Quotes about system
page 39

“The musical language which made the classical style possible is that of tonality, which was not a massive, immobile system but a living, gradually changing language from its beginning. It had reached a new and important turning point just before the style of Haydn and Mozart took shape.”

Charles Rosen (1927–2012) American pianist and writer on music

Part I. Introduction. 1. The Musical Language of the Late Eighteenth Century
Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (Expanded edition, 1997)

Music, Change

“Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Freedom from Fear (1991)

Death, Wisdom, People, Fear

“We go about the world, fighting to spread democracy and tell them how to live, but we really don't have a democratic system… The laws have been made to make it very difficult, because the Republicans and the Democrats aren't looking for the competition, they want to monopolize it. So in many ways, we are less democratic than some other systems, where they have multiple parties, and more people represented than they're able to be represented here.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

Interview by Laura Knoy on NHPR, June 5, 2007 http://info.nhpr.org/node/13016 2000s, 2006-2009

People, World, Law, Way

“The primordial forms of all sciences, taken back beyond the rise of writing, lie ultimately in the magic of prehistory. Just as modern man wants to indicate what consequences his actions will have, so also a man who grows up in the magical way of life seeks to find a ground for everything and to find consequences of his action. Magic as a more or less clearly formulated system of tenets shot through with emotional elements, can become independent only when magicians, acting as specialists, proclaim the consequences of certain customs, either esoterically,. e. g. at certain rituals, or exoterically as popular education. The magicians tell what cases are to count as 'equal', and when certain measures shall be used”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

if we think them ineffective, we call them ceremonies
Source: 1930s, "Empirical Sociology" (1931), p. 319

Life, Lie, Education, Way

“What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.”

Elmer Eric Schattschneider (1892–1971) American political scientist

Source: Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (1969), p. 24

Marriage, People, Communication, Dependency

“If we now reintroduce the conception of the complex organization as an open system subject to criteria of rationality, we are in a position to speculate about some dynamic properties of organizations.”

James D. Thompson (1920–1973) American sociologist

Source: Organizations in Action, 1967, p. 11

“The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 5 “Kiss the Blade” section I (p. 133).

Sun

“The country does want rest, we all want rest. Our very civilization wants it — and we mean that it shall have it. It shall have rest — repose — refreshment of soul and re-invigoration of faculty. And that rest shall be of life and not of death. It shall not be a poison that pacifies restlessness in death, nor shall it be any kind of anodyne or patting or propping or bolstering — as if a man with a cancer in his breast would be well if he only said he was so and wore a clean shirt and kept his shoes tied. We want the rest of a real Union, not of a name, not of a great transparent sham, which good old gentlemen must coddle and pat and dandle, and declare wheedlingly is the dearest Union that ever was, SO it is; and naughty, ugly old fanatics shan't frighten the pretty precious — no, they sha'n't. Are we babies or men? This is not the Union our fathers framed — and when slavery says that it will tolerate a Union on condition that freedom holds its tongue and consents that the Constitution means first slavery at all costs and then liberty, if you can get it, it speaks plainly and manfully, and says what it means. There are not wanting men enough to fall on their knees and cry: 'Certainly, certainly, stay on those terms. Don't go out of the Union — please don't go out; we'll promise to take great care in future that you have everything you want. Hold our tongues? Certainly. These people who talk about liberty are only a few fanatics — they are tolerably educated, but most of 'em are crazy; we don't speak to them in the street; we don't ask them to dinner; really, they are of no account, and if you'll really consent to stay in the Union, we'll see if we can't turn Plymouth Rock into a lump of dough'. I don't believe the Southern gentlemen want to be fed on dough. I believe they see quite as clearly as we do that this is not the sentiment of the North, because they can read the election returns as well as we. The thoughtful men among them see and feel that there is a hearty abhorrence of slavery among us, and a hearty desire to prevent its increase and expansion, and a constantly deepening conviction that the two systems of society are incompatible. When they want to know the sentiment of the North, they do not open their ears to speeches, they open their eyes, and go and look in the ballot-box, and they see there a constantly growing resolution that the Union of the United States shall no longer be a pretty name for the extension of slavery and the subversion of the Constitution. Both parties stand front to front. Each claims that the other is aggressive, that its rights have been outraged, and that the Constitution is on its side. Who shall decide? Shall it be the Supreme Court? But that is only a co-ordinate branch of the government. Its right to decide is not mutually acknowledged. There is no universally recognized official expounder of the meaning of the Constitution. Such an instrument, written or unwritten, always means in a crisis what the people choose. The people of the United States will always interpret the Constitution for themselves, because that is the nature of popular governments, and because they have learned that judges are sometimes appointed to do partisan service.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Life, Death, Men, People

“Anybody can reduce taxes, but it is not so easy to stand in the gap and resist the passage of increasing appropriation bills which would make tax reduction impossible. It will be very easy to measure the strength of the attachment to reduced taxation by the power with which increased appropriations are resisted. If at the close of the present session the Congress has kept within the budget which I propose to present, it will then be possible to have a moderate amount of tax reduction and all the tax reform that the Congress may wish for during the next fiscal year. The country is now feeling the direct stimulus which came from the passage of the last revenue bill, and under the assurance of a reasonable system of taxation there is every prospect of an era of prosperity of unprecedented proportions. But it would be idle to expect any such results unless business can continue free from excess profits taxation and be accorded a system of surtaxes at rates which have for their object not the punishment of success or the discouragement of business, but the production of the greatest amount of revenue from large incomes. I am convinced that the larger incomes of the country would actually yield more revenue to the Government if the basis of taxation were scientifically revised downward. Moreover the effect of the present method of this taxation is to increase the cost of interest. on productive enterprise and to increase the burden of rent. It is altogether likely that such reduction would so encourage and stimulate investment that it would firmly establish our country in the economic leadership of the world.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

World, Feeling, Business, Success

“That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say "I did look it up, and that's not true." That's 'cause you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (2006)

Truth, Books, Time

“Eastern Prussia was a battlefield during World War I years. And right from here, on September 1, 1939, began the spark of fire for the coming of the second world war. And in 1941, Eastern Prussia invaded Soviet soil with a powerful military onslaught, unleashing a grip of heavy burden, tragedy, and torture into the Soviet pre-Baltic and also the inhabitants of Leningrad, Pskov, and the Novgorod regions. Right from the very first days of the second world war, Eastern Prussia was completely transformed into a diabolic system of concentration camp strongholds for captured military people, and became a cruel prison for the young and females, who were brought from many European countries. In the first place, from the Soviet Union. And, aha! Now, after the winter of 1945, Soviet forces captured the descendants of these royal hounds in their very own doghouse!”

Hovhannes Bagramyan (1897–1982) Soviet military commander

The Germans are being referred to as dogs in the end of this famous quote. Quoted in "I. C. Bagramyan: A Photo Album About A Soviet Marshal" - Yerevan - 1987

War, People, World, Winter

“No British minister was forced to resign over Iraq or has been held properly accountable for it, despite the disastrous decision to go to war made collectively by the Cabinet on 17 March 2003. … Far from paying any price, the British system has rewarded ministers for their fateful decision on Iraq.”

Mark Curtis (British author) British journalist and historian

For the British political elite, the invasion of Iraq never happened http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/british-political-elite-invasion-iraq-never-happened-435103022 (19 March 2018), Middle East Eye.

Fate, War, Decision

“These bastards who run our country are a bunch of conniving, thieving, smug pricks who need to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control.”

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

[Dude, Where's My Country?, 2003, 0446532231, 53112245]
2003

Country

“The war was a “tragic error,” but not “fundamentally wrong or immoral” (as the overwhelming majority of the American people continue to believe), and surely not criminal aggression - the judgment that would be reached at once on similar evidence if the responsible agent were not the USA, or an ally or client. Our point is not that the retrospectives fail to draw what seem to us, as to much of the population, the obvious conclusions; the more significant and instructive point is that principled objection to the war as “fundamentally wrong and immoral,” or as an outright criminal aggression - a war crime - is inexpressible. It is not part of the spectrum of discussion. The background for such a principled critique cannot be developed in the media, and the conclusions cannot be drawn. It is not present even to be refuted. Rather, the idea is unthinkable. All of this reveals with great clarity how foreign to the mobilized media is a conception of the media as a free system of information and discussion, independent of state authority and elite interests.”

Edward S. Herman book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

Source: Manufacturing Consent, with Noam Chomsky, 1988, p. 252.

War, People, Error, Idea

“Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records. The type of mixing that was out then was blending from one record to the next or waiting for the record to go off and wait for the jock to put the needle back on.”

Grandmaster Flash (1958) musician

Quoted in Rap Attack 2 (1991) by David Toop, p. 62 ISBN 1852422432

Music, Waiting

“What is a constitution? It is a booklet with twelve or ten pages. I can tear them away and say that tomorrow we shall live under a different system. Today, the people will follow wherever I lead. All the politicians including the once mighty Mr. Bhutto will follow me with tails wagging.”

Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq (1924–1988) 6th President of Pakistan

Speaking to an Iranian Newspaper in September 1977, as quoted in Pakistan, a Dream Gone Sour http://www.defencejournal.com/dec98/pakdream.htm (1997) by Roedad Khan.

People, Tear

“Personal desire, age, and my health do not allow me to personally have a role in running the country after the fall of the current system.”

Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989) Religious leader, politician

Associated Press interview in Paris (7 November 1978); repeated on several occasions before Khomeini returned to Iran
Foreign policy

Health, Age, Personality, Country

“The distinction between "language" and "speech" rests on easily observable facts. The theoretical aspect of the issue has been raised in contemporary literature only by de Saussure, although in the terminological sense all the languages (I refer here to our cultural circle and its traditions), beginning with the distinction … lingua and sermo in Latin, accept the difference between "language" as a system of linguistic facts and "speech" as the name of a type of action. Following de Saussure, that theoretical distinction has been adopted in all contemporary linguistics. Gardiner distinguishes between speech as an activity with clearly utilitarian ends in view, and language as a precise knowledge pertaining to communication by means of verbal signs'*. The differentiation has been adopted in the Marxist literature of the subject, linguistic, psychological, etc. In his Psychology (in Russian) S. L. Rubinshtein defines speech as language functioning in the context of individual consciousness, and compares the difference between speech and language to the difference between individual and social consciousness.”

Adam Schaff (1913–2006) Polish Marxist philosopher and theorist

Source: Introduction to semantics, 1962, p. 316

Communication, Literature, Knowledge, Sense

“The brain is a complex system, but that doesn’t mean it’s incomprehensible. Our neural circuits were carved by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species’ evolutionary history. Your brain has been molded by evolutionary pressures just as your spleen and eyes have been. And so has your consciousness. Consciousness developed because it was advantageous, but advantageous only in limited amounts.”

David Eagleman (1971) neuroscientist and author

Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

History, Nature, Problem

“I stood on the stage and watched Marco in rather indignantly, look at Governor Bush and say, someone told you that because we’re running for the same office, that criticizing me will get you to that office. It appears that the same someone who has been whispering in old Marco’s ear too. So the indignation that you carry on, some of the stuff, you have to also own then. So let’s set the facts straight. First of all, I didn’t support Sonia Sotomayor. Secondly, I never wrote a check to Planned Parenthood. Third, if you look at my record as governor of New Jersey, I have vetoed a 50-caliber rifle ban. I have vetoed a reduction this clip size. I vetoed a statewide I. D. system for gun owners and I pardoned, six out-of-state folks who came through our state and were arrested for owning a gun legally in another state so they never have to face charges. And on Common Core, Common Core has been eliminated in New Jersey. So listen, this is the difference between being a governor and a senator. See when you’re a senator, what you get to do is just talk and talk and talk. And you talk so much that nobody can ever keep up with what you’re saying is accurate or not. When you’re a governor, you’re held accountable for everything you do. And the people of New Jersey, I’ve seen it. And the last piece is this. I like Marco too, and two years ago, he called me a conservative reformer that New Jersey needed. That was before he was running against me. Now that he is, he’s changed his tune. I’m never going to change my tune. I like Marco Rubio. He’s a good guy, a smart guy, and he would be a heck of a lot better president than Hillary Rodham Clinton would ever be.”

Chris Christie (1962) 55th Governor of New Jersey, former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey

Full Transcript of the Sixth Republican Debate in Charleston http://time.com/4182096/republican-debate-charleston-transcript-full-text/, Time (14 January 2016).

People, Guy, Support, Appearance

“The purpose and goal of Jewish living is to raise our consciousness of the presence of God in our every-day lives. Judaism, with its system of brakhot (blessings) for every experience from going to the bathroom to seeing a rainbow, teaches us that we do not need to remove ourselves from our daily routine in order to engender a sense of holiness. Rather, our challenge is to live with the chaos and tension of life in the modern world and, at the same time, to live lives of kedusha”

Bonnie Koppell American rabbi

holiness
Source: Vegetarianism, p. 37

Life, God, World, Sense

“It is not enough to "have" free speech. People must learn to speak freely. Noam Chomsky remarked in the sixties about the short-life ultra-radicals on campus who thought that Marx should have been burning down the British Museum rather than writing and thinking in it. The less political descendants of that faction have now tried to reduce life to a system of empowerment etiquette, and have wasted a lot of their own time and everyone else's in the process. But the real bridle on our tongues is imposed by the everyday lying and jargon, sanctioned and promulgated at the highest levels of media and politics, and not by the awkward handful who imagine themselves revolutionaries.”

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

"Politically Correct" (1991).
1990s, For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports (1993)

Life, People, Imagination, Lying

“It may thus be concluded that in the absence of 'development factors' the system lapses into a stationary state. These factors thus appear to be a prerequisite of a steady growth.”

Michał Kalecki (1899–1970) Polish economist

Source: Theory of Economic Dynamics (1965), Chapter 14, The Process of Economic Development, p. 155

Appearance

“[Fascism] is not a sign-post which would direct us here, for I firmly believe that our long experienced democracy will be able to preserve a parliamentary system of government with whatever modifications may be necessary from both extremes of arbitrary rule.”

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

Speech to the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union (17 February 1933), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 457
The 1930s

Democracy

“You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?”

James Tiptree, Jr (1915–1987) American science fiction writer

"I'm Too Big But I Love To Play" in Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home (1973)

Pain, Communication, Hell, Understanding

“Are the solutions offered us always to be too late? Shall we in Great Britain invite three-quarters of the world, including the whole of our Empire, to join with us in evolving a new currency system which shall be stable in terms of commodities? Or would the gold standard countries be interested to learn the terms, which must needs be strict, on which we should be prepared to re-enter the system of a drastically reformed gold standard?”

John Maynard Keynes book Essays in Persuasion

Essays in Persuasion (1931), The End of Gold Standard (1931)

World, Learning, Country

“I would like to create a speedier and more efficient system. Careers and reputations are at stake, and it would be good to be able to inject a sense of calm and transparency into procedures.”

Ruth Deech (1943) British academic, lawyer and bioethicist

Interview in the Guardian http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/profile/story/0,11109,1092253,00.html

Sense

“How can there be a religion which has no rigid dogmas demanding belief on pain of eternal damnation, no theological postulates, even no fixed theology, no credo distinguishing it from antagonistic or rival religions? How can there be a religion which has no papal head, no governing ecclesiastic body, no church, chapel or congregational system, no binding religious form of any kind obligatory on all its adherents, no one administration and discipline? For the Hindu priests are mere ceremonial officiants without any ecclesiastical authority or disciplinary powers and the Pundits are mere interpreters of the Shastra, not the lawgivers of the religion or its rulers. How again can Hinduism be called a religion when it admits all beliefs, allowing even a kind of high-reaching atheism and agnosticism and permits all possible spiritual experiences, all kinds of religious adventures? The only thing fixed, rigid, positive, clear is the social law, and even that varies in different castes, regions, communities. The caste rules and not the Church; but even the caste cannot punish a man for his beliefs, ban heterodoxy or prevent his following a new revolutionary doctrine or a new spiritual leader.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Indian Spirituality and Life (1919)

Pain, Religion, Law, Communication

“Educators have yet to realize how deeply the industrial system is dependent upon them.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The New Industrial State

Source: The New Industrial State (1967), Chapter XXXIII, Section 4, p. 375

Education, Dependency

“It follows from this that man's most urgent and pre-emptive need is maximally to utilize cybernetic science and computer technology within a general systems framework, to build a meta-systemic reality which is now only dimly envisaged. Intelligent and purposeful application of rapidly developing telecommunications and teleprocessing technology should make possible a degree of worldwide value consensus heretofore unrealizable.”

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Visions of Cybernetic Organizations (1972)

Intelligence, Reality, Science

“Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world!”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

No. 11
The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

World

“Let's discuss the world. To answer the question, "is globalisation possible without God", the simple answer is "yes". Globalisation is after all itself a code word, a mask, for not using the C-word, capitalism. Globalisation is basically the latest phase of expanding capitalism. This not something which is neutral, this is a capitalism that has its rules: it has its economic rules, it has its political rules, it has its cultural rules and it has its military rules. It is a system. At the heart of this system is the United States of America, the world's only existing empire today. The first time in the history of humanity that you have just had a single empire, so dominant, whose military budget is higher than the military budgets of the next 15 countries put together, and whose military-industrial complex itself is the eleventh largest economic entity in the world. This is the reality we live in, and this is the reality which confronts us in different ways.”

Tariq Ali (1943) British Pakistani writer, journalist, and historian

10th Globalisation lecture, VRPO. http://www.vpro.nl/programma/tegenlicht/artikelen/21200518/

God, World, Way, History

“A multithreaded file system is only a performance hack.”

Andrew S. Tanenbaum (1944) Dutch computer scientist

In a Usenet message to Linus Torvalds, 30 Jan 1992.
The "Linux is Obsolete" Debate

“A self–organizing system acts autonomously, as if the interconnecting components had a single mind. And as these components spontaneously march to the beat of their own drummer, they organize, adapt, and evolve toward a greater complexity than one would ever expect by just looking at the parts by themselves.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 225

Parting

“Any established power system grows decadent over time, if there is nothing with the strength or motivation to challenge it, and if it refuses to challenge itself.”

Nina Kiriki Hoffman (1955) American writer

Source: The Thread That Binds the Bones (1993), Chapter 8 (p. 72)

Motivation, Time

“Only empirical work - analysis based on observation and experience as opposed to theory - can answer the question of how labor force behavior is affected by changes in the tax system. Even intense armchair speculation on this matter must be regarded with considerable skepticism.”

Harvey S. Rosen (1949) American economist

Source: Public Finance - International Edition - Sixth Edition, Chapter 2, Tools of Positive Analysis, p. 22

Behavior, Question, Change

“All things change, creeds and philosophies and outward systems — but God remains.”

Mary Augusta Ward book Robert Elsmere

Robert Elsmere. Book iv. Chap. xxvi, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

God, Change

“Perfect order is boring, perfect randomness is boring, but complex systems are interesting.”

David Orrell (1962) Canadian mathematician

Source: The Other Side Of The Coin (2008), Chapter 4, Right Versus Left, p. 131

Perfection

“It must be the duty of the next Labour Government in power to make an immediate challenge to the capitalist system and take the banks and the land into the custody of the people. The time had come to drop all hesitancy and to be bold. If they returned a Socialist Government next time, it was going to "do things," whatever it cost.”

Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) British politician

Speech in Canning Town (26 June 1935), quoted in The Times (28 June 1935), p. 13.

People, Time

“When I became vegan I stopped training for myself and started training with a purpose greater than my own. Veganism for me is about mindfulness. I do this to liberate animals. … Before I went vegan I had tendonitis, and I would get joint aches and ligament strains, and my knees would be sore. All that went away as soon as I switched to a wholefood plant-based diet. It’s anti-inflammatory, and your digestive system gets a break. … I didn’t understand what it meant to be an athlete. I was big, muscularly, but I was swollen; it wasn’t ‘healthy big’. Now I’m leaner, sharper, quicker, and my mind’s sharper too.”

Tim Shieff (1988) American freerunner

"An interview with vegan parkour wonder Tim Shieff" https://www.vegansociety.com/whats-new/blog/interview-vegan-parkour-wonder-tim-shieff, interview with The Vegan Society (11 March 2016).

Understanding, Animals, Training

“The techniques for making art thus morally acceptable, of drawing its fangs, are endless; and each generation finds its own. Just now the democratic machinery for rendering art safe is so efficient that it seems that the system can absorb anything. It would be exciting to think that somewhere in Europe there was a man making art which was so violent and true that the system could not take it.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

X magazine (1959-62)

Art, Thinking, Drawing

“There is a relation between persons and role. But the relationship answers to the interactive system—to the frame—in which the role is performed and the self of the performer is glimpsed. Self, then, is not an entity half-concealed behind events, but a changeable formula for managing oneself during them. Just as the current situation prescribes the official guise behind which we will conceal ourselves, so it provides where and how we will show through, the culture itself prescribing what sort of entity we must believe ourselves to be in order to have something to show through in this manner.”

Erving Goffman (1922–1982) Sociologist, writer, academic

Frame Analysis (1974) quoted by Edward O. Wilson in On Human Nature (1978) Ch. 4 "Emergence" p. 93
1970s-1980s

Personality

“To Lincoln, slavery undercut the free labor outlook on the world because it denied advancement and self-improvement. For Lincoln, the great attraction of any economic regime was the degree to which it permitted accumulation and self-promotion. He once described the ideal system as being one where the penniless beginner starts out working for somebody else, accumulates capital on his own by dint of savings, goes into business for himself, and then eventually becomes so successful that he hires others, who in turn continue the cycle. And he spoke of that as being the order of things in a society of equals. For him, the very notion of equality is a matter of equality of openness, aspiration, and opportunity.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

World, Business, Success

“In the last 30 years, the prestige of mathematics has declined in all countries. I think that mathematicians are partially to be blamed as well—foremost, Hilbert and Bourbaki—the ones who proclaimed that the goal of their science was investigation of all corollaries of arbitrary systems of axioms.”

Vladimir I. Arnold (1937–2010) Russian mathematician

Interview translated from the Russian into English and republished in the book Boris A. Khesin; Serge L. Tabachnikov (editors), Arnold: Swimming Against the Tide (2014) Google Books preview http://books.google.com/books?id=aBWHBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA4 pages 4–5.

Mathematics, Thinking, Science, Country

“A nonlinear differential equation of the Riccati type is derived for the covariance matrix of the optimal filtering error. The solution of this 'variance equation' completely specifies the optimal filter for either finite or infinite smoothing intervals and stationary or non-stationary statistics.
The variance equation is closely related to the Hamiltonian (canonical) differential equations of the calculus of variations. Analytic solutions are available in some cases. The significance of the variance equation is illustrated by examples which duplicate, simplify, or extend earlier results in this field.
The duality principle relating stochastic estimation and deterministic control problems plays an important role in the proof of theoretical results. In several examples, the estimation problem and its dual are discussed side-by-side.
Properties of the variance equation are of great interest in the theory of adaptive systems. Some aspects of this are considered briefly.”

Rudolf E. Kálmán (1930–2016) Hungarian-born American electrical engineer

Source: New results in linear filtering and prediction theory (1961), p. 95 Article summary; cited in: " Rudolf E. Kálmán http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Kalman.html", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, 2010

Error, Optimism, Problem

“Our old-fashioned system is better than any new-fangled voting machine. Not only is it guaranteed to work, but there is something I find appealing in putting a mark on a piece of paper for the candidate of your choice, as opposed to pulling a lever as if you were gambling on a slot machine in Las Vegas.”

Jean Chrétien (1934) 20th Prime Minister of Canada

Source: My Years As Prime Minister (2007), Chapter Twelve, No To War, p. 287

Fashion

““Tanner, are you insane?”
“Very probably several kinds of insane,” I said. “But I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything. I’m perfectly happy with my current delusional system.””

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 27 (p. 454).

Happiness, Change

“Americans saw Watergate as a threat to their republic. They countered by following constitutional and legal procedure to the letter. In [South] Korea, many people appear unwilling to separate the political system from the wrongdoings of politicians.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Still the Unloved Republic (December 2016)

People, Appearance

“We have had significant achievements in political, economic and social spheres. A transparent public relations system has been created in our country, and the activity of democratic institutions, human rights and freedoms have been ensured. Legislation that meets international requirements, effective operation of specialized institutional structures, and ensuring transparency in public administration are the successes of our anti-corruption policy.”

Ilham Aliyev (1961) 4th President of Azerbaijan from 2003

President Ilham Aliyev's opening letter to participants of the Third Meeting of the Heads of Anti-Corruption Organizations and Ombudsmen of the Economic Cooperation Organization Member States (6 June 2017) http://www.today.az/print/news/politics/161995.html Anti-corruption policy

Freedom, Success, Country

“I think Pandeism was system; — and that when I say the country or kingdom of Pandæa, I express myself in a manner similar to what I should do, if I said the Popish kingdom or the kingdoms of Popery; or again, the Greeks have many idle ceremonies in their church, meaning the Greeks of all nations: or, the countries of the Pope are superstitions, &c. At the same time, I beg to be understood as not denying that there was such a kingdom as that of Pandae, the daughter of Cristna, any more than I would deny that there was a Kingdom of France ruled by the eldest son of the church, or the eldest son of the Pope.”

Godfrey Higgins book Anacalypsis

Vol. I., p. 439.
Anacalypsis (published 1833)

Thinking, Time, Daughters, Country

“In my own field, the History of Art, it was Alois Riegl who, at the turn of the century, worked out his own translation of the Hegelian system into psychological terms.”

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) art historian

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

Art, History

“It is commonly agreed that Keynes came up with the idea that public works are the best way to help the economy during a recession.
As a result, Keynesian economists seem to have developed a blind faith in the government in general, and in the system of public works in particular.
I do not share the same faith in the government.
I do not share the same faith in public works.<p”

Xavier Sala-i-Martin (1962) Catalan economist

http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/keynes/keynes2.htm And this may help explain why. Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Xavier Sala-i-Martin's Home Page http://www.columbia.edu/~xs23/keynes/keynes1.htm.

Faith, Way, Idea, Help

“Corporations are properly associated with mercantilism, rather than capitalism. Mercantilism is a system under which government grants special status to one or more company at the expense of its competitors. The British East India Company, for example, possessed an exclusive, royally-granted 'right' to conduct trade between India and China, on the one hand, and the British Empire for more than 250 years.
Private capitalism, by contrast, is a system under which various enterprises compete in the marketplace by offering the highest quality goods and services they can, at the lowest possible prices. Progress occurs as individuals and companies strive to raise quality and lower prices.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Corporations, Mercantilism, and Capitalism," http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle576-20100627-02.html 27 June 2010.

“My friends, I tell you that hitherto you have been prevented from even knowing what happiness really is, solely in consequence of the errors — gross errors — that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to men. And, in consequence, they have made man the most inconsistent, and the most miserable being in existence. By the errors of these systems he has been made a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic or a miserable hypocrite; and should these qualities be carried, not only into the projected villages, but into Paradise itself, a Paradise would no longer be found!”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

Statement (21 August 1817), as quoted by Jim Herrick, in "Bradlaugh and Secularism: 'The Province of the Real'" (1990) http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c33.htm.

Men, Happiness, Religion, Error

“Where mass-mobilizing ‘revolutionary Marxists’ have come to power, and remained in power sufficiently long to create a viable political system, what they have generally succeeded in creating is a reasonable analogue of the Fascist state.”

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

Source: The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics, (1974), p. 134

“It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a 'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval.
The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.”

J. C. R. Licklider Man-Computer Symbiosis

Cited in: Jacques Berleur, Markku I. Nurminen, John Impagliazzo (2006) Social Informatics: An Information Society for All? p. 436.
Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960

Communication, Thinking, Memory, Time

“The part assigned to this country in the 'Good Fight of Man' is the total overthrow of the spirit of caste. Luther fought it in the form of ecclesiastical despotism; our fathers fought it as political tyranny; we have hitherto encountered it entrenched in a system of personal slavery. But in all these forms it is the same old spirit of the denial of equal rights. Martin Luther, the monk, had exactly the same right to his religious faith that Giovanni de' Medici, the pope, had to his. Galileo had the same right to hold and teach his scientific theories that the Church doctors had to teach theirs. Patrick Henry, a British subject, had the same right to refuse to be taxed without representation that Lord North, another British subject, had. Robert Small, one of the American people, had exactly the same right to vote upon the same qualifications with other citizens that the President has or the Chief Justice of the United States. The Inquisition in Italy, aristocratic privilege in England, chattel slavery or unfair political exclusion in the United States, are only fruits ripened upon the tree of caste. Our swords have cut off some of the fruit, but the tree and its roots remain, and now that our swords are turned into plough-shares and our Dahlgrens and Parrotts into axes and hoes, our business is to take care that the tree and all its roots are thoroughly cut down and dug up, and burned utterly away in the great blaze of equal rights.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1860s, The Good Fight (1865)

People, Faith, Justice, Business

“Cybernetics is likely to reveal a great number of interesting and suggestive parallelisms between machine and brain and society. And it can provide the common language by which discoveries in one branch can readily be made use of in the others… [There are] two peculiar scientific virtues of cybernetics that are worth explicit mention. One is that it offers a single vocabulary and a single set of concepts suitable for representing the most diverse types of system… The second peculiar virtue of cybernetics is that it offers a method for the scientific treatment of the system in which complexity is outstanding and too important to be ignored. Such systems are, as we well know, only too common in the biological world!”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Source: An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), Part I: Mechanism, p. 4-5

World

“Protocols:
Number 3, para. 16
It is the bottomless rascality of the goyim peoples, who crawl on their bellies to force, but are merciless toward weakness, unsparing to faults, and indulgent to crimes, unwilling to bear the contradictions of a free social system but patient unto martyrdom under the violence of a bold despotism. It is those qualities which are aiding us to independence. From the premier-dictators of the present day the goyim peoples suffer patiently and bear such abuse as for the least of them they would have beheaded twenty kings.
Graves: An obvious ineptitude!…Notice “humanity” in the “dialogue” becomes “goyim” in the “protocols,” a Yiddish word taken from the Hebrew that Jews use for gentiles. Could anyone believe that the elders would be so naïve and careless as to employ a common ethnic word in such a formal tract as the Protocols?””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

Source: The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005), p.78

People, Suffering

“A system can be defined as a set of elements standing in interrelations. Interrelation means that elements, p, stand in relations, R, so that the behavior of an element p in R is different from its behavior in another relation, R’. If the behaviors in R and R’ are not different, there is no interaction, and the elements behave independently with respect to the relations R and R’.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 3. Some System Concepts in Elementary Mathematical Consideration, p. 55-56

Behavior

“Between the ages of five and nine I was almost perpetually at war with the educational system. …As soon as I learned from my mother that there was there was a place called school that I must attend willy-nilly—a place where you were obliged to think about matters prescribed by a 'teacher,' not about matters decided by yourself—I was appalled.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

The Small World of Fred Hoyle: an Autobiography (1986)

War, Age, Education, School

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system.”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 71. This statement is known as Gall's law

Appearance

“The effect of three things - the new laws, the revision of the tax system, and the elimination of the zaibatsu conglomerates - was to make Japan an egalitarian society for the first time.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 135.

Law, Time

“There's a tendency to view ourselves, our endeavors, and our accomplishments as the pinnacle. Yet, compared to whats in our solar system, whats in our galaxy, and whats in our universe, we are but a mere speck in the vastness of time, space, mass, and energy.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

Some Planetary Perspective http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/07/some-planetary-perspective/, wattsupwiththat.com, June 7, 2008. 2008

Universe, Time

“… I believe it to be a duty of the General Convention of Harrisburg, not only to support the wool growers and wool manufacturers, but to lay the root at the axe of the tree, by declaring the system of Adam Smith to be erroneous – by declaring war against it on the part of the American System – …”

Friedrich List (1789–1846) German economist with dual American citizenship

Letter I
Outlines of American Political Economy (1827)

War, Support, Tree, Parting

“The most promising lines of development of theory in the sociological and most immediately related fields, particularly the psychological and cultural, therefore, seem to be two-fold. One major direction is the theoretical elaboration and refinement of structural-functional analysis of social systems, including the relevant problems of motivation and their relation to cultural patterns. In this process, the structure of social action provides a basic frame of reference, and aspects of it become of direct substantive importance at many specific points. The main theoretical task, however, is more than a refinement of the conceptual scheme of the presently reprinted book — it involves transition and translation to a different level and focus of theoretical systematization.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Preface second edition, 1949
The structure of social action (1937)

Books, Motivation, Problem

“The Earth's cry for rescue from the punishing weight of the industrial system we have created is our own cry for a scale and quality of life that will free each of us to become the complete person that we were meant to be.”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (2001)

Life, Personality, Cry

“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless and hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have the government provide for them birth control medication. Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything that anyone else can do. Our party stands for the recognition of the equality of women and the capacity of women. That's not a war on them, that's a war for them. And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government then so be it!”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Republican National Committee winter meeting, , quoted in * 2014-01-23
Fox's Huckabee: Democrats Tell Women They Can't Control Their Libidos
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2014/01/23/foxs-huckabee-democrats-tell-women-they-cant-co/197717

Life, Women, War, Education

““Organization theory,” a term that appeared in the middle of the twentieth century, has multiple meanings. When it first emerged, the term expressed faith in scientific research as a way to gain understanding of human beings and their interactions. Although scientific research had been occurring for several centuries, the idea that scientific research might enhance understanding of human behavior was considerably newer and rather few people appreciated it. Simon (1950, 1952-3, 1952) was a leading proponent for the creation of “organization theory”, which he imagined as including scientific management, industrial engineering, industrial psychology, the psychology of small groups, human-resources management, and strategy. The term “organization theory” also indicated an aspiration to state generalized, abstract propositions about a category of social systems called “organizations,” which was a very new concept. Before and during the 1800s, people had regarded armies, schools, churches, government agencies, and social clubs as belonging to distinct categories, and they had no name for the union of these categories. During the 1920s, some people began to perceive that diverse kinds of medium-sized social systems might share enough similarities to form a single, unified category. They adopted the term “organization” for this unified category.”

William H. Starbuck (1934) American academic

William H. Starbuck and Philippe Baumard (2009). "The seeds, blossoming, and scant yield of organization theory," in: Jacques Rojot et. al (eds.) Comportement organisationnel - Volume 3 De Boeck Supérieur. p. 15

People, School, Faith, Way

“As any poet knows, a system is a way of looking at the world.”

Gerald M. Weinberg (1933–2018) American computer scientist

Source: Introduction to General Systems Thinking, 1975, p. 52

World, Way

“The system is run by the few with the few as the main beneficiaries. Most of the people in the world have no say in these systems and are either not helped or are adversely affected by them.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Source: Globalization - A Basic Text (2010), Chapter 7, Structuring the Global Economy, p. 189

People, World, Help

“American society […] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.”

Philip Roth book Portnoy's Complaint

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Men, Money, Happiness, People

“It became clear that our Galaxy is only one system among many, and that the universe is far vaster than the particular stellar system to which the Sun and planets belong. Since then developments have been more rapid than at any time since the days of Copernicus, Digges and Bruno when the geocentric hypothesis of the cosmos received its death-blow.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

"Theories of the Universe" (10 Apr 1958)

Death, Universe, Time, Sun

“The Russians are like us, they look and act like us. They are fine people. They got along with our soldiers in Berlin very well. As far as I am concerned, they can have whatever they want just so they don't try to impose their system on others.”

Harry Truman (1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)

Statement to a group of four congress freshmen (2 July 1947), as quoted in The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, p. 44

People

“It is right to be forward in the defence of the poor; no system that is not just as between rich and poor can hope to survive.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech at Edinburgh (24 November 1882), from in G. Cecil, The Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury. Volume III, p. 65
1880s

Hope

“In 1948 the Democrats had little choice but to nominate President Truman, under the banner HE'S GOING TO LOSE. Everybody felt this way: the politicians, the press, the pollsters, the piccolo players, Peter Piper, everybody. The Republicans were so confident that they nominated an individual named Thomas Dewey, whose lone accomplishment was inventing the decimal system. Truman campaigned doggedly around the nation, but his cause appeared to be hopeless. A Dewey victory seemed so inevitable that on election night, the Chicago Tribune printed the famous front-page headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. This was because Dewey had defeated Truman, who immediately threatened to drop an atomic bomb on Chicago, so everybody went ha-ha-ha-ha, just kidding, and wisely elected to have the feisty ex-haberdasher have another term.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Source: Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (1989), p. 131

Way, Confidence, Appearance, Victory

“When I was quite young… I began to suspect there must be flaws in my sense of reality. It seemed to my dim sense of confusion that things often blended one into another, and the Law of Excluded Middle merely opened up a void wherein anything was possible. But I had been produced to focus on objects (things) and not on systems”

Frank Herbert (1920–1986) American writer

processes
"Doll Factory, Gun Factory" (1973), essay reprinted in The Maker of Dune : Insights of a Master of Science Fiction (1987), edited by Tim O'Reilly
General sources

Law, Reality, Sense

“Today no one who wishes to clean even a minimal regard for reason or evidence can espouse racist ideology as it was in its heyday, a system as comprehensive as Marxism and to some clearly equally as satisfying. However, thanks to Jensen and Eysenck and Shockley, the racist can cling to the periphery of his ideology; for example, he can provide a reasoned defence of his position on certain issues such as immigration and foreign policy. I do not wish to minimize the ground he has lost: the retreat from world history to little more than immigration quotas is a great defeat for the racist and a great source of satisfaction for all of his opponents. I am quite convinced that the refutation of racism in the light of reason is almost complete (the effort to eradicate it as a social force is a different matter and may never be fully accomplished). However, the last stand of the racist is not without importance, something I will attempt to demonstrate by giving a racist ideologue his say.”

James Robert Flynn (1934–2020) New Zealand scholar

not referring to any of the above mentioned persons
Source: Race, IQ, and Jensen (1980), p. 8

World, History, Effort, Light

“The techno-industrial system is exceptionally tough due to its so-called "democratic" structure and its resulting flexibility. Because dictatorial systems tend to be rigid, social tensions and resistance can be built up in them to the point where they damage and weaken the system and may lead to revolution. But in a "democratic" system, when social tension and resistance build up dangerously the system backs off enough, it compromises enough, to bring the tensions down to a safe level.”

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

"Why The System Is Tough", point 4
Hit Where It Hurts (2002)

“A system in one perspective is a subsystem in another. But the systems view always treats systems as integrated wholes of their subsidiary components and never as the mechanistic aggregate of parts in isolable causal relations.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: Introduction to Systems Philosophy (1972), p. 14.

Parting

“Inconsistency is an inevitable trait of any self-sustaining system built up out of consistent parts.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

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

Parting

“Behind all the Great-Society-style and standardized testing, wars on poverty or drugs, self-esteem seminars. A good portion of the African-American population was simply institutionalized or interned, in public housing complexes, in urban schools, and in one of the biggest prison systems the world has ever known. It all amounts to a sprawling race gulag in which people are both dependent and hedged about with restrictions.”

Crispin Sartwell (1958) American philosopher

White Liberals: We’re Not Racist (August 29, 2016)

War, People, World, School

“Industrial production, the flow of resources in the economy, the exertion of military effort in a war theater-all are complexes of numerous interrelated activities. Differences may exist in the goals to be achieved, the particular processes involved, and the magnitude of effort. Nevertheless, it is possible to abstract the underlying essential similarities in the management of these seemingly disparate systems.”

George Dantzig (1914–2005) American mathematician

Source: Linear programming and extensions (1963), p. 1

War, Effort

“Two of Chicago’s four city pension funds will be bankrupt within a few years, according to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. You’d think that’s a scenario unions – the supposed champions for public-employee retirements – would want to avoid.
But not in Chicago. Unions are fighting to block any kind of pension reform, effectively locking in bankruptcy for city-employee pension systems.”

Rahm Emanuel (1959) politician, investment banker, White House Chief of Staff

Benjamin VanMetre, Unions to Bankrupt Chicago Pension Funds https://www.illinoispolicy.org/unions-to-bankrupt-chicago-pension-funds/, IllinoisPolicy.org, December 29, 2014 About

Thinking, Fight

“The Reservoir system will function not only as an equalizer of business conditions, but also as a national store to meet further emergencies, such as war and drought, and-most important of all-as the concrete means of developing a steadily higher living standard for all.”

Benjamin Graham (1894–1976) American investor

Part II, Chapter IV, A Plan For Conserving Surplus, p. 50
Storage and Stability (1937)

War, Business

“Differences in the incidence of destruction and "death" do not account for the reluctance to refer to international politics as a harmonious realm, while competitive economies are often so described. Instead, one may say that the standards of performance now applied to international political systems are higher, or at least widely different. As John Maynard Keynes once remarked, those who believe that unhampered processes of natural selection lead to progress do not "count the cost of the struggle" (1926, p. 37). In international politics, we often count nothing but the costs of the struggle.”

Kenneth N. Waltz book Theory of International Politics

Source: Theory of International Politics (1979), p. 137

Death, Nature

“You seem to be using some sort of logical system where when you get near any explanation, you say: “By definition my problem is insoluble. Now that explanation over there would solve it. But since I’ve defined my problem as insoluble, then by definition that solution doesn’t apply.””

Samuel R. Delany book Triton

Source: Triton (1976), Chapter 3 “Avoiding Kangaroos” (p. 123)

Problem

“How is technology changing the hierarchical nature of our world? History reveals an overall trend toward ever more coordination over ever-larger distances, which is easy to understand: new transportation technology makes coordination more valuable (by enabling mutual benefit from moving materials and life forms over larger distances) and new communication technology makes coordination easier. When cells learned to signal to neighbors, small multicellular organisms became possible, adding a new hierarchical level. When evolution invented circulatory systems and nervous systems for transportation and communication, large animals became possible. Further improving communication by inventing language allowed humans to coordinate well enough to form further hierarchical levels such as villages, and additional breakthroughs in communication, transportation and other technology enabled the empires of antiquity. Globalization is merely the latest example of this multi-billion-year trend of hierarchical growth.”

Max Tegmark (1967) Swedish-American cosmologist

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017)

Life, World, History, Communication

“Because the brain can be guided by rational calculation only in a limited degree, it must fall back on the nuances of pleasure and pain mediated by the limbic system and other lower centers of the brain.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

Pain, Pleasure

“Just about everybody in politics has something to hide. The higher they rise in the system, the more skeletons they have stuffed in their closets. And as we have all come to appreciate, this goes double — or perhaps even squared — for politicos who got their start in Chicago. And because the system no longer cares about our rights (to the extent it ever did) we can no longer focus solely on issues related to them, but must cast about more widely to ensnare and defeat the enemies of liberty.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"It Has to Cost Them Something".

“An information system is an organisation of people, materials and machines that serves to facilitate the transfer of information from one person to another. Its function is social: to aid human communication. If we take this to mean all reception of signals by the human senses (sight, sound, small, touch, taste,…)- then communication is an incessant and essential accompaniment of all human activity. If we restrict the meaning of signals to flowing between people, much of the daily life of most of us is occupied by such interpersonal acts.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Information Systems (1973), p. 1.

Life, People, Communication, Sense

“Speaking crudely, a living system—an organism—consists of a symbiotic relationship between a metabolism and a replicator. …the replicator contains the blueprint of the organism, with the information needed to grow, make repairs, and reproduce. …the metabolism provides the energy and raw materials needed to build and run the replicator.”

J. Doyne Farmer (1952) American physicist and entrepreneur (b.1952)

The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995)

“Being from Africa is the best thing that could have ever, ever happened to me. I cannot see it any other way. All of my fundamental principles that were instilled in me in my home, from my childhood, are still with me. And now, when I look at the system here and look at my position--not just as a basketball player, but when I look around me at the values of the people and the culture and compare them with the values of where I came from--I feel so blessed to be from Africa.”

Hakeem Olajuwon (1963) Nigerian–American basketball player

Sourced Quotes

People, Way, Feeling, Home

“The craziest of all political systems, the unique leader state, has found its deserved end. History will note for eternity that the German people were not able on their own initiative to shake off the yoke of the National Socialists. The victory of the Americans, English, and Russians was a necessary occurrence to destroy the National Socialists' delusions and plans for world domination.”

Friedrich Kellner (1885–1970) German Justice inspector

May 1, 1945; Vol. 2, p. 930.
Diary (1939 - 1945)

People, World, History, Victory

“Societies grow into systems. The systems require management and are therefore increasingly wielded, like a tool or a weapon, by those who have power. The rest of the population is still needed to do specific things. But the citizens are not needed to contribute to the form or direction of the society. The more "advanced" the civilization, the more irrelevant the citizen becomes.”

John Ralston Saul (1947) Canadian author and essayist

Voltaire's Bastards (1992)

“The calculus was the first achievement of modern mathematics and it is difficult to overestimate its importance. I think it defines more unequivocally than anything else the inception of modern mathematics; and the system of mathematical analysis, which is its logical development, still constitutes the greatest technical advance in exact thinking.”

John Von Neumann (1903–1957) Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath

As quoted in Bigeometric Calculus: A System with a Scale-Free Derivative (1983) by Michael Grossman, and in Single Variable Calculus (1994) by James Stewart.

Mathematics, Thinking