Quotes about system
page 29

“Formulating consists of determining the system inputs, outputs, requirements, objectives, constraints. Structuring the system provides one or more methods of organizing the solution, the method of operation, the selection of parts, and the nature of their performance requirements. It is evident that the processes of formulating a system and structuring it are strongly related.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Source: Systems Engineering Tools, (1965), Systems Engineering Methods (1967), p. 70

Nature, Parting

“I was informed this afternoon by the distinguished Secretary of the Treasury that his preliminary estimates indicate that our balance of payments deficit has been reduced from $2.8 billion in 1964 to $1.3 billion, or less, in 1965. This achievement has been made possible by the patriotic voluntary cooperation of businessmen and bankers working with your government. We must now work together with increased urgency to wipe out this balance of payments deficit altogether in the next year. And as our economy surges toward new heights we must increase our vigilance against the inflation which raises the cost of living and which lowers the savings of every family in this land. It is essential, to prevent inflation, that we ask both labor and business to exercise price and wage restraint, and I do so again tonight. I believe it desirable, because of increased military expenditures, that you temporarily restore the automobile and certain telephone excise tax reductions made effective only 12 days ago. Without raising taxes—or even increasing the total tax bill paid—we should move to improve our withholding system so that Americans can more realistically pay as they go, speed up the collection of corporate taxes, and make other necessary simplifications of the tax structure at an early date.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Family, Exercises, Business, Speed

“As Locke sees, equality in authority entails denying to the legal system's administrators—and thus to the legal system itself—any powers beyond those possessed by private citizens:The law of nature is in that state put into every man's hands, whereby every one has a right to punish the transgressors of that law to such a degree as may hinder its violation…. For in that state of perfect equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one over another, what any may do in prosecution of that law, every one must needs have a right to do.Lockean equality involves not merely equality before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially, equality with legislators, judges, and police.”

Roderick Long (1964) American philosopher

"Equality: the Unknown Ideal" (2001)

Law, Nature, Perfection

“Biases are either “hot” (that is, produced by the agent’s motivational system) or “cold” (more similar to optical illusions).”

Jon Elster (1940) Norwegian academic

Reason and Rationality (2009)

Motivation

“There are several world view assumptions present in enterprise engineering. The first assumption is that the enterprise can be viewed as a complex system. This is necessary because systems in organizations are systems of organized complexity. Complexity is the result of the multiplicity and intricacy of man’s interaction with other components of the system. Secondly, the enterprise is to be viewed as a system of processes. These processes are engineered both individually and holistically. The final assumption is the use of engineering rigor in transforming the enterprise. The enterprise engineering paradigm views the enterprise as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives. In the Enterprise Engineering paradigm, the enterprise is viewed as a complex system of processes that can be engineered to accomplish specific organizational objectives.”

Donald H. Liles (1947) American engineer

Source: Enterprise modeling within an enterprise engineering framework (1996), p. 993

World

“Democracy is not a form of government. It is a political philosophy that can be embodied in various systems of government.”

John Allen Fraser (1931) Canadian politician

Source: The House Of Commons At Work (1993), Chapter 1, The System of Government, p. 5

Democracy

“Your mind receives, remembers, & reminds, & sucks at all 3, compared to an objective external system a la GTD.”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

7 December 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/6439523499 Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

“Actually, a kind of state socialism seemed to be gaining more and more ground, furthered by many of the [Nazi] party functionaries. They had already managed to have all plants owned by the state distributed among the various party districts and subordinated to their own district enterprises… Our very system of industrial direction in the interests of war production could easily become the framework for a state-socialist economic order. The result was that our organization, the more efficient it became, was itself providing the party leaders with the instruments for the doom of private enterprise.”

Albert Speer (1905–1981) German architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany

Source: Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970), p. 359

War

“Once Steve Jobs goes away, which is probably not far away, then Apple will have to make a strategic decision on whether to open up the platform. Ultimately a closed system just can't go that far.”

Patrick Lo

Netgear CEO: Apple Doomed Because Of Closed Platform, Jobs' 'Ego' http://huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/31/netgear-ceo-steve-jobs_n_816279.html in The Huffington Post (31 January 2011)

Decision

“We have no proverbial tea to dump, should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports? Is a Civil War Imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that. But it might.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

1990s, Letter to the Union-Sun & Journal (1992)

War, Hope, Tea

“Enterprise engineering is rooted in both the organizational sciences and the information system sciences. In our current understanding, three concepts are paramount to the theoretical and practical pursuit of enterprise engineering: enterprise ontology, enterprise architecture, and enterprise governance.”

Erik Proper (1967) Dutch computer scientist

Preface
Advances in Enterprise Engineering II (2009)

Understanding, Science

“I have concentrated thus far on one aspect of achievement: the creation of a theory or theories, which in some form pass into the standard usage of economists. But with Keynes, and with other economists, theories were not the whole story. Keynes was also an applied economist using the existing body of theory in conjunction with the available facts of the world to try to shape certain outcomes, be they the international monetary system in 1931–2 or 1941–6, or the financial policy of the British Government in 1915, 1929–33 or 1940–6. And shape them he did with some success through various forms of private and public persuasion. How he did so and why he did so are also subjects for historians of economics, not to mention biographers, who may in the process of writing a biography have acquired additional perspectives.”

Donald Moggridge (1943) American economic historian

Preface
Maynard Keynes: An Economists' Biography (1992)

World, Success

“Capitalism cannot be reduced to one or a few features, but it does possess one relationship, central to its existence and operation, that constitutes the essence of inequality and ineradicable instability: the wage-labor-capital connection that dwells at the heart of the system.”

Herbert Schiller (1919–2000) American media critic

Source: Living In The Number One Country (2000), Chapter Five, Corporatizing Communication And Culture, p. 132

Heart

“We are in an emergency situation in the Anthropocene epoch in which the disruption of the Earth system, particularly the climate, is threatening the planet as a place of human habitation. However, our political-economic system, capitalism, is geared primarily to the accumulation of capital, which prevents us from addressing this enormous challenge and accelerates the destruction. answer to the dire ecological problems we face, because when looking at the human effect on the planet there is nothing gradual about it; it is a Great Acceleration and a rift in the Earth system. The problem is rising exponentially, while worsening even faster than that would suggest, because we are in the process of crossing all sorts critical thresholds and facing a bewildering number of tipping points.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice (2017)

Problem

“Did Libya invade Italy or was it Italy that invaded Libya? You attack us now as you did then. In other ways, with other systems, by supporting Israel, opposing Arab unity and our revolutions, frowning on Islam and calling us fanatics. We’ve been too patient with you. We’ve put up with your provocation for too long. If we hadn’t been so wise, we would have gone to war with you a thousand times. We didn’t because we think the use of force is a last resort for survival and because we have always been on the side of civilisation. After all, during the Middle Ages we civilised you. You were poor barbarians, primitive, savage creatures.”

Muammar Gaddafi (1942–2011) Libyan revolutionary, politician and political theorist

Interview with Oriana Fallaci (2 December 1979), Corriere della Sera
Interviews

War, Age, Way, Support

“The fundamental objective of the science of administration is the accomplishment of the work in hand with the least expenditure of man-power and materials. Efficiency is thus axiom number one in the value scale of administration. This brings administration into apparent conflict with certain elements of the value scale of politics, whether we use that term in its scientific or in its popular sense. But both public administration and politics are branches of political science, so that we are in the end compelled to mitigate the pure concept of efficiency in the light of the value scale of politics and the social order. There are, for example, highly inefficient arrangements like citizen boards and small local governments which may be necessary in a democracy as educational devices. It has been argued also that the spoils system, which destroys efficiency in administration, is needed to maintain the political party, that the political party is needed to maintain the structure of government, and that without the structure of government, administration itself will disappear. While this chain of causation has been disproved under certain conditions, it none the less illustrates the point that the principles of politics may seriously affect efficiency. Similarly in private business it is often true that the necessity for immediate profits growing from the system of private ownership may seriously interfere with the achievement of efficiency in practice.”

Luther H. Gulick (1892–1993) American academic

Source: "Science, values and public administration," 1937, p. 192-193

Education, Democracy, Business, Sense

“Most men of business think "Anyhow this system will probably last my time. It has gone on a long time, and is likely to go on still."”

Walter Bagehot (1826–1877) British journalist, businessman, and essayist

Source: Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/lsadm10.txt (1873), Ch. I, Introductory

Men, Business, Thinking, Time

“A systems approach begins when first you see the world through the eyes of another.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 231; cited in Michael C. Jackson (2003) Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers. p. 139

World

“Operations research '(OR) is the securing of improvement in social systems by means of scientific method”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

C. West Churchman, "Operations research as a profession" (1970); cited in Arjang A. Assad, Saul I. Gass (2011) Profiles in Operations Research: Pioneers and Innovators. p. 181
1960s - 1970s

“The study a posteriori of the distribution of consciousness shows it to be exactly such as we might expect in an organ added for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Source: 1890s, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Ch. 5

Study

“An analysis [of urban space] is possible only if one reduces social action to a language and social relations to systems of communication. The ideological displacement carried out in this perspective consists in passing from one method of mapping traces of social practice through its effects on the organization of space to a principle of organization deduced from the formal expression listed, as if social organization were a code and urban structure a set of myths.”

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

Source: The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, 1977, p. 216

Communication

“This statement appears to us to be conclusive with respect to the insufficiency of the undulatory theory, in its present state, for explaining all the phenomena of light. But we are not therefore by any means persuaded of the perfect sufficiency of the projectile system: and all the satisfaction that we have derived from an attentive consideration of the accumulated evidence, which has been brought forward, within the last ten years, on both sides of the question, is that of being convinced that much more evidence is still wanting before it can be positively decided. In the progress of scientific investigation, we must frequently travel by rugged paths, and through valleys as well as over mountains. Doubt must necessarily succeed often to apparent certainty, and must again give place to a certainty of a higher order; such is the imperfection of our faculties, that the descent from conviction to hesitation is not uncommonly as salutary, as the more agreeable elevation from uncertainty to demonstration. An example of such alternations may easily be adduced from the history of chemistry. How universally had phlogiston once expelled the aërial acid of Hooke and Mayow. How much more completely had phlogiston given way to oxygen! And how much have some of our best chemists been lately inclined to restore the same phlogiston to its lost honours! although now again they are beginning to apprehend that they have already done too much in its favour. In the mean time, the true science of chemistry, as the most positive dogmatist will not hesitate to allow, has been very rapidly advancing towards ultimate perfection.”

Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath

Miscellaneous Works: Scientific Memoirs (1855) Vol. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=-XAXAQAAMAAJ, ed. George Peacock & John Leitch, p. 249

Way, Travel, History, Mountain

“Development of Western Science is based on two great achievements, the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (Renaissance). In my opinion one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.”

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

Letter to J.S. Switzer (23 April 1953), quoted in The Scientific Revolution: a Hstoriographical Inquiry By H. Floris Cohen (1994), p. 234 http://books.google.com/books?id=wu8b2NAqnb0C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA234#v=onepage&q&f=false, and also partly quoted in The Ultimate Quotable Einstein edited by Alice Calaprice (2010), p. 405 http://books.google.com/books?id=G_iziBAPXtEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA405#v=onepage&q&f=false 1950s

Science

“If, in pursuing this object, we employ our skill in research, not in forming vain conjectures; and if data are to be found, on which Science may form just conclusions, we should not long remain in ignorance with respect to the natural history of this Earth, a subject on which hitherto opinion only, and not evidence, has decided. For in no subject is there naturally less defect of evidence, although philosophers, led by prejudice, or misguided by false theory, have neglected to employ that light by which they should have seen the system of the world.”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Ages in Chaos (2003), Chapter 14, “We have now got to the end of our reasoning” (p. 130)

World, History, Nature, Light

“It looks perverted and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), Chapter 1 (p. 91).

Happiness

“Much of the skill of the true mathematical physicist and of the mathematical astronomer consists in the power of adapting methods and results carried out on an exact mathematical basis to obtain approximations sufficient for the purposes of physical measurements. It might perhaps be thought that a scheme of Mathematics on a frankly approximative basis would be sufficient for all the practical purposes of application in Physics, Engineering Science, and Astronomy, and no doubt it would be possible to develop, to some extent at least, a species of Mathematics on these lines. Such a system would, however, involve an intolerable awkwardness and prolixity in the statements of results, especially in view of the fact that the degree of approximation necessary for various purposes is very different, and thus that unassigned grades of approximation would have to be provided for. Moreover, the mathematician working on these lines would be cut off from the chief sources of inspiration, the ideals of exactitude and logical rigour, as well as from one of his most indispensable guides to discovery, symmetry, and permanence of mathematical form. The history of the actual movements of mathematical thought through the centuries shows that these ideals are the very life-blood of the science, and warrants the conclusion that a constant striving toward their attainment is an absolutely essential condition of vigorous growth. These ideals have their roots in irresistible impulses and deep-seated needs of the human mind, manifested in its efforts to introduce intelligibility in certain great domains of the world of thought.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), pp. 285-286; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 229): Mathematics and Science.

Life, World, History, Intelligence

“The capitalist system of production, once it had given all it was capable of giving, became an abysmal obstacle to the progress of humanity.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

“Every element of Fascist doctrine can be traced to the belief system of revolutionary national syndicalism as that syndicalism emerged from the First World War.”

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

Source: Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship, (1979), p. 119

War, World

“Whenever we pride ourselves upon finding a newer, stricter way of thought or exposition; whenever we start insisting too hard upon "operationalism" or symbolic logic or any other of these very essential systems of tramlines, we lose something of the ability to think new thoughts. And equally, of course, whenever we rebel against the sterile rigidity of formal thought and exposition and let our ideas run wild, we likewise lose. As I see it, the advances in scientific thought come from a combination of loose and strict thinking, and this combination is the most precious tool of science.”

Gregory Bateson book Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Gregory Bateson (1935) "Culture Contact and Schismogenesis" in: Man, Vol. 35 (Dec., 1935), pp. 178-183. Republished in: Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972, p. 75)

Way, Idea, Thinking, Science

“…if peace is to be preserved we must see to it that the causes of war are removed. Freedom and democracy must be based not only on security but also on social justice. Hitlerism flourished on the breakdown of an outworn economic system. The world depression of 1930 was the opportunity of the gangsters. We must have planning for expansion and not restriction. Victory in war could only be achieved by putting the interest of the community before private profit and this was also the key to reconstruction after the war. Socialism had always been something far greater than an economic theory, far greater than the policy of a political party. It was a way of life. They sought to attain an organized society in which every human being would have the opportunity of living the good life—a society in which free men and women would cooperate together for the common good. The workers of the countries which had been under the yoke of tyranny would look to the Labour parties of the British Commonwealth for a lead and would not look in vain.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the conference of representatives of the British and Dominion Labour parties, Westminster, London (12 September 1944), quoted in The Times (13 September 1944), p. 8.
War Cabinet

Life, Women, Men, War

“#The availability of high-quality Model Compilers and Virtual Execution Environments (VEEs) that provide "out of the box" platforms upon which Executable UML models can execute. These VEEs, which exist today in a somewhat incipient stage, will someday soon reduce low-level system architectures to near-commodity status.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Cited in: Gerry Boyd (2003) " Executable UML: Diagrams for the Future http://www.devx.com/enterprise/Article/10717." published at devx.com, February 5, 2003. The Limits of Software

Box

“These early [Windows Phone sales] reports don't provide any credible figures. But even if sales are as bad as all get-out, you're forgetting one thing: It almost doesn't matter, because Microsoft is in this for the long haul. They're going to continue pushing this system ahead, and pushing it to developers and users.”

Paul Thurrott (1966) American podcaster, author, and blogger

About those Windows Phone Chicken Little stories... http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2010/11/29/about-those-windows-phone-chicken-little-stories in Windows Phone Secrets (29 November 2010)

Forgetting

“As I have already hinted, one of the directions of work which the realm of ideas of the Macy meetings has suggested concerns the importance of the notion and the technique of communication in the social system. It is certainly true that the social system is an organization like the individual, that it is bound together by a system of communication, and that it has a dynamics in which circular processes of a feedback nature play an important part. This is true, both in the general fields of anthropology and sociology and in the more specific field of economics; and the very important work, which we have already mentioned, of von Neumann and Morgenstern on the theory of games enters into this range of ideas. On this basis, Drs. Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead have urged me, in view of the intensely pressing nature of the sociological and economic problems of the present age of confusion, to devote a large part of my energies to the discussion of this side of cybernetics.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Introduction. p. 24.
Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948)

Age, Game, Communication, Idea

“An example from soft systems thinking is Checkland's appreciation of soft systems methodology. He wants to introduce hard systems approaches to deal with hard problems only after and through a soft systems analysis.”

Robert L. Flood (1959) British organizational scientist

Robert L. Flood (1993) Dealing with Complexity: An Introduction to the Theory and … - Pagina 127.

Problem, Thinking

“Today, organizations are competing in complex environments so that an accurate understanding of their goals and the methods for attaining those goals is vital. The Balanced Scorecard translates an organization’s mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures that provides the framework for a strategic measurement and management system.”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2

Understanding

“While this nation is guilty of the enslavement of three millions of innocent men and women, it is as idle to think of having a sound and lasting peace, as it is to think there is no God to take cognizance of the affairs of men. There can be no peace to the wicked while slavery continues in the land. It will be condemned; and while it is condemned there will be agitation. Nature must cease to be nature; men must become monsters; humanity must be transformed; Christianity must be exterminated; all ideas of justice and the laws of eternal goodness must be utterly blotted out from the human soul—ere a system so foul and infernal can escape condemnation, or this guilty republic can have a sound, enduring peace.”

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

The Nature of Slavery. Extract from a Lecture on Slavery, at Rochester, December 1, 1850
1850s, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Women, Men, God, Peace

“Democracy, in this late stage of capitalism, has been replaced with a system of legalized bribery. All branches of government, including the courts, along with the systems of entertainment and news, are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state. Electoral politics are elaborate puppet shows.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Reform or Revolution" (2016)

Democracy

“General systems theory is the scientific exploration of "wholes" and "wholeness" which, not so long ago, were considered metaphysical notions transcending the boundaries of science. Hierarchic structure, stability, teleology, differentiation, approach to and maintenance of steady states, goal-directedness — these are a few of such general system properties.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p.xviii.

Science

“[I]n the system of Copernicus there are found many and great inconveniences; for both the loading of the earth with triple motion is very incommodious, and the separation of the sun from the company of the planets, with which it has so many passions in common, is likewise a difficulty, and the introduction of so much immobility into nature, by representing the sun and stars as immovable, especially being of all bodies the highest and most radiant, and making the moon revolve about the earth in an epicycle, and some other assumptions of his, are the speculations of one who cares not what fictions he introduces into nature, provided his calculations answer. But if it be granted that the earth moves, it would seem more natural to suppose that there is no system at all, but scattered globes… than to constitute a system of which the sun is the centre. And this the consent of ages and of antiquity has rather embraced and approved. For the opinion concerning the motion of the earth is not new, but revived from the ancients… whereas the opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable is altogether new… and was first introduced by Copernicus. …But if the earth moves, the stars may either be stationary, as Copernicus thought or, as it is far more probable, and has been suggested by Gilbert, they may revolve each round its own centre in its own place, without any motion of its centre, as the earth itself does… But either way, there is no reason why there should not be stars above stars til they go beyond our sight.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, and author

Descriptio Globi Intellectualis (1653, written ca. 1612) Ch. 6, as quoted in "Description of the Intellectual Globe," The Works of Francis Bacon (1889) pp. 517-518, https://books.google.com/books?id=lsILAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA517 Vol. 4, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, Douglas Denon Heath.

Age, World, Way, Star

“As a formal analytical point of reference, primacy of orientation to the attainment of a specific goal is used as the defining characteristic of an organization which distinguishes it from other types of social systems.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1956: 64); Partly cited in: Chiara Demartini (2013). Performance Management Systems: Design, Diagnosis and Use. p. 17

“Recognition that art was located in an interactive system rather than residing in a material object… provid[ed] a discipline as central to an art of interactivity as anatomy and perspective had been to the renaissance vision.”

Roy Ascott (1934) British academic

“Interactive Art,” unpublished manuscript, 1994, p. 3; as cited in: Edward A. Shanken. " Cybernetics and Art: Cultural Convergence in the 1960s http://www.responsivelandscapes.com/readings/CyberneticsArtCultConv.pdf." 2002

Art

“Every software system needs to have a simple yet powerful organizational philosophy (think of it as the software equivalent of a sound bite that describes the system's architecture)… [A] step in [the] development process is to articulate this architectural framework, so that we might have a stable foundation upon which to evolve the system's function points.”

Grady Booch (1955) American software engineer

Source: Object-oriented design: With Applications, (1991), p. 320

Thinking

“The management science approach to organizational decision making is the analog to the rational approach by individual managers. Management science came into being during World War II. At that time, mathematical and statistical techniques were applied to urgent, large-scale military problems that were beyond the ability of individual decision makers. Mathematicians, physicists, and operations researchers used systems analysis to develop artillery trajectories, antisubmarine strategies, and bombing strategies such as salvoing (discharging multiple shells simultaneously). Consider the problem of a battleship trying to sink an enemy ship several miles away. The calculation for aiming the battleship's guns should consider distance, wind speed, shell size, speed and direction of both ships, pitch and roll of the firing ship, and curvature of the earth. Methods for performing such calculations using trial and error and intuition are not accurate, take far too long, and may never achieve success.
This is where management science came in. Analysts were able to identify the relevant variables involved in aiming a ship's guns and could model them with the use of mathematical equations. Distance, speed, pitch, roll, shell size, and so on could be calculated and entered into the equations. The answer was immediate, and the guns could begin firing. Factors such as pitch and roll were soon measured mechanically and fed directly into the targeting mechanism. Today, the human element is completely removed from the targeting process. Radar picks up the target, and the entire sequence is computed automatically.”

Richard L. Daft (1964) American sociologist

Source: Organization Theory and Design, 2007-2010, p. 500

War, World, Error, Mathematics

“In a fundamental sense, Alchian's theory of economic organizations is different from those of Coase or Simon. He disavows an explicit model of individual choice… and… offers a system-level explanation of organizational emergence, structure, and survival that is largely independent of decision making at the micro level… Yet it is precisely this independence of a distinct model of choice that ultimately renders it compatible with the individualistic theories of both Coase and Simon….
Whether individuals optimize under uncertainty or satisfice under the more limiting conditions of bounded rationality…, Alchian's logic of natural selection, when grafted onto either approach, provides a powerful means of deriving and integrating expectations about individuals, organizations and systems. The result in either case is an approach that gains in scope and coherence, and that does so by remaining true to its underlying model of individual choice.”

Terry M. Moe (1949) American political scientist

Source: "The new economics of organization." 1984, p. 746-747; as cited in Eggertsson (1990; 56)

Optimism, Nature, Decision, Sense

“Every part of the system is so related to every other part that a change in a particular part causes a changes in all other parts and in the total system”

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

Cited in: Harold Chestnut (1967) Systems Engineering Methods. p. 121
A methodology for systems engineering, 1962

Change, Parting

“More generally, the hidden variable account of a given system becomes entirely different when we remember that it has undoubtedly interacted with numerous other systems in the past and that the total wave function will certainly not be factorable. The same effect complicates the hidden variable account of the theory of measurement, when it is desired to include part of the 'apparatus' in the system. Bohm of course was well aware of these features of his scheme, and has given them much attention. However, it must be stressed that, to the present writer's knowledge, there is no proof that any hidden variable account of quantum mechanics must have this extraordinary character. It would therefore be interesting, perhaps, to pursue some further 'impossibility proofs,' replacing the arbitrary axioms objected to above by some condition of locality, or of separability of distant systems.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics (1966)

Knowledge, Distant, Past, Parting

“The world is facing a historic turning point because the system of materialistic liberalism has come to a deadlock.”

Kingoro Hashimoto (1890–1957) officer of Imperial Japanese Army and politician

January 1941. Quoted in "The China Monthly Review" - Page 47 - East Asia - 1917

World

“Carnism is the belief system in which eating certain animals is considered ethical and appropriate. Carnists—people who eat meat—are not the same as carnivores. Carnivores are animals that are dependent on meat to survive. … Carnists eat meat not because they need to, but because they choose to, and choices always stem from beliefs. Carnism's invisibility accounts for why choices appear not to be choices at all.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), p. 30

People, Appearance, Animals, Dependency

“When in 1977, the United Nations passed the resolution inaugurating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people, it was asserting the recognition that injustice and gross human rights violations were being perpetrated in Palestine. In the same period, the UN took a strong stand against apartheid; and over the years, an international consensus was built, which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

1990s, The International Day Of Solidarity With The Palestinian People (1997)

People, Strong, Help

“A number of engineers became so-called disciples of Frederick W. Taylor, even though he had passed on to his reward in 1915. A considerable number of engineers took up the so-called scientific management of Frederick Taylor and further embroidered it and publicized themselves as efficiency engineers and management consultants. Henry L. Gantt had been Taylor's assistant at the Midvale Steel and the Bethlehem Steel Company. Gant, were among the many prominent advocates of Taylor's efficiency system with some variations.
Gant, Barth and others tried to start an organization, ' 'The New Machine." ' 'The New Machine" never got off the ground; all of them wrote articles and delivered papers in the engineering societies and management conferences. But their chief purpose was in creating a national image so they could sell their services to large-scale private enterprise as scientific managers and efficiency engineers who would be able to install the system that could extract more productivity from the American worker.”

Howard Scott (1890–1970) American engineer

Source: History and Purpose of Technocracy, 1965, p. 7

“After the Spaniards settled the Southwest, the Navajo began another burst of cultural borrowing—or, more actually, stealing. Spanish ranches and villages were so depleted of horses—not to mention sheep—that by 1775 the Spaniards had to send to Europe for 1,500 additional horses. After the Pueblo Rebellion against the Spaniards was put down in 1692, many Pueblo took refuge with their Navajo neighbors—and taught them how to weave blankets, a skill for which the Navajo are still noted, and to make pottery. During this time the Navajo probably absorbed many Pueblo religious and social ideas and customs as well, such as ceremonial paraphernalia and possibly the Pueblo class system.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Idea, Time, Horse

“Settle it therefore in your minds, as a maxim never to be effaced or forgotten, that atheism is an inhuman, bloody, ferocious system, equally hostile to every useful restraint and to every virtuous affection; that, leaving nothing above us to excite awe, nor round us to awaken tenderness, it wages war with heaven and with earth: its first object is to dethrone God, its next to destroy man.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Rev. Robert Hall, sermon to Baptist meeting, Cambridge, quoted in [1843, The Baptist Library: a republication of standard Baptist works, 2, Charles George Sommers, William R. Williams, Levi L. Hill, 108, http://books.google.com/books?id=CgxMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA108]

God, Hostility, War

“There must be room in our army system for nearly everyone who is not grossly idle or grossly stupid. It is not a case of employing incompetent or worthless men, and such should, of course, be expelled from the army. It is a case of finding suitable employment for officers not fit for higher command.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Officers and Gentlemen, The Saturday Evening Post, 29 December 1900.
Reproduced in The Collected Essays of Sir Winston Churchill, Vol I, Churchill at War, Centenary Edition (1976), Library of Imperial History, p. 51. ISBN 0903988429
Early career years (1898–1929)

Men, Stupidity

“The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison.”

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)

“It is the Patrol System that makes the Troop, and all Scouting for that matter, a real co-operative matter.”

Robert Baden-Powell book Aids to Scoutmastership

Aids to Scoutmastership (1920)

Scouting

“The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the breakdown of the mechanistic theory even within physics, the science where it was the most successful… Relativity took over in field physics, and the science of quantum theory in microphysics… In view of parallel developments in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and economics, many branches of the contemporary sciences became… ‘sciences of organized complexity’ — that is, systems sciences.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 8 as cited in: Martha C. Beck (2013) "Contemporary Systems Sciences, Implications for the Nature and Value of Religion, the Five Principles of Pancasila, and the Five Pillars of Islam," Dialogue and Universalism-E Volume 4, Number 1/2013. p. 3 ( online http://www.emporia.edu/~cbrown/dnue/documents/vol04.no01.2013/Vol04.01.Beck.pdf).

Science, Success

“There never has been, and till we see it we never shall believe that there can be, a system of geometry worthy of the name, which has any material departures (we do not speak of corrections or extensions or developments) from the plan laid down by Euclid.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

"Short Supplementary Remarks on the First Six Books of Euclid's Elements" (Oct, 1848) Companion to the Almanac for 1849 as quoted by Sir Thomas Little Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements Vol.1 https://books.google.com/books?id=UhgPAAAAIAAJ, Introduction and Books I, II. Preface, p. v.

Departure

“If we're all led to believe that poverty is just a matter of laziness or stupidity or whatever other justifications we can come up with, then we're not likely to be in a real position to do much about it when it comes to attacking the root causes of the problem. Instead of demanding a more equitable system for the distribution of social and economic goods, we blame the victim. This is insidious, because ideology is something we carry around with us in our heads; it forms the basis of our day-to-day understanding of the world.”

Bob Torres American podcaster

Source: Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights (2007), p. 7

Stupidity, World, Understanding, Problem

“Arun Shourie tells us that a lot can be learned from the case of Narayan Guru who, early this century, as a member of the unapproachable Ezhava caste in Kerala, became an acknowledged religious leader and profoundly changed caste relations in Kerala for the better. He 'attained the highest spiritual states, thereby acquired unquestioned authority, and transformed society from within the tradition'. He made use of a major loophole in the rigidities of the caste system, a loophole which Hindu society deliberately maintained precisely because Hinduism was not merely a social system but, among other things, also a spiritual system: renunciates in general, and sages with acknowledged yogic realization in particular, are above the worldly divisions such as caste. They also have the authority to herald social transformations which Hindus would never accept from purely political busybodies.”

Narayana Guru (1855–1928) Indian social reformer

Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743

Learning, Change

“Animal behavior has evolved to battle parasites. In fact, we have parasites to thank for the existence of sex. Sex is a costly and time-consuming method of reproduction. Experiments have shown that, in the absence of parasites, species evolve toward parthenogenesis—or cloning—as the reproductive method of choice. In parthenogenesis each individual is able to self-replicate. But this produces almost no genetic variation. In the presence of parasites, cloning, while more energy-efficient, is not a viable reproductive strategy. It presents a stationary genetic target to parasites, who, once introduced into such a system, will quickly dominate it. …”

Daniel Suarez Daemon

Source: Daemon (2006), Chapter 31: Red Queen Hypothesis, Character: Sobol

Sex, Behavior, Time, Animals

“Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Fashion

“The sense of shame that the Chancellor should have felt is far more personal. It is a sense of shame for having taken over an economy with a £1,000 million surplus and running it to a £2,000 million deficit. It is a sense of shame for having conducted our internal financial affairs with such profligacy that our public accounts are out of balance as never before. It is a sense of shame for having presided over the greatest depreciation of the currency, both at home and abroad, in our history. It is a sense of shame for having left us at a moment of test far weaker than most of our neighbours…There is, I believe, a greater threat to the effective working of our democratic institutions than most of us have seen in our adult lifetimes. I do not believe that it springs primarily from the machinations of subversively-minded men, although no doubt they are there and are anxious to exploit exploitable situations. It comes much more dangerously from a widespread cynicism with the processes of our political system. I believe that the Chancellor contributed to that on Monday. I believe that it poses a serious challenge to us all…None of us should seek salvation through chaos. There is a duty too to recognise that we could slip into a still worse rate of inflation and a world spiral-ling downwards towards slump, unemployment and falling standards, with our selves, temporarily at least, well in the vanguard. What is required is neither an imposed solution nor an open hand at the till. The alternative to reaching a settlement with the miners is paralysis…The task of statesmanship is to reach a settlement but to do it in a way which opens no floodgates for if they were opened, it would not only damage everyone but it would undermine the differential which the miners deserve and which the nation now needs them to have.”

Roy Jenkins (1920–2003) British politician, historian and writer

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1973/dec/19/economic-and-energy-situation in the House of Commons (19 December 1973) 1970s

Men, World, Way, Home

“I love being with people. But I need a script, a role, something that will help me overcome my fears of rejection and shame. Most religions and belief systems provide a blueprint for some sort of community. And the religion’s leaders model a way of being. For example, in my book Choke, a character enacts his own death and resurrection every night – as does the narrator in Fight Club. Here’s Jesus, allowing himself to look terrible in front of his peers. That’s the biggest purpose of religious gathering: permission to look terrible in public.”

Chuck Palahniuk (1962) American novelist, essayist

Quoted in Andrew Lawless, "Those burnt tongue moments - Chuck Palahniuk in interview" http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_article_chuck_palahniuk_haunted_interview.htm, Three Monkeys (May 2005)

Love, Death, People, Books

“It sounds rather strange to talk of an infinite universe still expanding. If we were certain that the curvature was negative, we might still, as in the case of positive curvature, replace the phrase "the universe expands" by the equivalent one "the curvature of the universe decreases." But if the curvature is zero, and remains zero throughout, what sort of meaning are we to attach to the "expansion"? The real meaning is, of course, that the mutual distances between the galactic systems, measured in so-called natural measure, increase proportionally to a certain quantity R appearing in the equations, and varying with the time. The interpretation of R as the "radius of curvature" of the universe, though still possible if the universe has a curvature, evidently does not go down to the fundamental meaning of it.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Nature, Universe, Appearance, Time

“The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system”

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

Source: 1960s, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, 1966, p. 8

Future

“The current term of protection for software is the life of an author plus 70 years, or, if it's work-for-hire, a total of 95 years. This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for "limited times." By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

May the Source Be With You (2001)

Life, Time

“One odd detail that I think was vital to how the group functioned was a result of the first Unix being run on a clunky minicomputer with terminals in the machine room. People working on the system congregated in the room - to use the computer, you pretty much had to be there. (This idea didn't seem odd back then; it was a natural evolution of the old hour-at-a-time way of booking machines like the IBM 7090.) The folks liked working that way, so when the machine was moved to a different room from the terminals, even when it was possible to connect from your private office, there was still a "Unix room" with a bunch of terminals where people would congregate, code, design, and just hang out.”

Rob Pike (1956) software engineer

The coffee machine was there too. Rob Pike (2004) in interview http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/18/1153211&tid=189 at slashdot.com, Oct 18 2004

People, Books, Way, Coffee

“[In the year 1957] I have just returned from an exciting meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education where I heard a paper on the new discipline of systems engineering. It is no longer sufficient for engineers merely to design boxes such as computers with the expectation that they would become components of larger, more complex systems. That is wasteful because frequently the box component is a bad fit in the system and has to be redesigned or worse, can lead to system failure. We must learn how to design large-scale, complex systems from the top down so that the specification for each component is derivable from the requirements for the overall system. We must also take a much larger view of systems. We must design the man-machine interfaces and even the system-society interfaces. Systems engineers must be trained for the design of large-scale, complex, man-machine-social systems.”

A. Wayne Wymore (1927–2011) American mathematician

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Education, Failure, Learning, Training

“Information Engineering is the application of an interlocking set of formal techniques for the planning, analysis, design, and construction of information systems on the enterprise wide basis or across a major sector of the enterprise.”

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

Source: Information Engineering (1989), p. 1; cited in Karl E. Kurbel (2008) The making of information systems [electronic resource]. p. 176

“Use cases, scenarios or scripts are roughly synonymous terms for important ways to focus our design activities. I prefer the term use case (although quickly saying it three times can leave your tongue tied) because it emphasizes usage. A use case is a textual description of a sequence of interactions between an actor (roughly corresponding to an external agent or class of users) and the system we are designing. Use cases were first described by Ivar Jacobson in his book “Object Oriented Software Engineering A Use Case Driven Approach.”
Use cases have been around in various forms for quite some time. Jacobson, however, made the keen observation that use cases can be treated as refineable, extensible and even reusable specifications of system requirements. We’ve had these same goals for object designs. We know that it is harder to actually accomplish them than it is to talk about them.”

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (1953) American software engineer

About What is a Use Case?
Designing scenarios: Making the case for a use case framework (1993)

Books, Way, Time

“I know about your [British] system of democracy, but in that system the workers 'hold keys of straw', as an expression of ours puts it. It is democracy for the capitalists, for the lords, but not for the workers. When we win we shall establish democracy, but not like that democracy of yours. In our country there will be democracy only for the people, while the 'keys of straw' will be in the hands of the beys, aghas and the bajraktars who have always opressed and betrayed the people.”

Enver Hoxha (1908–1985) the Communist leader of Albania from 1944 until his death in 1985, as the First Secretary of the Party of L…

Writings, The Artful Albanian

People, Democracy, Country

“It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 10

Justice

“The painful experience of many gamblers has taught us the lesson that no system of betting is successful in improving the gambler's chances. If the theory of probability is true to life, this experience must correspond to a provable statement.”

William Feller (1906–1970) Croatian-American mathematician

Source: An Introduction To Probability Theory And Its Applications (Third Edition), Chapter VIII, Unlimited Sequences Of Bernoulli Trials, p. 198.

Life, Pain, Chance, Success

“Government grows because low-income individuals use the political system to redistribute income toward themselves.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 6, Political Economy, p. 128

“The problem for China is political. China is held together by money, not ideology. When there is an economic downturn and the money stops rolling in, not only will the banking system spasm, but the entire fabric of Chinese society will shudder. Loyalty in China is either bought or coerced. Without available money, only coercion remains. Business slowdowns can generally lead to instability because they lead to business failure and unemployment. In a country where poverty is endemic and unemployment widespread, the added pressure of an economic downturn will result in political instability.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 96

Money, Failure, Business, Problem

“The values that Scientology states are universal values. Values that any good mother or father or friend couldn't possibly disagree with. They're the values of health and improvement. It's not a belief system where you have to sign up and believe something particularly. People of all religions study Hubbard, and Hubbard himself encouraged religions to flourish because in our day and age, in our mechanized society, what is lacking is the humanities and people with faith and beliefs. So that's one of our operations. We encourage that. I require a certain amount of ethics from anybody I work with.”

Chick Corea (1941) American jazz and fusion pianist, keyboardist, and composer

Interview at All About Jazz (30 October 2004) http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=15351

People, Health, Age, Faith

“THE INDUSTRIAL SYSTEM requires that prices be under effective control. And it seeks the greatest possible influence over what buyers take at the established prices.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XX, Section 1, p. 219 (Caps as per text...)

“Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Speech to the Los Angeles Town Club, Los Angeles, California (11 September 1952); Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952), p. 31

Faith, Democracy, Confidence, Fight

“The grand success of the British Empire depends not on its having followed any constitutional precedent of the past but on having met a new situation in history with a creation in law; and as a matter of fact the new constitutional system grew empirically and organically out of the practical necessities of the colonial situation.”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

From The League of Nations - A Practical Suggestion, 1918, pp. 37-38, as cited by W. K. Hancock in SMUTS 1: The Sanguine Years 1870-1919, p. 502

Law, History, Success, Past

“Icons, windows, mice, big operating systems, huge programs, integrated packages…. I would like to remind the world that just because two things are on the same menu doesn't mean they taste good together.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

Programmers At Work (1986)

World

“Daycare is a system that guarantees, beyond doubt, a steady quota of neurotics for society…”

Ferdinand Lundberg (1905–1995) American journalist

Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (Crosset & Dunlap, 1957)

“What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.”

Dennis M. Ritchie (1941–2011) American computer scientist

In a 1980 lecture "The Evolution of the UNIX Time-sharing System", as quoted in Christopher Negus, Linux Bible 2010 Edition http://books.google.com/books?id=W5vItTVMLaYC&pg=PT650 (2010),

Communication, Time

“And then, the Earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet and sun from sun. The Earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the Universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds.”

William Winwood Reade (1838–1875) British historian

Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"

Men, World, Nature, Universe

“Although I wish the anarchists luck, since that’s the way we ought to be moving now. But I believe we need government to enforce the rules of the game. By prosecuting anti-trust violations, for instance. We need a government to maintain a system of courts that will uphold contracts and rule on compensation for damages. We need a government to ensure the safety of its citizens–to provide police protection. But government is failing at a lot of these things that it ought to be doing because it’s involved in so many things it shouldn’t be doing.”

Milton Friedman (1912–2006) American economist, statistician, and writer

A 1973 Interview with Milton Friedman – Playboy Magazine
“Interview with Milton Friedman”, Playboy magazine (Feb. 1973)

Way, Game

“The adoption of a system, as a whole, which will not only enable the General Superintendent to detect errors immediately, but will also point out the delinquent.”

Daniel McCallum (1815–1878) Canadian engineer and early organizational theorist

Source: Report of the Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad to the Stockholders (1856), p. 35-36: Partly cited in: George Leonard Vose. Handbook of Railroad Construction: For the Use of American Engineers. Containing the Necessary Rules, Tables, and Formulæ for the Location, Construction, Equipment, and Management of Railroads, as Built in the United States. J. Munroe, 1857. p. 415-16

Error

“Too bad, Matson thought archly, that George Hoffman didn’t discover more planets in more star systems habitable by us, the frail needs of living, sentient, mentating biochemical upright bipeds which we humans are.”

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

Source: Lies, Inc. (1984), Chapter 3 (p. 19)

Star

“# "An operationally definable, objective, non-anthropomorphic study of purposiveness, goal-seeking system behavior, symbolic cognitive processes, consciousness and self-awareness, and sociocultural emergence and dynamics in general.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 39 as cited in: Joyce Aschenbrenner, Lloyd R. Collins (1978) The Processes of Urbanism: A Multidisciplinary Approach http://books.google.nl/books?id=qC4hN9zpgI0C&pg=PA383. p. 383.

Behavior, Study

“The systems approach to problems does not mean that the most generally formulated problem must be solved in one research project. However desirable this may be, it is seldom possible to realize it in practice. In practice, parts of the total problem are usually solved in sequence. In many cases the total problem cannot be formulated in advance but the solution of one phase of it helps define the next phase. For example, a production control project may require determination of the most economic production quantities of different items. Once these are found it may turn out that these quantities cannot be produced on the available equipment in the available time. This, then, gives rise to a new problem whose solution will affect the solution obtained in the first phase.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Source: 1940s - 1950s, Introduction to Operations Research (1957), p. 7

Problem, Time, Help, Parting

“My friend, there is something very serious in this business. The Holy Ghost carries on the whole Christian system in this earth. Not a baptism, not a marriage, not a sacrament can be administered but by the Holy Ghost, Who is transmitted from age to age by laying the hands of the Bishop on the heads of candidates for the ministry.... There is no authority, civil or religious — there can be no legitimate government — but what is administered by this Holy Ghost. There can be no salvation without it — all without it is rebellion and perdition, or, in more orthodox words, damnation... Your prophecy, my dear friend, has not become history as yet. I have no resentment of animosity against the gentleman [Jefferson] and abhor the idea of blackening his character or transmitting him in odious colors to posterity. But I write with difficulty and am afraid of diffusing myself in too many correspondences. If I should receive a letter from him, however, I should not fail to acknowledge and answer it.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Adams as misquoted by David Barton, in "The Dream of Dr. Benjamin Rush & God's Hand in Reconciling John Adams and Thomas Jefferson" in WallBuilders (June 2008) http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=10152; omitting many words, giving a very misleading impression that Adams (who did not believe in the Christian Trinity) is endorsing the viewpoint that a government must be administered by the Holy Ghost to be legitimate. Barton went on to use another version, substituting some of Adams' words with false ones: Misattributed

Marriage, Age, Color, History

“What has stood in the way of people running as an independent is that winning the presidency in a system that so clearly favors the two major parties is something of a hopeless cause.”

Dan Balz (1946) American journalist

Donald Trump, America’s first independent president (November 19, 2016)

People, Way

“A child’s mind is open to learn, and it is a cruel and heartless thing to fill it with myth disguised as history, to impose upon it a bogus lifelong perspective, and close it up again, leaving it proof against common sense and all argument. Surely, if there is a hell, people who do this are the ones who will get their tickets punched.
A judgment by the God who devised the quantum system should be considerably different from the one the Reverend Koestler envisions. I gave you a sky full of stars, and you never raised your eyes. I gave you a brain, and you never used it.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 12 (p. 113)

God, People, History, Star

“There comes a stage, however, as the system becomes larger and larger, when the reception of all the information is impossible by reason of its sheer bulk. Either the recording channels cannot carry all the information, or the observer, presented with it all, is overwhelmed. When this occurs, what is he to do? The answer is clear: he must give up any ambition to know the whole system. His aim must be to achieve a partial knowledge that, though partial over the whole, is none the less complete within itself, and is sufficient for his ultimate practical purpose”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part I: Mechanism, p. 106, as quoted in: " An Introduction to Cybernetics http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/nurcap/cybernetics198803.htm," at ecotopia.com

Knowledge