew Stover book Blade of Tyshalle

(XIV.3) Del Rey, p. 472
Blade of Tyshalle (2001)

Birth , Question , Waiting

“Ultimately, the struggle of the fundamentalists is against two enemies, secularism and modernism. The war against secularism is conscious and explicit, and there is by now a whole literature denouncing secularism as an evil neo-pagan force in the modern world and attributing it variously to the Jews, the West, and the United States. The war against modernity is for the most part neither conscious nor explicit, and is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.”

Bernard Lewis (1916–2018) British-American historian

Books, The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990)

War , World , Literature , Evil

“As both technologies and organizations undergo dramatic changes in form and function, organizational researchers are increasingly turning to concepts of innovation, emergence, and improvisation to help explain the new ways of organizing and using technology evident in practice. With a similar intent, I propose an extension to the structurational perspective on technology that develops a practice lens to examine how people, as they interact with a technology in their ongoing practices, enact structures which shape their emergent and situated use of that technology. Viewing the use of technology as a process of enactment enables a deeper understanding of the constitutive role of social practices in the ongoing use and change of technologies in the workplace. After developing this lens, I offer an example of its use in research, and then suggest some implications for the study of technology in organizations.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "Using technology and constituting structures", 2000, p. 404; Abstract

People , Way , Understanding , Study

“A book at the very start comes to me as a nebulous geometric form, a kind of tension in space that has to be resolved. The resolution is effected by fleshing out the form with character, plot, dialogue, etc. But the original structure perseveres throughout, even when, or perhaps especially when, I am not conscious of it being at work. Art is a mysterious business.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

Fully Booked: Q & A with John Banville (2012)

Books , Art , Business , Perseverance

“For centuries knowledge meant proven knowledge… Einstein's results again turned the tables and now very few philosophers or scientists still think that scientific knowledge is, or can be, proven knowledge. But few realize that with this the whole classical structure of intellectual values falls in ruins and has to be replaced.”

Imre Lakatos (1921–1974) Hungarian mathematician, philosopher

Source: Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, 1970, p. 92 as cited in: Anthony C. Thiselton (2007) The Hermeneutics of Doctrine. p. 166.

Knowledge , Thinking

“Stress phenomena are… not independent of scale, as was the case pertaining to simple external static equilibrium. …with increasing dimensions of a structural element the volume and therefore the proper weight increases more rapidly than its cross-sectional areas…”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

“From the day that the impressionists liberated painting, the modern picture set out at once the structure itself on contrasts; instead of submitting to a subject, the painter makes an insertion and uses a subject in the service of purely plastic means.... [the contemporary painter] must prepare himself in order to confer a maximum of plastic effect on means that have not yet been used. He must not become an imitator of the new visual objectivity, but be a sensibility completely subject to the new state of things.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote, 1914, in 'Functions of Painting by Fernand Leger'; p. 14
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1910's, Contemporary Achievements in Painting, 1914

Painting

“Why do I paint? In my work as a mathematician, form, structure, and economy of expression are important. In music, add tone quality, balance and harmony. And now in painting, these aesthetic values are enhanced by color, contrast, and composition.”

Robin Hartshorne (1938) American mathematician

Robin Hartshorne Fine Art, fineartstudioonlione.com http://robinfaso.fineartstudioonline.com/about

Music , Color , Painting

“There is something inherently stupid about gentrified thinking. It’s a dumbing down and smoothing over of what people are actually like. It’s a social position rooted in received wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing and without information or awareness about the structures that create its own delusional sense of infallibility. Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogeneous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”

Sarah Schulman (1958) American writer

Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), p. 51

Wisdom , People , Stupidity , Thinking

“If the system exhibits a structure which can be represented by a mathematical equivalent, called a mathematical model, and if the objective can be also so quantified, then some computational method may be evolved for choosing the best schedule of actions among alternatives. Such use of mathematical models is termed mathematical programming.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Source: Linear programming and extensions (1963), p. 2

Mathematics

“There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body,2 the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain.3 But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes. There is a nearly similar contrast between the Malays and the Papuans,4 who live under the same physical conditions, and are separated from each other only by a narrow space of sea.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter VII: "On the Races of Man", page 216 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=238&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

Disease , Light , Appearance , Heart

“Through the means just specified, aided perhaps by others as yet undiscovered, man has been raised to his present state. But since he attained to the rank of manhood, he has diverged into distinct races, or as they may be more appropriately called sub-species. Some of these, for instance the Negro and European, are so distinct that, if specimens had been brought to a naturalist without any further information, they would undoubtedly have been considered by him as good and true species. Nevertheless all the races agree in so many unimportant details of structure and in so many mental peculiarities, that these can be accounted for only through inheritance from a common progenitor; and a progenitor thus characterised would probably have deserved to rank as man.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XXI: "General Summary and Conclusion", page 388 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=405&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image
The Descent of Man (1871)

“From an explorer who is condemned to seek 'structural properties' of an inaccessible reality, the experiencing organism now turns-into a builder of cognitive structures intended to solve such problems as the organism perceives.”

Ernst von Glasersfeld (1917–2010) German philosopher

Von Glasersfeld (1983) cited in: Gary D. Phye (1996) Handbook of Academic Learning: Construction of Knowledge. p. 360

Problem , Reality

“We know that the enemies of our civilization and of Arab-Muslim civilization have emerged from what is actually a root cause. The root cause is the political slum of client states from Saudi Arabia through Iraq, Pakistan and elsewhere, that has been allowed to dominate the region under U. S. patronage, and uses people and resources as if they were a gas station with a few flyblown attendants. To the extent that this policy, this mentality, has now changed in the administration, to the extent that their review of that is sincere and the conclusions that they draw from it are sincere, I think that should be welcomed. It's a big improvement to be intervening in Iraq against Saddam Hussein instead of in his favor. I think it makes a nice change. It's a regime change for us too. Now I'll state what I think is gonna happen. I've been in London and Washington a lot lately and all I can tell you is that the spokesmen for Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush walk around with a look of extraordinary confidence on their faces, as if they know something that when disclosed, will dissolve the doubts, the informational doubts at any rate, of people who wonder if there is enough evidence. [Mark Danner: It's amazing they've been able to keep it to themselves for so long. ] I simply say, I have two reasons for confidence. I know perfectly well that there are many people who would not be persuaded by this evidence even if it was dumped on their own doorstep, because the same people, many of the same people, didn't believe that it was worth fighting in Afghanistan even though the connection between the Taliban and Al Qaeda was as clear as could possibly be. So I know that. There's a strong faction of the so-called peace movement that is immune to evidence and also incapable of self criticism, of imagining what these countries would be like if the advice of the peaceniks has been followed. I also made some inquiries of my own, and I think I know what some of these disclosures will be. But, as a matter of fact I think we know enough. And what will happen will be this: The President will give an order, there will then occur in Iraq a show of military force like nothing probably the world has ever seen. It will be rapid and accurate and overwhelming enough to deal with an army or a country many times the size of Iraq, even if that country possessed what Iraq does not, armed forces in the command structure willing to obey and be the last to die for the supreme leader. And that will be greeted by the majority of Iraqi people and Kurdish people as a moment of emancipation, which will be a pleasure to see, and then the hard work of the reconstitution of Iraqi society and the repayment of our debt — some part of our debt to them — can begin. And I say, bring it on.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

"How Should We Use Our Power: A Debate on Iraq" http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/03/03-01hitchensdanner-qa.html with Mark Danner at UC Berkeley (2003-01-28}: On the 2003 invasion of Iraq
2000s, 2003

People , Pleasure , World , Peace

“Legal rules are to be judged by the structure of incentives they establish and the consequences of people altering their behavior in response to those incentives”

David D. Friedman (1945) American economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist

Source: Law's Order: What Economics Has to Do With Law and Why It Matters, 2001, p.11

People , Behavior

“Science gets most of its information by the process of reductionism, exploring the details, then the details of the details, until all the smallest bits of the structure, or the smallest parts of the mechanism, are laid out for counting and scrutiny. Only when this is done can the investigation be extended to encompass the whole organism or the entire system. So we say.
Sometimes it seems that we take a loss, working this way.”

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

"The Tucson Zoo", p. 8
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Way , Science , Loss , Parting

“Contingency theorists suggest that we can best proceed by appointing 'the right people' to the job we have in mind, and by creating flexible authority, communications, and reward structures that will motivate them to satisfy their own needs through the achievement of organizational goals.”

Gareth Morgan book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 78; as cited in: Steffen Blaschke (2008). Structures and Dynamics of Autopoietic Organizations. p. 42

People , Communication , Motivation

“…I offended some of you by saying you had been brainwashed. This is not an insult; it's a simple statement of fact. When any infant is born and socialized in a society, even if he is to become a very mature individual, he has been brainwashed. …given a structure for categorizing his experience and a system of values applied to the structure of categories.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

“Ever since the Industrial Revolution, Western society has benefited from science, logic, and reductionism over intuition and holism. Psychologically and politically we would much rather assume that the cause of a problem is “out there,” rather than “in here.” It’s almost irresistible to blame something or someone else, to shift responsibility away from ourselves, and to look for the control knob, the product, the pill, the technical fix that will make a problem go away.
Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents — preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our “solutions” have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.
Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless.
That is because they are intrinsically systems problems-undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.”

Donella Meadows (1941–2001) American environmental scientist, teacher, and writer

Pages 3-4.
Thinking in systems: A Primer (2008)

Wisdom , Hunger , War , People

“With the collapse of the old welfare states, all this has come to seem decidedly quaint. As the language of antibureaucratic individualism has been adopted, with increasing ferocity, by the Right, which insists on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream Left has increasingly reduced itself to fighting a kind of pathetic rearguard action, trying to salvage remnants of the old welfare state: it has acquiesced with–often spearheaded–attempts to make government efforts more “efficient” though the partial privatization of services and the incorporation of ever-more “market principle,” “market incentives,” and market-based “accountability processes” into the structure of the bureaucracy itself.”

David Graeber book The Utopia of Rules

The Utopia of Rules (2015)

Problem , Effort , Fight

“My main orientation is harmonic. Bill, besides having the harmonic structures that he did, had a control of the dynamic level of the piano and pedaling, which is ridiculously fantastic. I never saw a man make so many gradations from pianissimo to piano in my life. I can't do that. On the other hand, I think that what I do harmonically is somewhere other than where he was.”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

Radio interview, circa 1985, by Ben Sidran, as quoted in Talking Jazz With Ben Sidran, Volume 1: The Rhythm Section https://books.google.com/books?id=O3hZDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT453 (1992, 2006, 2014)

Life , Thinking

“Our mathematical concepts, structures, ideas have been invented as tools to organise the phenomena of the physical, social and mental world. Phenomenology of a mathematical concept, structure, or idea means describing it in its relation to the phenomena for which it was created, and to which it has extended in the learning process of mankind, and, as far as this description is concerned with the learning process of the young generation, it is didactical phenomenology, a way to show the teacher the places where the learner might step into the learning process of mankind.”

Hans Freudenthal (1905–1990) Dutch mathematician

Source: The Concept and the Role of the Model in Mathematics and Natural and Social Sciences (1961), p. ix

World , Way , Mathematics , Idea

“Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.”

Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) American libertarian thinker

Source: Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov (1980), p. 397, “Freedom Is Better,” Plain Talk, (November 1949)

Law , Nature , Freedom

“Physiologists have usually represented that our species holds a middle rank, in the masticatory and digestive apparatus, between the flesh-eating and the herbivorous animals; — a statement which seems rather to have been deduced from what we have learned by experience on this subject, than to result fairly from an actual comparison of man and animals. … The teeth of man have not the slightest resemblance to those of the carnivorous animals, except that their enamel is confined to the external surface. He possesses, indeed, teeth called canine, but they do not exceed the level of the others, and are obviously unsuited to the purposes which the corresponding teeth execute in carnivorous animals. … Thus we find that, whether we consider the teeth and jaws, or the immediate instruments of digestion, the human structure closely resembles that of the simiæ; all of which, in their natural state, are completely herbivorous.”

Sir William Lawrence, 1st Baronet (1783–1867) British surgeon

Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man, Eighth Edition (London: John Taylor, 1840), Section I, Chapter VI, pp. 148-150. Full text online at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/stream/lecturesoncompar00lawr#page/n5/mode/2up.

Nature , Learning , Animals

“This new-democratic republic will be different from the old European-American form of capitalist republic under bourgeois dictatorship, which is the old democratic form and already out of date. On the other hand, it will also be different from the socialist republic of the Soviet type under the dictatorship of the proletariat which is already flourishing in the U. S. S. R., and which, moreover, will be established in all the capitalist countries and will undoubtedly become the dominant form of state and governmental structure in all the industrially advanced countries. However, for a certain historical period, this form is not suitable for the revolutions in the colonial and semi-colonial countries. During this period, therefore, a third form of state must be adopted in the revolutions of all colonial and semi-colonial countries, namely, the new-democratic republic. This form suits a certain historical period and is therefore transitional; nevertheless, it is a form which is necessary and cannot be dispensed with.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

On New Democracy (1940)
Original: (zh-CN) 这种新民主主义共和国，一方面和旧形式的、欧美式的、资产阶级专政的、资本主义的共和国相区别，那是旧民主主义的共和国，那种共和国已经过时了；另一方面，也和苏联式的、无产阶级专政的、社会主义的共和国相区别，那种社会主义的共和国已经在苏联兴盛起来，并且还要在各资本主义国家建立起来，无疑将成为一切工业先进国家的国家构成和政权构成的统治形式；但是那种共和国，在一定的历史时期中，还不适用于殖民地半殖民地国家的革命。因此，一切殖民地半殖民地国家的革命，在一定历史时期中所采取的国家形式，只能是第三种形式，这就是所谓新民主主义共和国。这是一定历史时期的形式，因而是过渡的形式，但是不可移易的必要的形式。

Country

“MR. PANSCOPE. (suddenly emerging from a deep reverie.) I have heard, with the most profound attention, everything which the gentleman on the other side of the table has thought proper to advance on the subject of human deterioration; and I must take the liberty to remark, that it augurs a very considerable degree of presumption in any individual, to set himself up against the authority of so many great men, as may be marshalled in metaphysical phalanx under the opposite banners of the controversy; such as Aristotle, Plato, the scholiast on Aristophanes, St Chrysostom, St Jerome, St Athanasius, Orpheus, Pindar, Simonides, Gronovius, Hemsterhusius, Longinus, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Paine, Doctor Paley, the King of Prussia, the King of Poland, Cicero, Monsieur Gautier, Hippocrates, Machiavelli, Milton, Colley Cibber, Bojardo, Gregory Nazianzenus, Locke, D'Alembert, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Erasmus, Doctor Smollett, Zimmermann, Solomon, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Thomas-a-Kempis.
MR. ESCOT. I presume, sir, you are one of those who value an authority more than a reason.
MR. PANSCOPE. The authority, sir, of all these great men, whose works, as well as the whole of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the entire series of the Monthly Review, the complete set of the Variorum Classics, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Inscriptions, I have read through from beginning to end, deposes, with irrefragable refutation, against your ratiocinative speculations, wherein you seem desirous, by the futile process of analytical dialectics, to subvert the pyramidal structure of synthetically deduced opinions, which have withstood the secular revolutions of physiological disquisition, and which I maintain to be transcendentally self-evident, categorically certain, and syllogistically demonstrable.
SQUIRE HEADLONG. Bravo! Pass the bottle. The very best speech that ever was made.
MR. ESCOT. It has only the slight disadvantage of being unintelligible.
MR. PANSCOPE. I am not obliged, Sir, as Dr Johnson remarked on a similar occasion, to furnish you with an understanding.
MR. ESCOT. I fear, Sir, you would have some difficulty in furnishing me with such an article from your own stock.
MR. PANSCOPE. 'Sdeath, Sir, do you question my understanding?
MR. ESCOT. I only question, Sir, where I expect a reply, which from what manifestly has no existence, I am not visionary enough to anticipate.
MR. PANSCOPE. I beg leave to observe, sir, that my language was perfectly perspicuous, and etymologically correct; and, I conceive, I have demonstrated what I shall now take the liberty to say in plain terms, that all your opinions are extremely absurd.
MR. ESCOT. I should be sorry, sir, to advance any opinion that you would not think absurd.
MR. PANSCOPE. Death and fury, Sir!
MR. ESCOT. Say no more, Sir - that apology is quite sufficient.
MR. PANSCOPE. Apology, Sir?
MR. ESCOT. Even so, Sir. You have lost your temper, which I consider equivalent to a confession that you have the worst of the argument.
MR. PANSCOPE. Lightnings and devils!”

Thomas Love Peacock book Headlong Hall

Headlong Hall, chapter V (1816).

Death , Men , Pain , Fear

“Mathematics is merely a convenient tool by which the designer determines the physical proportions and details of a planned structure in order to transform his ideas… to the actuality of a finished structure.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

p, 125
Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Mathematics , Idea

“Can we afford to let Laloo, whose knowledge of anything except caste structures is non-existent, damage the rural economy further? The long-suffering railway ministry, which has by now lost its ability to resist any absurd decision by any of their ministers, has agreed to budget Rs 250 crore a year to buy kulhars. While all that money comes from your pocket, where will it actually go?”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

Criticising Railway Minister Lalu Prasad's plan to introduce disposable clay-cups or kulhars to serve tea in trains, as quoted in "Clay-Pot Dictator!" http://www.outlookindia.com/article/claypot-dictator/224296, Outlook India (28 June 2004)
2001-2010

Money , Knowledge , Decision , Suffering

“In the psychological fields most fundamental to the whole behavior of living things the transition seems inevitable to a Galileian view of dynamics, which derives all its vectors not from single isolated objects, but from the mutual relations of the factors in the concrete whole situation, that is, essentially, from the momentary condition of the individual and the structure of the psychological situation. The dynamics of the processes is always to be derived from the relation of the concrete individual to the concrete situation, and, so far as internal forces are concerned, from the mutual relations of the various functional systems that make up the individual.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1930s, A Dynamic Theory of Personality, 1935, p. 41; partly cited in: Kay Deaux, Mark Snyder (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology. p. 74

Behavior

“The next monument visited was the great Jain temple built only a few years before by Shantidas Jhaveri, one of the wealthiest men of Gujarat in his day and high in favour both with Shah Jahan and after him with Aurangzeb. …In 1638, however, when Mandelslo visited the place, this temple which he calls ‘ the principal mosque of the Banyas ’ was in all its pristine splendour and ‘ without dispute one of the noblest structures that could be seen’. ‘It was then new,’ he adds, ‘ for the Founder, who was a rich Banya merchant, named Shantidas, was living in my time.
As Mandelslo’s description is the earliest account we have of this famous monument, which was desecrated only seven years after visit by the Orders of Aurangzeb, then viceroy of Gujarat (1645), we shall reproduce it at some length. It stood in the middle of a great court which was enclosed by a high wall of freestone. All about this wall on the inner side was a gallery, similar to the cloisters of the monasteries in Europe, with a large number of cells, in each of which was placed a statue in white or black marble. These figures no doubt represented the Jain Tirthankars, but Mandelslo may be forgiven when he speaks of each of them as ‘ representing a woman naked, sitting, and having her legs lying cross under her, according to the mode of the country. Some of the cells had three statues in them, namely, a large one between two smaller ones.’ At the entrance to the temple stood two elephants of black marble in life- size and on one of them was seated an effigy of the builder. The walls of the temple were adorned with figures of men and animals. At the further end of the building were the shrines consisting of three chapels divided from each other by wooden rails. In these were placed marble statues of the Tirthankars with a lighted lamp before that which stood in the central shrine. One of the priests attending the temple was busy receiving from the votaries flowers which were placed round the images, as also oil for the lamps that hung before the rails, and wheat and salt as a sacrifice. The priest had covered his mouth and nose with a piece of linen cloth so that the impurity of his breath should not profane the images.”

Shantidas Jhaveri (1580–1659) Indian jewellery and bullion trader during Mughal era

Description of the temple built by Shantidas Jhaveri. Mandelslo’s Travels In Western India (a.d.1638-9) https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.531053 p. 23-25

Life , Men , Flowers , Lying

“As so often I have pointed out, intuition is a level of the highest range. In details, I don’t have to think or to worry about the realization of my interpretation; no, it’s something that spreads out of my artistic all-compassion. Probably I have to be sorry for it, but this is my deepest artistic conviction for the rightness of an interpretation - interpretation as a summary of something unique and whole, not of a combining of details. Intuition is a level that includes all levels of emotion, intelligence, structure, and architecture. And I’m also confronted with the question of poetry and poesy, something that is so often neglected - especially in Bach.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Intelligence , Question , Thinking

“Why are the theories of physics so similar in their structure?”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

“It is clearly necessary to invent organizational structures appropriate to the present multicultural age. But such efforts are doomed to failure if they do not grow out of something deeper, out of generally held values.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Age , Failure , Effort

“The term architecture is used here to describe the attributes of a system as seen by the programmer, i. e., the conceptual structure and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of the data flow and controls, the logical design, and the physical implementation. i. Additional details concerning the architecture”

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Gene Amdahl, Gerrit Blaauw, and Fred Brooks (1964) " Architecture of the IBM System http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72.7974&rep=rep1&type=pdf." in: IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol 8 (2) p. 87-101

Behavior

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

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

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

Lie , Sense , Sea

“[This] is or should be our main scientific activity — studying the structure of information and the structure of problem solving processes independently of applications and independently of its realization in animals or humans.”

John McCarthy (1927–2011) American computer scientist and cognitive scientist

John McCarthy (1974), quoted in: Joscha Bach (2009) Principles of Synthetic Intelligence PSI, p. 233
1970s

Problem , Study , Animals

“The Shah's vision of the ideal form of government was not so far removed from that of Mossadeq. In that ideal model one man, the king, prime minister or Pishva [Führer] would act as the guardian of the nation's highest interests. The Pishva, because he loves his people, could never do anything that might not be good for the people and the country. He might sacrifice the interests of the few for the benefit of the many. But he would never harm 'the people' or 'the nation' as a whole. Mossadeq's version of the same model envisaged a role for crowds, political groups - though not for political parties - and religious associations whose task was to support the Pishva by fighting his opponents and making him feel loved and cherished. In the Shah's model, the Pishva's decisions were to be carried out exclusively through the bureaucracy with the armed forces always ready to crush any opposition. All that was left for 'the nation' to do was applaud the Pishva and make him feel good. Mossadeq and the Shah advanced exactly the same argument in defence of their respective models: Iran, being constantly prey to the devilish appetite of the rapacious foreign powers, the influence of the ajnabi (foreigners), multiplying the centres of political power would allow the ajnabi to infiltrate the nation's structures. Neither man could invisage a situation in which different sections of the Iranian society might, for reasons of their own, oppose the Leader. They could conceive of no circumstances in which an opposition movement could emerge without foreign backing and intrigue.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

The Unknown Life of the Shah (1991)

Love , People , Feeling , Support

“[Ackoff also developed the circular organization concept. This structure is a democratic hierarchy with three essential characteristics:]
(1) the absence of an ultimate authority, the circularity of power;
(2) the ability of each member to participate directly or through representation in all decisions that affect him or her directly; and
(3) the ability of members, individually or collectively, to make and implement decisions that affect no one other than the decision maker or decision-makers.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff’s (1994) The Democratic Corporation: A Radical Prescription for Recreating Corporate America and Rediscovering Success. p. 117 cited in: Stuart A. Umpleby and Eric B. Dent. (1999) "The Origins and Purposes of Several Traditions. in Systems Theory and Cybernetics". in Cybernetics and Systems: An International Journal, Vol 30. pp. 79-103.
1990s

Decision

“[O]f that scientifically practical skill which produces the greatest effect with the least possible expenditure of material and work, the instances are comparatively rare. In too many cases we see the strength and the stability which ought to be given by the skilful arrangement of the parts of a structure supplied by means of clumsy massiveness, and of lavish expenditure of material, labour, and money; and the evil is increased by a perversion of the public taste, which causes works to be admired, not in proportion to their fitness for their purposes, or to the skill evinced in attaining that fitness, but in proportion to their size and cost.”

William John Macquorn Rankine (1820–1872) civil engineer

p, 125
"On the Harmony of Theory and Practice in Mechanics" (Jan. 3, 1856)

Money , Evil , Parting

“In fact rock, rather than being an example of how freedom can be achieved within the capitalist structure, is an example of how capitalism can, almost without conscious effort, deceive those whom it oppresses…. So effective has the rock industry been in encouraging the spirit of optimistic youth take-over that rock's truly hard political edge, its constant exploration of the varieties of youthful frustration, has been ignored and softened.”

Michael Lydon (1907–1977) Irish politician

"Rock for Sale"; quoted in The Sociology of Rock, Simon Frith, 1978, ISBN 0094602204

Youth , Effort , Freedom

“[Fred] Spoor's observations are truly startling, In all species of the genus Homo, the inner ear structure is indistinguishable from that of modern humans. Similarly, in all species of Australopithecus, the semicircular canals look like those of apes. Does this mean that the australopithecines moved about as apes do—that is, quadrupedally? The structure of the pelvis and lower limbs speaks against this conclusion. So does a remarkable discovery my mother made in 1976: a trail of very humanlike footprints made in a layer of volcanic ash some 3.75 million years ago.”

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

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

“To be sure, the moment the study passes beyond bare description the student must leave the landscape itself, must go beneath it, even to state what its form represents — to translate the outer foliage of a forest into the forest, the outer surface of buildings into different kinds of buildings, etc…. Our interest in houses, factories, and forests cannot be confined to their surface form; only in the limited field of aesthetic geography could such a restriction be justified. Our very use of such words as house, barn, factory, office building, etc., indicates that we are primarily concerned with the internal functions within these structures, the external form is a secondary aspect which we use simply as a handy means to detect the internal function - and should use only insofar as it is a reliable means for that purpose.”

Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) American Geographer

Source: The Nature of Geography (1939), p. 215-216; as cited in: John A. Agnew, James S. Duncan (2011) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Human Geography. p. 122

Study , Housing

“Balla, he advanced Dynamic Futurism.... drawing closer, not to the human body but to the machine, as contemporary muscles of a man of today... The actual structure of each of Balla's works tells us that the dynamic power sensed by the artist is incomparable greater than the actual bodies of the machines, and the content of each machine is only a small part of this dynamic power, since each machine is a mere unit from the sum total of the forces of contemporary life.”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

Quote, c. 1915 in: 'Cubofuturism', Malevich, in Essays on Art, op. cit., vol 2; as quoted in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, pp. 59-60
1910 - 1920

Life , Sense , Future , Parting

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

Niklaus Wirth (1934) Swiss computer scientist

Program Development by Stepwise Refinement (1971)

Change

“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

Jones' third annual discourse before the Asiatic Society on the history and culture of the Hindus (delivered on 2 February 1786 and published in 1788)

Family , Strong , Perfection

“The equilibrium… in order to become static—should be steady, permanent, lasting. …This type of equilibrium… is… independent of any scale. A reduced model will show the same effects as the proper structure. Experiments on models are simple and… instrumental for understanding such structural problems.”

Eduardo Torroja (1899–1961) Spanish architect

Philosophy of Structures (1958)

Understanding , Problem

“Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.”

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: Mind, Self, and Society. 1934, p. 1 , lead paragraph

Communication

“[The] length of the cycles and the tendency towards dampening are determined by the intrinsic structure of the swinging system, while the intensity (the amplitude) of the fluctuations is determined primarily by the exterior impulse. An important consequence of this is that a more or less regular ﬂuctuation may be be produced by a cause which operates irregularly.”

Ragnar Frisch Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics

Source: 1930s, Propagation problems and impulse problems in dynamic economics, 1933, p. 1

“Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such “transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. xliii

Light , Universe

“Is it possible or not, given the present conditions in our continent, to achieve it (socialist power, that is) by peaceful means? We emphatically answer that, in the great majority of cases, this is not possible. The most that could be achieved would be the formal takeover of the bourgeois superstructure of power and the transition to socialism of that government which, under the established bourgeois legal system, having achieved formal power will still have to wage a very violent struggle against all who attempt, in one way or another, to check its progress toward new social structures.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Tactics and Strategy of the Latin American Revolution (1962)

Peace , Way

“The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, Conflict in man-made environment. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; As cited in M.J. Apter, ‎J.H. Kerr, ‎S. Murgatroyd (1993) Advances in Reversal Theory. p. 63-64
1970s and later

Game , Motivation , Change

“Functionalist systems theories. The theorists in this tradition explain the emergence and/or maintenance of parts, structures, institutions, norms or cultural patterns of a social system in terms of their consequences, that is, the particular functions each realizes or satisfies. This includes, for instance, their contribution to the maintenance and reproduction over time of the larger system. The major functionalist in sociology is arguably Talcott Parsons.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Time , Parting

“The Code-and-Fix Model. The basic model used in the earliest days of software development contained two steps:
:1. Write some code.
:2. Fix the problems in the code.
Thus, the order of the steps was to do some coding first and to think about the requirements, design, test, and maintenance later. This model has three primary difficulties: (a) After a number of fixes, the code became so poorly structured that subsequent fixes were very expensive. This underscored the need for a design phase prior to coding. (b) Frequently, even well designed software was such a poor match to users' needs that it was either rejected outright or expensively redevelopment…”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Source: A spiral model of software development and enhancement. (1988), p. 61-62

Problem , Thinking

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

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

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

Life , Hostility , Rage , Change

“By following up this idea, also, we might go a little further. We might arrive at the conviction that our present science is human, petty, and contingent; that it is closely linked with the structure of our sensory organs; that this structure results from the evolution which fashioned these organs; that this evolution has been an accident of history; that in the future it may be different; and that, consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the work of our eyes and hands—and also of our words—there might have been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely and extraordinarily new—auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences, and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment, differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other matter with totally different properties. …We must, by setting aside the mechanical theory, free ourselves from a too narrow conception of the constitution of matter. And this liberation will be to us a great advantage which we shall soon reap. We shall avoid the error of believing that mechanics is the only real thing and that all that cannot be explained by mechanics must be incomprehensible. We shall then gain more liberty of mind for understanding what the union of the soul with the body may be.”

Alfred Binet (1857–1911) French psychologist and inventor of the first usable intelligence test

Source: The Mind and the Brain, 1907, p. 43

Error , Soul , History , Idea

“A new level of organization means a simplification of system function, and of the corresponding system structure, it also means the initiation of a process of progressive structural and functional complexification.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Evolution: the general theory (1996), p. 28.

“Finally, the claim that we equated punctuated equilibrium with saltation makes no sense within the logical structure of our theory — so, unless we are fools, how could we ever have asserted such a proposition? Our theory holds, as a defining statement, that ordinary allopatric speciation, unfolding gradually at microevolutionary scales, translates to punctuation in geological time.”

Stephen Jay Gould book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory

Source: The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002), p. 1009

Fools , Sense , Time

“The truth is, that the greatest enemies of the doctrine of Jesus are those, calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them to the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter … But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_adams.html to John Adams (11 April 1823) (Scan at The Library of Congress) http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/053/0800/0844.jpg
1820s

Truth , Hope , Error , Freedom

“Now that everything is, or may be, "digital" and could contemplate its membership in an e-category, the final product should be always studied, not only in its appearance, but in its process, structure, in its modes of functioning and of presentation / fruition and also in an historical perspective.”

Caterina Davinio (1957) Italian writer

Source: Virtual Mercury House. Planetary & Interplanetary Events, p. 130

Study , Appearance

“Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Life , Hope , Science , Change

“It's an open question, the degree to which the cosmos would order itself around you properly if you got yourself together as much as you could get yourself together. We know that things can go very badly wrong if you do things very badly wrong – there's no doubt about that. But the converse is also true. If you start to sort yourself out properly, and if you have beneficial effect on your family, first of all that's going to echo down the generations, but it also spreads out into the community. And we are networked together. We're not associated linearly. We all effect each other. So it's an open question, the degree to which acting out the notion that being is good, and the notion that you can accept its limitations and that you should still strive for virtue. It's an open question as to how profound an effect that would have on the structure of reality if we really chose to act it out. I don't think we know the limits of virtue. I don't think we know what true virtue could bring about if we aimed at it carefully and practically. So the notion that there is something divine about the individual who accepts the conditions of existence and still strives for the good, I think that's an idea that's very much worth paying attention to. And I think the fact that people considered that idea seriously for at least 2000 years indicates that there's at least something to be thought about there.”

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

Other

People , Family , Communication , Idea

“An explanation of a phenomenon is regarded, apparently instinctively, as the most general possible when it is a mechanical explanation. The "mechanism" of the process is the ultimate goal of experiment. Now this mechanism in general lies beyond the range of the senses; either by reason of their limitations, as in the case of the atomic structure of matter, or by the very nature of the supposed mechanism, as in the theory of the ether. The only way to bridge the gap between the machinery of the physical process and the world of sense-impressions is to think out some consequence of that mechanism. This we will call the hypothesis. The hypothesis, resting still on the mechanical basis, is yet beyond the range of direct experimental investigation; but if, by mathematical reasoning, a consequence of the hypothesis can be deduced, this will often lie within the range of experimental inquiry, and thus a test of the soundness of the original mechanical conception may be instituted.”

J. R. Partington (1886–1965) British chemist

Introduction
Higher Mathematics for Chemical Students (1911)

Lie , World , Way , Mathematics

“Your mind projects a structure and you identify yourself with it. It is in the nature of desire to prompt the mind to create a world for its fulfillment. Even a small desire can start a long line of action; what about a strong desire? Desire can produce a universe; its powers are miraculous. Just as a small matchstick can set a huge forest on fire, so does a desire light the fires of manifestation. (…)”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Desire and fear
Source: "I am That." P.87.

World , Nature , Light , Strong

“Let me start a different/ analysis by recalling an idea from Max Weber. He characterized cultural modernity as the separation of the substantive reason expressed in religion and metaphysics into three autonomous spheres. They are science, morality and art. These came to be differentiated because the unified world-views of religion and metaphysics fell apart. Since the 18th century, the problems inherited from these older world-views could be arranged so as to fall under specific aspects of validity: truth, normative rightness, authenticity and beauty. They could then be handled as questions of knowledge, or of justice and morality, or of taste. Scientific discourse, theories of morality, Jurisprudence, and the production and criticism of art could in turn be institutionalized. Each domain of culture could be made to correspond to cultural professions in which problems could be dealt with as the concern of special experts. This professionalized treatment of the cultural tradition brings to the fore the intrinsic structures of each of the three dimensions of culture. There appear the structures of cognitive-instrumental, of moral-practical and of aesthetic-expressive rationality, each of these under the control of specialists who seem more adept at being logical in these particular ways than other people are. As a result, the distance grows between the culture of the experts and that of the larger public. What accrues to culture through specialized treatment and reflection does not immediately and necessarily become the property of everyday praxis. With cultural rationalization of this sort, the threat increases that the life-world, whose traditional substance has already been devalued, will become more and more impoverished.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: Modernity — An Incomplete Project, 1983, p. 8-9

Life , People , Truth , World

“Dear reader, traditional human power structures and their reign of darkness are about to be rendered obsolete.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

From 1980s onwards, Cosmography (1992)

“I have always accepted and respected all other schools of architecture, from the chill and elemental structures of Mies van der Rohe to the imagination and delirium of Gaudi. I must design what pleases me in a way that is naturally linked to my roots and the country of my origin.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

Quoted in "Gordon Bunshaft and Oscar Niemeyer: Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureates 1988" http://www.pritzkerprize.com/bunnei.htm#...about%20Oscar%20Niemeyer, pritzkerprize.com (1988).

School , Way , Imagination , Nature

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

Mahmud of Ghazni (971–1030) Sultan of Ghazni

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

Men , Support , Nature , Strong

“Structure joins the evocative concept of paradigm, a disarmingly simple dialectic of scientific change (long periods of paradigmatic "normal science" punctuated by short "revolutions"), and the apparent authority of historical example to show that major conceptual shifts in the natural sciences are effected not by logical argument alone but also by appeals to worldviews, religion, metaphysical commitments, notions of simplicity and order, and so on. The view that science, like other thought systems, advances or retreats through rhetoric and persuasion, not by logical necessity, was a revelation to people who had never practiced it or studied its history. The book comforted social scientists who wanted to assimilate their discipline to physics, Luddites who blamed social problems on scientists and engineers, and everyone who rejected authority. It repelled the philosophers of science at which it was aimed for the good reason that it undercut their belief that scientific knowledge advances by the application of rational criteria to the products of observation and experiment.”

John L. Heilbron (1934) American historian

Thomas Samuel Kuhn: 18 July 1922-17 June 1996 (1998)

People , Books , Religion , History

“You have never expressed any decided political opinions, and indeed I do not know if or how far you assent to the proposition that almost unlimited sacrifices of individual life and happiness are worth while to preserve the unique structure of power of which the keystone (the only conceivable and indispensable keystone) is the English Crown. I for my part find it the nearest thing in the world to an absolute (as opposed to a relative) value: it is like the outer circle that bound my universe, so that I cannot conceive anything beyond it.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Letter to his parents (9 March 1943), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), p. 75.
1940s

Life , World , Universe , Parting

“We may predict that the science of which we try to be the humble and devoted servants will in the future life of the nations be an important factor in eliminating maladjustments between fundamental economic sectors and assure a smooth and progressive utilization of resources… One wants men with a knowledge of the characteristic features of the economic and social structure of their country and with a fundamental theoretical knowledge along modern lines.”

Ragnar Frisch (1895–1973) Norwegian economist

Frisch, (1946, p. 1), as quoted in: " Ragnar Frisch 1895-1995 https://www.ssb.no/a/histstat/doc/doc_199403.pdf." O. Bjerkholt, 1994.
1940-60s

Life , Men , Knowledge , Science

“Already at the age of 21 I played the complete organ works of Bach - and this by memory. As a child and youngster I had been taught by one of the last master-students of the legendary Helmut Walcha, and I completely had been affected by this style of insight into Bach and the internal structures. This method of regarding the independent coherence of all the voices gave me a special comprehension of Bach and his philosophy. Lastly one can say that I have been growing up with Bach, even to this day. If you understand the free organ works (preludes, toccatas, fugues), the chorales, and especially the trio sonatas, you have an insight into Bach that others don’t have. Especially the soloistic and independent leadings of the three voices of the trio sonatas is artistically the major aim of an organist; and already the Orgelbüchlein, the part 5 of the Peters Edition, shows Bach in all his structural and emotional effects. Albert Schweitzer described the Orgelbüchlein as something where the tonal speech of Bach is unbeatable. The comprehension of the organ-Bach is an understanding of the counterpoint and the polyphonic structures, and the coherence of Bach himself.”

Burkard Schliessmann classical pianist

Talkings on Bach

Age , Understanding , Memory , Parting

“A class is a set of objects that share a common structure and a common behavior”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 513

Behavior

“Emergent structuring, whereby participants discover or adopt certain similar strategies within bounded rationality and situations with certain opportunity structures and incentive structures. Social network and ecological properties result in relatively well-defined aggregate performance characteristics…”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. 127; As cited in C.J. McNair et al. (2006) " The fall of management accounting http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1026&context=accfinwp".

“The structure of a theoretical system tells us what alternatives are open in the possible answers to a given question. If observed facts of undoubted accuracy will not fit any of the alternatives it leaves open, the system itself is in need of reconstruction.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The structure of social action (1937), p. 9

Question

“[Physicists and philosophers] stick stubbornly to the principles of a mechanistic interpretation of the world after physics has, in its factual structure, already outgrown the latter. They have the same excuse as the inhabitant of the mainland who for the first time travels on the open sea: he will desperately try to stay in sight of the vanishing coast line, as long as there is no other coast in sight, towards which he steers.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

"Wissenschaft als symbolische Konstruktion des Menschen" Eranos-Jahrbuch (1948) GA IV, as quoted/translated by Erhard Scholz, "Philosophy as a Cultural Resource and Medium of Reflection for Hermann Weyl" http://arxiv.org/abs/math/0409596 (2004)

World , Travel , Time , Sea

“What takes place within the structure of the leaf, then, with the aid of the wonderful green workmen, is this: A certain number of molecules of water, brought to the leaf from root and stem, are taken in hand and compounded with a certain number of molecules of carbon extracted from the air that has been brought into the leaf laboratory through its mouths or stomata from the outside atmosphere.
When the compound has been effected, we still have the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen that composed the water molecules and the atoms of carbon, but they are so marvelously put together that they no longer constitute the liquid water or the gas in which the carbon was imported. They now constitute an altogether new substance which is termed sugar.
Thus only three elements are dealt with and these very familiar ones. It would seem as if almost any chemist should be able to manage a simple combination like that. But… no human chemist knows how to manage it. There are forces to be invoked in effecting that combination of which no chemist has any knowledge.
Only the chlorophyll grains in the plant leaf have learned the secret, and up to the present they have kept their secret well.”

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

How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening

Secret , Knowledge , Learning , Water

“An iniquitous social structure has produced an iniquitous power structure. Individuals and parties are not at fault. Political, social and economic monopolies exclude a large section of the masses from decision-making. To that extent they are undemocratic. So far teams of the ruling elite played and the rest were called to applaud. Now the onlookers are saying we also want to kick and net a goal, and we have our own team.”

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

On the changes occurring in the political structure of the country
We are ruled by an upper caste Hindu raj

Decision

“I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a physical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

Source: 1860s, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), Ch.2, p. 129

Life , World , Feeling , Animals

“I did not teach painting but seeing. I concentrated on the basic courses for beginners. I taught drawing (purposely without nudes), color (without any painting as such) and design (as 'structural organization'). And so the graduate students came 'down' to the basic courses for beginners.”

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

Source: Homage to the square' (1964), A conversation with Josef Albers' (1970), p. 459

Color , Drawing , Painting

“Jacob Bekenstein found… in 1971 that every black hole must have an entropy proportional to the area of its horizon… Stephen Hawking then refined this by showing that the constant of proportionality must be… exactly one quarter. …entropy is supposed to correspond to a measure of information …Loop quantum gravity… [gives] a detailed description of the microscopic structure of a black hole. …a horizon can have, for each quantized unit of area, a finite number of states. Counting them, we get exactly Bekenstein's result…”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"Loop Quantum Gravity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“Houses stretched off on all sides, sometimes dipping below the ground and sometimes emerging out of it, piling themselves into pyramids, into almost toppling waves, never one rooftree more than eighty yards from the next. The planet was covered. There were the old, open-air cities planted with whatever would grow, mountains honeycombed, resorts in Antarctica, covered roads crammed with carrier traffic only, hovercraft, sea-craft, masses, structures, and installations under the sea, nets of algae towed in the air, some insects and no animals whatever, but people, people, people everywhere.
What’s the opposite of the Garden of Eden?”

Joanna Russ (1937–2011) American author

Source: Fiction, And Chaos Died (1970), Chapter 3 (p. 120)

People , Mountain , Animals , Housing

“The final result will be that the American people will ultimately prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. …People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Life , Death , People , World

“Don't try to tear down other people's religion about their ears, Build up your own perfect structure of truth, and invite your listeners to enter in and enjoy it's glories.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

The Life Story of Brigham Young, p. 149-150
Attributed

People , Truth , Religion , Tear

“This Caesarean madness stops at no barrier. Without compunction it rides roughshod over those achievements of the past which have all too often had to be purchased with the heart's blood of the people. It is always ready to smother with brutal violence the last rights and the last liberties which might interfere with its plans for holding all social activities within the rigid forms set by its will. This is the great danger which threatens us today and which immediately confronts us. The success or failure of monopolistic capitalistic power plans will determine the structure of the social life of the near future.”

Rudolf Rocker book Nationalism and Culture

Source: Nationalism and Culture (1937), Ch. 1 "The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism"

Life , People , Failure , Success

“[T]he North’s ideology glorifies the heart over the mind, instincts over consciousness, which makes rash decisions more likely to be made, even quite low down the military command structure. There is therefore a significant danger of some sort of limited clash at any time. But that has always been the case.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with The Conversation (September 2017)

Decision , Time , Heart

“When we have undermined the patriotic lie, we shall have cleared the path for the great structure where all shall be united into a universal brotherhood — a truly free society.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

What is Patriotism? (1908)

Lie , Universe

“No more harmful nonsense exists than [the] common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern.”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts", p. 48
I Have Landed (2002)

Life , Question , Knowledge , Reality

“Up to 1931 there was no reason to suppose that social changes would not, or could not, follow the same evolutionary pattern which had resulted from the increased creation and distribution of wealth during the nineteenth century. Now, after 1931, many of us felt that the disease was more deep-rooted. It had become evident that the structure of capitalist society in its old form had broken down, not only in Britain but all over Europe and even in the United States. The whole system had to be reassessed. Perhaps it could not survive at all; it certainly could not survive without radical change. Something like a revolutionary situation had developed, not only at home but overseas.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

Harold Macmillan (1966) Winds of change, 1914-1939. p. 266 as cited in Brian Vickery (2005) "Coming of age in the 1930s" ( online http://web.archive.org/web/20080531130709/http://www.lucis.me.uk/thirties.htm at archive.org)
1960s

Disease , Home , Change , Wealth

“My ambition has always been to reduce a building’s support to a minimum. The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is. That has been my life’s work.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

Quoted in "Architect of Optimism," Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (2007-04-13).

Life , Support

“The description of the evolutionary trajectory of dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear fits certain features of the historical development of human societies. But the description of evolutionary processes, whether in nature or in history, has additional elements. These elements include such factors as the convergence of existing systems on progressively higher organizational levels, the increasingly efficient exploitation by systems of the sources of free energy in their environment, and the complexification of systems structure in states progressively further removed from thermodynamic equilibrium.
General evolution theory, based on the integration of the relevant tenets of general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, can convey a sound understanding of the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems in the various realms of investigation…. The basic notions of this new discipline can be developed to give an adequate account of the dynamical evolution of human societies as well. Such an account could furnish the basis of a system of knowledge better able to orient human beings and societies in their rapidly changing milieu.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

E. Laszlo et al. (1993) pp. xvii- xix; as cited in: Alexander Laszlo and Stanley Krippner (1992) " Systems Theories: Their Origins, Foundations, and Development http://archive.syntonyquest.org/elcTree/resourcesPDFs/SystemsTheory.pdf" In: J.S. Jordan (Ed.), Systems Theories and A Priori Aspects of Perception. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1998. Ch. 3, pp. 47-74.

Law , History , Communication , Understanding

“As Adam Smith once said, "There is much ruin in a nation". Our basic structure of values and the interwoven network of free institutions will withstand much. I believe that we shall be able to preserve and extend freedom despite the size of the military programs and despite the economic powers already concentrated in Washington. But we shall be able to do so only if we awake to the threat that we face, only if we persuade our fellowmen that free institutions offer a surer, if perhaps at times a slower, route to the ends they seek than the coercive power of the state. The glimmerings of change that are already apparent in the intellectual climate are a hopeful augury.”

Milton Friedman book Capitalism and Freedom

Source: Capitalism and Freedom (1962), Ch. 13 Conclusion

Hope , Freedom , Change , Time

“We're adapted to the meta-reality, which means that we're adapted to that which remains constant across the longest spans of time. And that's not the same things that you see around you day to day. They're just like clouds, they're just evaporating, you know? There are things underneath that that are more fundamental realities, like the dominance hierarchy, like the tribe, like the danger outside of society, like the threat that other people pose to you, and the threat that you pose to yourself. Those are eternal realities, and we're adapted to those. That's our world, and that's why we express all those things in stories. Then you might say, well how do you adapt yourself to that world? The answer, and I believe this is a neurological answer, is that your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order. The way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning. Let's say that there's a place in the environment that you should be. So what should that place be? Well, you don't want to be terrified out of your skull. What good is that? And you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep. You want to be somewhere where you are kind of on firm ground with both of your feet, but you can take a step with one leg and test out new territory. Some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable are going to go pretty far out there into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself. And some people are just going to put a toe in the chaos, and that's neuroticism basically - your sensitivity to threat that is calibrated differently in different people. And some people are more exploratory than others. That's extroversion and openness, and intelligence working together. Some people are going to tolerate more chaos in their mixture of chaos and order. Those are often liberals, by the way. They're more interested in novel chaos, and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist. Who's right? It depends on the situation. That's why liberals and conservatives have to talk to each other, because one of them isn't right and the other is wrong. Sometimes the liberals are right and sometimes the liberals are right, because the environment is unpredictable and constantly changing, so that's why you have to communicate. That's what a democracy does. It allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate their societies. So let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order. What does that mean? Well, you're stable enough, but you're interested. A little novelty heightens your anxiety. It wakes you up a bit. That's the adventure part of it. But it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity, and that's associated with pleasure. That's the dopamine circuit. So if you're optimally balanced - and you know you're there if you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one…you're saying some things that you know, and the other person is saying some things that they know - and what both of you know is changing. Music can model that. It provides you with multi-level predictable forms that can transform just the right amount. So music is a very representational art form. It says, 'this is what the universe is like.' There's a dancing element to it, repetitive, and then little variations that surprise you and produce excitement in you. In doesn't matter how nihilistic you are, music still infuses you with a sense of meaning because it models meaning. That's what it does. That's why we love it. And you can dance to it, which represents you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality, and positioning yourself properly.”

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

"The selection pressure that women placed on men developed the entire species. There's two things that happened. The men competed for competence, since the male hierarchy is a mechanism that pushes the best men to the top. The effect of that is multiplied by the fact that women who are hypergamous peel from the top. And so the males who are the most competent are much more likely to leave offspring, which seems to have driven cortical expansion."
Concepts

Love , Women , Men , People

“Don't simply blame the individuals involved in policy decisions (although they must shoulder the moral and legal responsibilities); blame the sociocultural structure within which they are enmeshed. Search for the role pressures, the premiums and penalties that result from doing or not doing things in certain ways, the goals held out with associated carrots and sticks, and the tensions generated by the often incompatible demands of peers, family, sub- and super-ordinates, politicians, and national flag”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Society: A Complex Adaptive System--Essays in Social Theory, (1998), p. 256.

Family , Penalty , Way , Search

“Formal theories of organization have been taught in management courses for many years, and there is an extensive literature on the subject. The textbook principles of organization — hierarchical structure, authority, unity of command, task specialization, division of staff and line, span of control, equality of responsibility and authority, etc. — comprise a logically persuasive set of assumptions which have had a profound influence upon managerial behavior.”

Douglas McGregor (1906–1964) American professor

Source: The Human Side of Enterprise (1960), p. 15 (p. 21 in 2006 edition)

Behavior , Literature

Quotes about structure page 4

Quotes about structure
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