Quotes about system (5397 quotes, page 53)

“By this time, the era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any "political liberties" that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject.”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

"Conserving Forest Communities"
Another Turn of the Crank (1996)

Time , Dependency , Freedom , People

“Economic system of the US was created & designed before women had a voice in the public realm. We do have a voice now; it’s important that we use it not to fit into the system but to change the system. The main engine of our economy should be the care & nurturance of our children”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Twitter https://twitter.com/marwilliamson (2 Oct 2019)
Williamson's quotes in social media

Children , Women , Change

“From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

"The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege" (2011)

“Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.”

Kevin Carson (1963) American academic

"The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand: Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege" (2011)

“When the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem is applied to particular formal systems, we obtain as special cases: Every group, field, ordered field, etc., has a countable subsystem of the same type. A more spectacular result follows from applying the theorem to set theory (a system which we shall later formalize): There is a countable collection of sets, such that if restrict the membership relation to these sets alone, they form a model for set theory (more precisely all the true statements of set theory are true in this model). In particular, within this model which we may denote by M, there must be an uncountable set. This paradox, that a countable model can contain an uncountable set, is explained by noting that to say a set is uncountable merely asserts the nonexistence of a one-one mapping of the set with the set of integers. The "uncountable" set in M set actually has only countably many members in M, but there is no one-one correspondence \underline {within} M of this set with the set of integers.”

Paul Cohen (1934–2007) American mathematician

Set theory and the continuum hypothesis, pp. 19–20 https://books.google.com/books?id=Z4NCAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA19
Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (1966)

Relation ships

“The native is to be treated as a child and denied franchise. We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa.”

Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902) British businessman, mining magnate and politician in South Africa

Magubane, Bernard M. (1996). The Making of a Racist State: British Imperialism and the Union of South Africa, 1875–1910. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. ISBN 978-0865432413.

Relation ships

“By 1980, the work of Feldstein, Boskin, Summers, and others had convinced many economists that U.S. taxes were in fact a significant obstacle to investment. Nor was this all: another major U.S. policy, the Social Security system, was also discouraging saving and investment.”

Paul Krugman book Peddling Prosperity

Source: Peddling Prosperity (1994), Ch. 2 : Taxes, Regulation, and Growth

Summer

“Domestic slavery, combined with systems of foreign conquest and usurpation, ruined the empires of antiquity.”

Thomas Hodgskin (1787–1869) British writer

Source: Popular Political Economy: Four lectures delivered at the London Mechanics Institution (1827), p. 30

“We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. These idea systems are limited by language. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms,we must step outside the language.”

Frank Herbert book The Santaroga Barrier

Source: The Santaroga Barrier (1968), Chapter Ten

Idea , Reality

“Without an analysis of women's status in the hierarchical system and the conditions under which she was enslaved, neither the state nor the class-based system that it rests upon can be understood.”

Abdullah Öcalan (1949) Founder of the PKK

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Liberating Life: Women's Revolution, p. 69

Women

“A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.”

Leslie Lamport (1941) American computer scientist

Email of 28 May 1987 https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/distributed-system.txt
As quoted in [Teresa K. Attwood, Stephen R. Pettifer, David Thorne, Bioinformatics Challenges at the Interface of Biology and Computer Science: Mind the Gap, https://books.google.com/books?id=_i-8DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA266, 26 September 2016, John Wiley & Sons, 978-0-470-03548-1, 266–]

Failure

“The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.”

Ken Thompson (1943) American computer scientist, creator of the Unix operating system

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/360000/358210/reflections.pdf, 1983 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 27 (8), August 1984, pp. 761-763.

Making love , Housing

“When wealth,power, and media are monopolized by a minority, how can they speak about freedom and justice? The capitalist systems can never grant freedom and justice.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1956) 6th President of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Twitter https://twitter.com/Ahmadinejad1956 18 Feb 2019
2019

Wealth , Justice , Freedom

“The evils of a military system, which, after all, every day must attenuate, are light compared with the evils of an anarchic conservatism reinstated in central Europe. Divided Germany means preponderating Russia. What can be more desirable in the interests of the highest civilisation than the interposition in the heart of the European state-system, of a powerful, industrious, intelligent, and progressive people, between the western nations and the half-barbarous Russian swarms? To the careful observer of the history of modern Europe it is plain that increasing vigour and self-conscious strength in Germany are other words for the spread eastwards of the best of those ideas, the most durable of those civilising elements, in which the difference of historic development has enabled England and France to anticipate her.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Fortnightly Review (September 1870), p. 371
1870s

History , Light , Intelligence , People

“It’s the global food system that’s broken, not just the practices of any one country. A global problem requires a united global effort, and China could easily take the lead.”

Jacy Reese (1992) American social scientist

[China Could Become the Lab Meat Capital of the World, August 26, 2018, LiveKindly, https://www.livekindly.co/china-lab-meat-capital-world/]

Problem , Food , Country , Effort

“Democracy is a system of government according to which every member of society is considered as a man and nothing more.”

William Godwin (1756–1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist

Book V, Chapter 13, "General Features of Democracy"

Massacre is the too possible attendant upon revolution , and massacre is perhaps the most hateful scene, alllowing for its omentary duration, that any imagination can suggest, The fearful, hopeless, expectation of the defeated, and the blood-hound fury of their conquerors, is a complication of mischief that all which has been told of internal regions can scarcely surpass. The cold-blooded massacres that are perpetrated under the naem of criminal justice fall short of these in some of their most frightful aggravations. The ministers and instruments of law have by perform, and often bear their parts in the most shocking enormities without being sensible to the passions allied murders with the rudeness of an insulting triumph ; and, as the conduct themselves , in a certain sort, by known principles of injustice, the evil we have reason to apprehend has its limits. But the instruments of massacre are discharged from every restraint.

Book VIII, Ch.
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Democracy

“I think political systems will use it [artifical intelligence] to terrorize people.”

Geoffrey Hinton (1947) computer scientist and psychologist

about artificial intelligence https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom
Quote

Thinking , Intelligence , People

“Capitalism without socialism is like a great shark in the waters that will eat up everything in sight, and has no group sense or social responsibility. We need to take the best of both systems and bring them together....a fusion of the best aspects of both. Both are necessary.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. II (1993)

Sense , Water

“Step by step [aesthetic] judgment, restless under the growth of positive knowledge, has discarded creed after creed and philosophic system after philosophic system.”

Karl Pearson book The Grammar of Science

Introductory
The Grammar of Science (1900)

Knowledge

“[S]mall as our increase in knowledge may be, concrete systems of religion have not kept pace with it. They persist in explaining by myth, portions of the relation of... which we have true knowledge. Hence we see the danger, if not the absolute evil of any myth at all.”

Karl Pearson (1857–1936) English mathematician and biometrician

The Ethic of Freethought (Mar 6, 1883)

Knowledge , Religion , Evil , Relation ships

“The type of people who gravitate to the government system are doing this out of desperation and they don't really have the answers, and eventually... [will] fail.”

Ron Paul (1935) American politician and physician

2019

People

“I see myself as sort-of the left’s ‘immune system’; no more than that.”

Natalie Wynn ContraPoints

ContraPoints, Miscellaneous, Contrapoints Is De-Radicalizing Young, Right-Wing Men https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nrz4-FZx6k (Vice News, 2019)

“Winnow the chaff of a hundred creeds
Beyond these systems, hollow as reeds,
Turn unhorizened to where Truth leads,
To be unhoused, O my soul!”

Kuvempu (1904–1994) Kannada novelist, poet, playwright, critic, and thinker

Aniketana (1964)

Truth , Soul

“…there are individual ways that we work our way through all of these systems that are corrosive and inescapable. But if there is a solution to the system itself, it’s at a collective level. It’s the level of policy and politics, it’s not at the level of individual choice.”

Jia Tolentino (1988) American writer and editor

On why her book Trick Mirror offers no solutions in “Jia Tolentino: What It’s Like Being the Most Talked About Millennial Writer” https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/11896/jia-tolentino-trick-mirror-book-interview-new-yorker-staff-writer-2019 in AnOther (2019 Sep 15)

Way

“… Wage theft, the intentional dumping of oil, shark finning—in each of those categories you’ll find people who are the culprits, but if you really try to understand what makes them tick, you’ll see that they’re pretty desperate characters who are victims themselves of a larger, screwed-up system…”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On trying to distinguish predator from prey in The Outlaw Ocean in “Wage Theft, Slavery, and Climate Change on the Outlaw Ocean” https://civileats.com/2019/09/27/wage-theft-slavery-and-climate-change-on-the-outlaw-ocean/ (Civil Eats; 2019 Sep 27)

Making love , People , Understanding

“Much more seriously, in those traditional eco-systems that we chose to retain, millions of non-human animals will continue periodically to starve, die horribly of thirst and disease, or even get eaten alive. This is commonly viewed as "natural" and hence basically OK. It would indeed be comforting to think that in some sense this ongoing animal holocaust doesn't matter too much. We often find it convenient to act as though the capacity to suffer were somehow inseparably bound up with linguistic ability or ratiocinative prowess. Yet there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case, and a great deal that it isn't.”

David Pearce (philosopher) (1959) British transhumanist

1.9 The Taste of Depravity https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#taste
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Suffering , Nature , Animals , Thinking

“School system teach you to ride a horse while in real life we have to ride a car.”

Christian Canlubo (2002) Filipino Internet Entrepreneur

Source: Christian Canlubo https://en.everybodywiki.com/Christian_Canlubo| Christian Canlubo profile on EverybodyWiki

Christian Canlubo expressed his belief that the school system is too slow.

School , Horse , Life , Cars

“Whenever I go and give a talk on Hinduism, and when I say something nice about it, invariably someone from the audience will object: 'I think Hinduism is a disgusting religion because of the caste system.'”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

Source: Quoted from Elst, K. The use of Dalits and racism in anti-Hindu propaganda https://web.archive.org/web/20190310132553/http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/chr/christiandalit.html

Thinking , Religion

“In the face of all this those who continue to assert, ‘Shariah has safeguarded the rights of women like no other system of law has,’ do so only because of their confidence that no one but them has read the texts of shariah.”

Arun Shourie (1941) Indian journalist and politician

The World of Fatwas (Or The Shariah In Action), 1995

Confidence , Law , Reading , Self-confidence

“As both sides debate the path forward on reforming our immigration system, the BE SAFE Act provides a constitutional answer that guarantees funding for our needs on the border without taking away from other priorities or increasing the burden on American taxpayers.”

Rand Paul (1963) American politician, ophthalmologist, and United States Senator from Kentucky

4 March 2019 https://votesmart.org/public-statement/1331191/dr-rand-paul-introduces-be-safe-act-to-fund-border-security
2019

“As people surrender the power to build the institutions they want, which would enable lives that make sense to them, the system as a whole sacrifices the intelligence it needs: it loses its minds.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. 413, entry on Scale https://leanlogic.online/scale/

Sense , Intelligence , People , Making love

“There can be no full or even adequate understanding of the systemic problems of capitalist society, of the origins and dynamics of hierarchy, and of a future rational, autonomous, ethical, and ecological society until we address the 10,000-year legacy of speciesism and the barbaric exploitation of other animals.”

Steven Best (1955) American activist

Source: The Politics of Total Liberation: Revolution for the 21st Century (2014), Chapter 5 "Minding the Animals: Cognitive Ethology and the Obsolescence of Left Humanism" (p. 135)

Animals , Problem , Future , Understanding

“There are information asymmetries in this story. Health insurance is limping along. It's limited in scope, and then you other consequences. Insurance companies have high premiums to protect themselves. The ones who come to the insurance company are sicker and the people have to pay more. You have adverse selection. You have moral hazard. And the doctor does what's on the safe side -- defensive medicine -- without regard to cost. These are fundamental conditions that make health insurance difficult. You have some things that help. Some doctors understand that they shouldn't abuse the system. But you still see problems in the way doctors behave towards patients. They goof off. Sometimes it's too much work. Some things are difficult and risky to diagnose.”

Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

quoted in Conor Clarke, An Interview with Kenneth Arrow, Part Two https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/07/an-interview-with-kenneth-arrow-part-two/22279/ (2009)
New millennium

Understanding , Help , Health , People

“I don’t think most Americans realize that the way we raise animals is such a betrayal of the heritage of our grandparents. I don’t think they realize that … these big companies like Smithfield and Cargill and others have our American farmers now living like sharecroppers in constant debt, forced to follow their rules. I’ve watched the suffering in North Carolina of minority communities who live around Cafos and can no longer breathe their air … and I’ve seen workers in the meatpacking plants and how dangerous those plants are. Everybody is losing in this system – except for the massive corporations that have taken over the American food system.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

'A savagely broken food system': Cory Booker wants radical reform ... now https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/15/a-savagely-broken-food-system-cory-booker-wants-radical-reform-now. The Guardian, September, 15 2020
2020

Betrayal , Food , Suffering , Communication

“I have been impressed time and again by the schizophrenic character of many businessmen. They are capable of being extremely far‐sighted and clear‐headed in matters that are internal to their businesses. They are incredibly short sighted and muddle‐headed in mat ters [sic!] that are outside their businesses but affect the possible survival of business in general. This short sightedness is strikingly exemplified in the calls from many businessmen for wage and price guidelines or controls or incomes policies. There is nothing that could do more in a brief period to destroy a market system and replace it by a centrally controlled system than effective governmental control of prices and wages. The short‐sightedness is also exemplified in speeches by business men on social responsibility. This may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the ptirsuit [sic!] of profits is wicked and im moral [sic!] and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, business men seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.”

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

“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 1970)

Time , Business , Help , Suicide

“IN a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employe of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose—for example, a hospital or school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services. In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.”

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

“A Friedman doctrine‐- The Social Responsibility Of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” (Sept. 1970)

School , Money , Law , Business

“When I see the present Socialist Government denouncing capitalism in all its forms, mocking with derision and contempt the tremendous free enterprise capitalist system on which the mighty production of the United States is founded, I cannot help feeling that as a nation we are not acting honourably or even honestly.”

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

Churchill By Himself: The Definitive Collections of Quotations, ed. Richard Langworth, 2008, p. 124, (1948, 10 July) Woodford, Essex, Europe, 374)
Post-war years (1945–1955)

Feeling , Help

“At all levels, the systems of life - from sociopolitical systems to solar systems - are repugnant and should be negated as MALIGNANTLY USELESS.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

Source: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Life

“Life can exist on other planets, in other solar systems, in other galaxies and universes.”

J. Posadas (1912–1981) Argentine Trotskyist (1912-1981)

Source: Flying saucers, the process of matter and energy, science, the revolutionary and working-class struggle and the socialist future of mankind (26 June 1968)

Universe , Life

“Asia gave us dowry deaths and the caste system. Africa elevated famine to an art form. North America cultivated chattel slavery for far longer than I would have dared hope; South America has done things with political oppression that I am obliged to call brilliant; Australia showed the world that the only good aborigine is a dead aborigine; and Antarctica has fabulous weather. Of all the continents that constitute Earth’s terrain, however, Europe remains dearest to my heart and closest to my soul.
I allude here not to the sweatshops, the world wars, or totalitarian socialism (though none of these innovations has escaped my notice) but to the fact that the European imagination endowed me with a degree of glamour—you might even say charm—that in pre-coma times enabled me to function with extraordinary effectiveness. The concept of an Evil One is intrinsic to Islam, of course; the ancient Hebrews had their “adversary,” their satan; the Egyptians feared a dark deity called Set; Zoroastrians believed in Ahriman, essence of destruction (forever warring with Ohrmazd, source of all things bright and beautiful). But only in Christian Europe did the Prince of Hell acquire a personality as vivid and endearing as any you will meet in a Dickens novel.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: Blameless in Abaddon (1996), Chapter 11 (p. 253; spoken by the Devil)

Soul , Hell , Imagination , Time

“Metaphors are the beginning of the democratic system of envy. They look for what is dissimilar and try to make it similar. Everything that is similar cuts the edge of what is unique.”

Giannina Braschi (1953) Puerto Rican writer

Envy , Making love

“[A] hundred years ago the selling of goods at retail had settled into a system of small shops, each confining itself to a particular class of merchandise. The comprehensive trade of the sixteenth century had been divided into small sections, and the smaller the section the smaller was the study, the amount of experience and the capital required. The retail trade of shop-keeping became in consequence a petty and insignificant undertaking, necessitating little risk, little profit, and little ability, and so generally was this fact accepted that the name of shop-keeper became a term of reproach and of disrespect.”

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858–1947) America born English businessman

The Romance of Commerce (1918), A Representative Business of the Twentieth Century

Study

“This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/nov/09.htm (November 1912)
1910s

“The aims and ideals of the Soviet revolution inspired the patriotic enthusiasm of millions of people in the 1930s, during World War II, and in the postwar reconstruction period. This explains the Soviet Union's great leap forward, the achievement of a high level of industrial capacity in a very short time, the transformation of the Soviet Union into a major power in terms of science and culture. The historic victory in the Great Patriotic War against Nazism, which was a surprise not only for Hitler but also for the Western democracies is also explained by what we have said above. All this is true. But the historical truth is also that the regime and the system abused the faith of the people in these high ideals, turning them to its own advantage. Rule by the people, equality, justice, and the promise of a happy future — all these ideas were utilized for the sake of maintaining and strengthening totalitarianism.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

Democracy , Faith , Justice , Time

“To demonize all Soviet "leaders" at all levels, to portray them as unqualified villains and evildoers, unprincipled self-seeking scoundrels who were indifferent to the interests and needs of the people — that is a shallow and frivolous approach. Of course there were villains, quite a few of them. But most of those who came to power had the intention of serving the "toiling masses" from which they themselves had come. That the system rendered their aspirations useless, reduced their efforts to nothing, and ultimately snuffed out their finer impulses — that is a separate question.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)

Question , Indifference , People , Self-confidence

“Turkey will continue moving forward to new targets [and] new horizons in stability and security with the new governing system.”

Binali Yıldırım (1955) Turkish politician; 27th Prime Minister of Turkey

Turkish premier casts vote in his hometown Izmir (June 24, 2018) https://www.aa.com.tr/en/todays-headlines/turkish-premier-casts-vote-in-his-hometown-izmir/1184573

“[The Communist’s] objective is not to secure ‘agreements’ or ‘compromises,’ but to use the tribunes of governments for disruptive agitation, and destroy the representative system from within… Any Communist, sitting in any ‘bourgeoisie’ government, represents only the Communist International.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Source: "Let the Record Speak" 1939, “The Truth about Communism” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015051180423&view=1up&seq=5 (1948), p. 9

“The architects of the Constitution had the intention of making a republican and federal government which would endure with stability, insure justice, promote the general welfare and be proof against usurpation, either by the few and the rich or by the poor and the many. For the founding of a republic they had guides. For a federal system they had none. But they thoroughly believed that help could be found in the successes and failures of the past. They knew all about the ‘class struggle’—so, for that matter, did the Greek philosophers, although you would think from our young socialist friends that Karl Marx was the first person ever to notice it. They knew all about Fascism and its causes, although they called it by another name.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 52-53
Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)

Justice , Success , Past , Personality

“Capitalism is the use of wealth in private hands to create more wealth. It is the existing world-wide modern system of organizing production and trade by private enterprise, free to seek profit by employing human labor. Its defenders argue that never, since the beginning of history, has there been such a thing as perfect equality and harmony;… and every know period of history had rich and poor, and that actually modern technology, plus liberal democracy, plus an increased social sense, plus Capitalism, have created the modern world, and that as far as the standard of living of the average man is concerned the modern world surpasses all previous epochs of history.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
p. 26

Democracy , History , Wealth , Perfection

“I’m going to go obsessively run diagnostics on systems I know are solid so I can feel like I have control of something.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: The Expanse, Tiamat's Wrath (2019), Chapter 30 (p. 319)

Feeling

“The new tax bill should improve both the equity and the simplicity of our present tax system. This means the enactment of long-needed tax reforms, a broadening of the tax base and the elimination or modification of many special tax privileges. These steps are not only needed to recover lost revenue and thus make possible a larger cut in present rates; they are also tied directly to our goal of greater growth. For the present patchwork of special provisions and preferences lightens the tax load of some only at the cost of placing a heavier burden on others. It distorts economic judgments and channels an undue amount of energy into efforts to avoid tax liabilities. It makes certain types of less productive activity more profitable than other more valuable undertakings. All this inhibits our growth and efficiency, as well as considerably complicating the work of both the taxpayer and the Internal Revenue Service. These various exclusions and concessions have been justified in part as a means of overcoming oppressively high rates in the upper brackets--and a sharp reduction in those rates, accompanied by base-broadening, loophole-closing measures, would properly make the new rates not only lower but also more widely applicable. Surely this is more equitable on both counts.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Making love , Parting , Effort

“I am talking about the accumulated evidence of the last 5 years that our present tax system, developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peace time; that it siphons out of the private economy too large a share of personal and business purchasing power; that it reduces the financial incentives for personal effort, investment, and risk-taking. In short, to increase demand and lift the economy, the Federal Government's most useful role is not to rush into a program of excessive increases in public expenditures, but to expand the incentives and opportunities for private expenditures. [...] While rising demand will expand imports, new investment in more efficient productive facilities will aid exports and a new economic climate could both draw capital from abroad and keep capital here at home.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Home , Peace , Drawing , Time

“The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrents to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system; and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Source: 1962, Address and Question and Answer Period at the Economic Club of New York

Business , Personality , Summer

“The world is your oyster if you’re unafraid to tell your own story and keep it universally appealing. But you have reason to be afraid of making live action children’s drama in Australia if the system is dismantled.”

Jonathan M. Shiff Australian television producer

Source: Interview with Jonathan Shiff https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/sa/screen-news/2018/06-18-international-tv-sales-snapshot-for-2017/part-4-interview-with-jonathan-shiff (18 June 2018)

World , Universe , Making love , Children

“No one, I think, can deny that the depression of the agricultural interest is excessive. Though I can recall periods of suffering, none of them have ever equalled the present in its instances. ... [N]or is it open to doubt that foreign competition has exercised a most injurious influence on the agricultural interests of the country. The country, however, was perfectly warned that if we made a great revolution in our industrial system, that was one of the consequences that would accrue. I may mention that the great result of the returns we possess is this, that the immense importations of foreign agricultural produce have been vastly in excess of what the increased demands of our population actually require, and that is why the low prices are maintained...That is to a great degree the cause of this depression.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Speech in the House of Lords on the agricultural depression (28 March 1879), reported in The Times (29 March 1879), p. 8

Country , Thinking , Suffering , Exercises

“The imbalances of our political, social, cultural, spiritual condition must be turned into revolutionary action to overthrow this corrupt system of dutch colonial exploitation.”

Joceline Clemencia (1952–2011) Curaçaoan writer

Source: Source https://triunfodisablika.wordpress.com/2020/11/29/an-anti-colonial-anthem-joceline-clemencia/

“We live in a country afflicted by a senile and selfish capitalist system...where families are homeless, sick people unattended, children untaught whilst building workers, nurses and teachers are unemployed”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Source: ‘Introduction’, in Why Vote Labour? (1979), p. 2, quoted in Tudor Jones, ‘Neil Kinnock's socialist journey’, Contemporary Record, Volume 8, Issue 3 (1994), p. pp. 568–569

Selfishness , Family , Country , Affliction

“See, in general, as systems designers, you’re forced with necessity to make decisions about how you’re going to do things, and in general, the way you’d like to retain flexibility is to never make up your mind about anything until you’re forced to do it. The problem is, there’s a very, very narrow line between deferring decisions and outright procrastination. So you’d like to make progress, but also at the same time, never be bound by the consequences of your decisions.”

Hal Abelson (1947) computer scientist

Source: Lecture on Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrFkf-T-6Co

Time , Problem , Decision , Way

“Look at the solar system, and look at the Earth. On Earth, there are many intelligent species, but only one has achieved technology. Right here in the journey of our own solar system, there is a very, very powerful message that says here's how we should look for alien life, small and big. So yeah, microbes are talking and we are listening, and they are taking us, one planet at a time and one moon at a time, towards their big brothers out there. And they are telling us about diversity, they are telling us about abundance of life, and they are telling us how this life has survived thus far to reach civilization, intelligence, technology and, indeed, philosophy.”

Nathalie Cabrol (1963) French American astrobiologist

Source: How Mars might hold the secret to the origin of life https://www.ted.com/talks/nathalie_cabrol_how_mars_might_hold_the_secret_to_the_origin_of_life (March 2015)

Life , Intelligence , Time

“We must not lose. If we lose, this country could go extinct. Because the Indonesian elites are always disappointing, always failing to carry out the mandate given by the Indonesian people. If the same system is continued, Indonesia will become weak. Indonesia will become even poorer, even more helpless and could even go extinct.”

Prabowo Subianto (1951) Indonesian general and politician

Indonesia could go 'extinct' if I lose election: Prabowo https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/12/18/indonesia-could-go-extinct-if-i-lose-election-prabowo.html The Jakarta Post (December 18, 2018)

Disappointment , People , Country

“Folks, this is a time of testing. We face an attack on our democracy and on truth. A raging virus, growing inequity, the sting of systemic racism, a climate in crisis. America′s role in the world. Any one of these would be enough to challenge us in profound ways. But the fact is, we face them all at once. Presenting this nation with one of the gravest responsibilities we′ve had. Now we′re going to be tested.Are we going to step up, all of us? It′s time for boldness, for there is so much to do. And this is certain. I promise you, we will be judged, you and I, by how we resolve these cascading crises of our era. We will rise to the occasion, is the question. Will we master this rare and difficult hour?”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2021, January, Presidential Inaugural Address (2021)

Democracy , Time , Question , Truth

“Systems thinking is only an epistemology, a particular way of describing the world. It does not tell us what the world is. Hence, strictly speaking, we should never say of something in the world: “It is a system,” only: “It may be described as a system.””

John Mingers researcher

John Mingers (2006) Realising Systems Thinking: Knowledge and Action in Management Science. p. 87.

World , Thinking , Way

“If you think about things that happen, as being computations... a computation in the sense that it has definite rules... You follow them many steps and you get some result. ...If you look at all these different computations that can happen, whether... in the natural world... in our brains... in our mathematics, whatever else, the big question is how do these computations compare. ...Are there dumb ...and smart computations, or are they somehow all equivalent? ...[T]he thing that I ...was ...surprised to realize from ...experiments ...in the early 90s, and now we have tons more evidence for ...[is] this ...principle of computational equivalence, which basically says that when one of these computations ...doesn't seem like it's doing something obviously simple, then it has reached this ...equivalent layer of computational sophistication of everything. So what does that mean? ...You might say that ...I'm studying this tiny little program ...and my brain is surely much smarter ...I'm going to be able to systematically outrun [it] because I have a more sophisticated computation ...but ...the principle ...says ...that doesn't work. Our brains are doing computations that are exactly equivalent to the kinds of computations that are being done in all these other sorts of systems. ...It means that we can't systematically outrun these systems. These systems are computationally irreducible in the sense that there's no ...shortcut ...that jumps to the answer.”

Stephen Wolfram (1959) British-American computer scientist, mathematician, physicist, writer and businessman

Stephen Wolfram: Fundamental Theory of Physics, Life, and the Universe (Sep 15, 2020)

Study , Question , Nature , World

“[Nature] only keeps us alive by a complicated system of the most shameful illusions, falsifying beyond rectification life, death, and after-death. Having made us take part in this poor puzzling game of life, she has taken care that all the rules shall be unfavourable to us: the cards are marked, the dice are loaded, we are always swindled. Thus years of hard work; and self-denial are frequently lost by a slip or chance, but seldom or never saved by a chance. Our health may be ruined by a pin-prick, but never doubled by an accident. We fall seriously ill in a moment, and take weeks or months to recover; lose a limb by some sudden mishap, but never by a good hap regain it. We cannot reach even a low degree of wisdom or knowledge without long hard study, while to be ignorant and foolish is the easiest and most natural thing in the world for us. Our sorrows are real and enduring; our joys deceptive and transient; our prizes of victory are not to be compared with our forfeits of defeat.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

"The Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery", part II, p. 62
Essays and Phantasies (1881)

Chance , Study , Game , Victory

“‘The people’ have in fact done everything that is done; they built the houses and roads and railroads and telephones and planes, they organized world‐wide cooperative institutions—the oil companies, the banks—and the postal services, and the militia companies, and the schools—what didn’t ‘the people’ do? What happens is that, after they do it, The Government takes it. The Government takes the roads, the postal service, the systems of communication, the banks, the markets, the stock exchanges, the insurance companies, the schools, the militia, the building trades, the telegraph and telephones, the radios, after ‘the people’ have done all these things for themselves.”

Rose Wilder Lane (1886–1968) American journalist

Source: The Lady and The Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973), pp. 332-333 (letter July 13, 1963)

School , Housing , People , Communication

“Our country is suffering from the lack of food. We don't have rice for the military. Our country is in a state of anarchy because of the dysfunctional food rationing system. The administration department is responsible for this mess, as well as the Party officials. The Party's Central Committee members have failed their duty in generating a revolutionary spirit, diminishing the Party's effectiveness. We must solve the food problem according to socialist principles, and we must not rely on individuals. If we let the people solve the problem on their own, only merchants and markets will prosper. Then, selfishness will rule our society and destroy our system of true equality.”

Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea

Reported speech at Kim Il Sung University in December 1996, as quoted in Exit Emperor Kim Jong-il (2012) by John H. Cha and K. J. Sohn. Domestic collections of Kim's works do not confirm the speech or the wording, but an April 1996 speech to the Central Committee began with similar observations, and a "state of anarchy" arising from privatization in former socialist countries was a theme in earlier works.
1990s

Selfishness , Country , Food , Suffering

“The brain isn't the cause of experience for the same reason that lightning isn't the cause of atmospheric electric discharge, or that flames aren't the cause of combustion. Just as flames are but the image of the process of combustion, the body-brain system is but the image of localized experience in the stream of universal consciousness.”

Bernardo Kastrup Dutch computer scientist and philosopher

" Why the World Is Imagined: Summary https://www.bernardokastrup.com/2018/12/why-world-is-imagined-summary.html", Metaphysical Speculations, 1 Dec. 2018

Universe

“I knew it long ago: I’m a compulsive teacher, but I can’t teach. The godawful state of today’s education system isn’t what’s stopping me. I lack at least two of the essential qualifications.
I cannot “suffer fools gladly.””

Larry Niven book N-Space

The smartest of my pupils would get all my attention, and the rest would have to fend for themselves. And I can’t handle being interrupted.
Writing is the answer. Whatever I have to teach, my students will select themselves by buying the book. And nobody interrupts a printed page.
Foreword: Playgrounds for the Mind (pp. 26-27)
Short fiction, N-Space (1990)

Education , Suffering , Fools , Teachers

“Gerry had once said to her in the middle of an argument that he didn't believe in souls but if, just perchance, they did exist, hers would be like a razor. She had been made that way by the Catholic Church, he said. Inflexible, narrow, capable of doing terrible damage by her adherence to rules and systems. But she totally objected. She told him that if she was a good person at all, it had come from her religion. If she had any sense of justice and fairness, any concept of equality, then it had come from the Church.”

Bernard MacLaverty book Midwinter Break

Ch 11 - p.217
Novels, Midwinter Break (2017)

Soul , Religion , Justice , Personality

“You can never awaken using the same system that put you to sleep in the first place.”

George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

Sleep

“It is the responsibility of all to stand up against any systemic discrimination by the government in a democratic society; this is a principle which Ukrainians certainly understand intimately.”

Stephen Chmilar (1945)

Bishop urges Catholic groups to renege after they signed Trudeau’s pro-abortion pledge https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/bishop-urges-catholic-groups-to-renege-after-they-signed-trudeaus-pro-abort (May 3, 2018)

Understanding

“The Communists say that there are the only two means of establishing communism. The first is violence. Nothing short of it will suffice to break up the existing system. The other is dictatorship of the proletariat. Nothing short of it will suffice to continue the new system.”

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) Father of republic India, champion of human rights, father of India's Constitution, polymath, revolutionary…

On Communism, Thoughts of Dr. Baba Saheb Ambedkar https://books.google.com/books?id=6nolAQAAIAAJ, p. 107

Communication

“Even in physics, there is no infallible procedure for generating reliable knowledge. The calm order and perfection of well-established theories, accredited by innumerable items of evidence from a thousand different hands, eyes and brains, is not characteristic of the front-line of research, where controversy, conjecture, contradiction and confusion are rife. The physics of undergraduate text-books is 90% true; the contents of the primary research journals of physics is 90% false. The scientific system is as much involved in distilling the former out of the latter as it is in creating and transferring more and more bits of data and items of 'information'.”

John Ziman (1925–2005) New Zealand physicist

John Ziman in "Reliable Knowledge: an Exploration of the Grounds for Belief in Science" (1978)

Knowledge , Perfection , Falseness , Books

“It seems amazing that those who advocate energy conservation haven't noticed what happens: As soon as some energy is freed up by conservation, the technological world-system gobbles it up and demands more. No matter how much energy is provided, the system always expands rapidly until it is using all available energy, and then it demands still more.”

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

Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015), p. 56

World

“As technology progresses and globalization grows more pervasive, the world-system becomes ever more complex and more tightly coupled, so that a catastrophic breakdown has to be expected sooner or later.”

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

Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015), p. 49

World

“Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems.”

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

Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015), p. 47

Problem , Self-confidence , World , Nature

“In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences.”

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

Source: Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (2015), p. 44

Self-confidence , Nature

“A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed in favor of freedom is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the "bad" parts of technology and retain only the "good" parts.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

The ‘Bad’ Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated From the ‘Good’ Parts, paragraph 121
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

Bad luck , Freedom , Parting , Dependency

“The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.”

Theodore Kaczynski book Industrial Society and Its Future

"Restriction on Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society", paragraph 119
Industrial Society and Its Future (1995)

Behavior

“We will not shy away from engaging in the hard work to take on the damaging legacy of slavery and our treatment of Native Americans, or from doing the daily work of addressing systemic racism and violence against Black, Native, Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and other communities of color.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

21 March 2021 https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/21/statement-by-president-biden-on-the-international-day-for-the-elimination-of-racial-discrimination/
2021, March 2021

Color , Communication

“Simulation systems (mathematical models, philosophical thought experiments) that don’t have real world applications are like SPACs - shells with all the paperwork in place till something operational is ready to merge into them.”

Anand Gandhi (1980) Indian film director

World , Mathematics

“Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks. I knew my cousins were getting beaten for things that I'd done, but I wasn't interested in changing my grandmother's perspective, because that would mean I'd get beaten, too. Why would I do that? So that I'd feel better? Being beaten didn't make me feel better. I had a choice. I could champion racial justice in our home, or I could enjoy granny's cookies. I went with the cookies.”

Trevor Noah book Born a Crime

page 52/53
Born a Crime

Home , Justice , People , Learning

“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix - and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”

Trevor Noah book Born a Crime

page 21
Born a Crime

Personality

“There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily.”

Alan Turing Intelligent Machinery

"Intelligent Machinery." This passage was one of the epigraphs to Cryptonomicon, the influential novel by Neal Stephenson, in which Turing was a fictionalized character. It shared a page with a quote from Imelda Marcos.

Universe , Problem , Law

“Systemize your decision making.”

Ray Dalio (1949) American businessman

[Principles: Life and Work, https://books.google.com/books?id=6LGuDgAAQBAJ&pg=PR11, xv]
Principles: Life and Work (2017)

Making love , Decision

“In a nutshell, poor education, a poor culture (one that impedes people from operating effectively together), poor infrastructure, and too much debt cause bad economic results. The best results come when there is more rather than less of: a) equal opportunity in education and in work, b) good family or family-like upbringing through the high school years, c) civilized behavior within a system that most people believe is fair, and d) free and well-regulated markets for goods, services, labor, and capital that provide incentives, savings, and financing opportunities to most people.”

Ray Dalio (1949) American businessman

[Economic Principles – Why and How Capitalism Needs to be Reformed, April 5, 2019, lejourdapres.parlement-ouvert.fr, https://lejourdapres.parlement-ouvert.fr/uploads/decidim/attachment/file/308/Economic_Principles_-_Why_and_How_Capitalism_Needs_To_Be_Reformed.pdf] (quote from p. 5 of 42)

School , Family , Education , Bad luck

“It is now an established fact that there is a complete lack of fear of law in the minds of criminals and instead the laxity of the system emboldens them to commit gruesome crimes against women and girls in the country.”

Swati Maliwal (1984) women activist who fights for women rights

Zee News https://zeenews.india.com/delhi/dcw-chief-swati-maliwal-asks-delhi-lg-anil-baijal-to-fast-track-two-delhi-rape-cases-ensure-death-penalty-for-accused-2308623.html, accessed May 9, 2021

Law , Country , Girl , Fear

“It is now an established fact that there is a complete lack of fear of law in the minds of criminals and instead the laxity of the system emboldens them to commit gruesome crimes against women and girls in the country. The justice delivery mechanism in the country is painfully long and cumbersome which more often than not breaks the spirit of the girl or woman who has been raped,”

Swati Maliwal (1984) women activist who fights for women rights

Zee News https://zeenews.india.com/delhi/dcw-chief-swati-maliwal-asks-delhi-lg-anil-baijal-to-fast-track-two-delhi-rape-cases-ensure-death-penalty-for-accused-2308623.html, accessed May 9, 2021

Justice , Law , Country , Girl

“The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”

Elizabeth Cheney (1966) American lawyer

[Alex Rogers and Manu Raju, https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/03/politics/liz-cheney-criticism-trump-big-lie/index.html, Cheney calls out Trump's latest attempt to promote 'BIG LIE' amid criticism from within her own party, cnn.com, May 3, 2021, May 7, 2021]

Lie , Law

“The centre of all our efforts in caring for the sick must be the person himself or herself. Our attention must be directed to each person at this particular moment of their journey of life. In our modern world, and even within our health system, we face the danger of depersonalisation. Too easily, we can focus on procedures and techniques, on the task at hand and the hoped-for outcome. The challenge is to remain focused on the particular person before us, on their physical well-being and also on their emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. It is their particular fears and hopes, struggles and frailties that we are called to receive and to carry with them.”

Albert LeGatt (1953) Catholic bishop

World Day of the Sick https://www.archsaintboniface.ca/media/Archeveque-Archbishop/World-Day-of-the-Sick-2015_1.pdf (February 11, 2015)

Fear , World , Personality , Life

“Everybody needs to understand when you drink a glass of water you’re drinking the ocean. There’s only one water system. If you go up in the Alps or wherever on top of the mountains to go skiing, you’re skiing on the ocean. That water system is life for every plant, every animal, and we need to manage it like a business. We need to make sure it’s not polluted and we need to stop using the ocean ultimately as a universal sewer.”

Jean-Michel Cousteau (1938) French explorer and environmentalist; son of Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Exclusive: Jean-Michel Cousteau talks marine conservation & why education is key https://www.diveplanit.com/marine-environment/jean-michel-cousteau/ (April 14, 2019)

Drink , Understanding , Business , Mountain

“If we want to give back to future generations what we have taken for granted, we have to understand the planet as a natural resource bank account. In other words, we need to start investing in depleted capital and live off the interest instead. There are plenty of individuals from both countries who are conscious of these things and trying to do better. But, we need to do much better as a global society. All countries need to communicate the importance of this life support system and protect this web of life. We must be able to live with the planet and not on it.”

Fabien Cousteau (1967) French filmmaker and oceanographer

Deep Sea Rendez-Vous with Fabien Cousteau https://beautyandwellbeing.com/well-being/deep-sea-rendez-vous-with-celine-fabien-cousteau/ (September 30, 2020)

Understanding , Country , Communication , Support

“There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people. When they fail to do so, they should be replaced by something more responsive, more just, and more democratic. Marx said this, and so did Jefferson. It is a revolutionary doctrine, and very much an American one.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 17, p. 335

People

“We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

“We did not expect to have a backup system for the rest of the universe. We can rely upon it to be cold most of the time.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

“YMIR” (p. 354)
Seveneves (2015), Part Two

Time , Universe

“There was something fundamentally wrong with our economic system. It was based upon injustice and could not last.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons
Source: Speech to the Welsh National Liberal Federation in Rhyl (9 July 1926), quoted in The Times (10 July 1926), p. 16

“An observer studying the Solar system dispassionately, and finding himself capable of bringing the four giant planets to his notice, could reasonably say that the Solar system consisted of one star, four planets, and some traces of debris.”

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

"Worlds In Order" in The Secret of the Universe (1992), p. 63
General sources

Study , Star

“The systemic transformation of the current world is a strategic challenge for our people. We must be ready to accept them.”

Nursultan Nazarbayev (1940) first president of Kazakhstan

"Speech at the international scientific and practical conference "30 years of leadership" https://elbasy.kz/en/speeches/2019-06/speech-elbasy-na-nazarbayev-international-scientific-and-practical-conference-30 (2019)

People , World

“I want to make the country a favourable place to do business and an attractive place in which to invest by reforming the markets and systems in a fair and transparent manner based on international standards.”

Roh Moo-hyun (1946–2009) 9th President of the Republic of Korea

Excerpts from inaugural address (25 February 2003)

Country , Business

“Real and major changes in religious or political power systems do not occur until substantial numbers of people realize the old systems are destructive, genocidal and beyond repair.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

Revolution by Number

People , Change

Quotes about system page 53

Quotes about system
page 53