Quotes about system (5397 quotes, page 6)

“Any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene

Selfishness

“Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly.”

Erica Jong book Fear of Flying

Source: Fear of Flying

“For me there is something primitively soothing about this music, and it went straight to my nervous system, making me feel ten feet tall.”

Eric Clapton (1945) English musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist

Music , Feeling

“I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.”

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

As quoted in ‪If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't There More Happy People? (2009) ‬by John Mitchinson, p. 87

People

“The worms were beautifully drawn, with their nervous systems and reproductive organs shaded in different colors of highlighter, but the artist had also given them big goofy smiling faces. Grotesque but lovable in a cross-eyed way.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

Smile , Color , Way

“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return …”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1970s, Homage to Daniel Shays : Collected Essays (1972), Matters of Fact and Fiction : Essays 1973 - 1976 (1978), p. 280

People , Question

“The metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

“Down there between our legs, it's like an entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system. Who designed that?”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier

“The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power.”

Eric Schlosser book Fast Food Nation

Source: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

History

“If only you could really use a fail-proof system to know who was worth keeping and who needed to be thrown away. It would make it so much easier to move through the world, picking and choosing what connections to make, or whether to make any at all.”

Sarah Dessen book What Happened to Goodbye

Source: What Happened to Goodbye

World

“You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 3
Context: You turn up your music to hide the noise. Other people turn up their music to hide yours. You turn up yours again. Everyone buys a bigger stereo system. This is the arms race of sound You don't win with a lot of treble. This isn't about quality. It's about volume. This isn't about music. This is about winning. You stomp the competition with the bass line. You rattle windows. You drop the melody line, and shout the lyrics. You put in foul language and come down hard on each cussword. You dominate. This is really about power.

People , Music

“Unlike a fountain that circulates the same water in an enclosed, perpetually recycling system, a human being circulates thoughts in an unlimited reservoir of self.

Don't limit yourself to being a mere fountain when you contain an ocean.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Water

“He took a step closer. "I don't know if I'll ever get you out of my system, not completely. I have this… feeling. That you'll always be there. Here." Conrad clawed at his heart and then dropped his hand.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: We'll Always Have Summer

Feeling , Heart

“Our natural tendency is to project onto other people our own belief and value systems, in ways in which we are not even aware.”

Robert Greene book Mastery

Source: Mastery

People , Way , Nature

“Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, ‘Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has had an idea, It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.”

Mark Batterson (1969) American pastor and writer

Source: Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge

Game , Idea , Personality

“To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper. To accept injustice”

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

1950s, Three Ways of Meeting Oppression (1958)
Context: To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper. To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right. It is a way of allowing his conscience to fall asleep. At this moment the oppressed fails to be his brother's keeper. So acquiescence-while often the easier way-is not the moral way. It is the way of the coward.

Religion , Evil

“An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

Source: Desert Solitaire

Falseness

“It may well be impossible for people who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay.”

Michel Houellebecq (1956) writer

Source: Submission

People , Feeling , Imagination

“One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems… wars, nations, destructions… to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: One

War , Parting , Dead

“Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."”

Sigmund Freud book The Future of an Illusion

Source: 1920s, The Future of an Illusion (1927)

Religion , Question , Reality

“Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.”

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe

Source: Eastern Standard Tribe

Past

“We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act … Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

" Notebook N http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_notebooks.html" (1838) page 36 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=25&itemID=CUL-DAR126.-&viewtype=text
quoted in [Darwin's Religious Odyssey, 2002, William E., Phipps, Trinity Press International, 9781563383847, 32, http://books.google.com/books?id=0TA81BTW3dIC&pg=PA32]
also quoted in On Evolution: The Development of the Theory of Natural Selection (1996) edited by Thomas F. Glick and David Kohn, page 81
Other letters, notebooks, journal articles, recollected statements
Source: Notebooks

Law , Universe , Sun

“Just when we think we have a system,… the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what's coming next, everything changes.”

Anthony Doerr (1973) American writer

Source: Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World

Way , Thinking , Change

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Fear , Imagination , Reality

“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.”

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

Feeling , Reality , Change , Past

“Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Democracy , Time

“Hello! Your dear father is unfortunately very dead," he called. "And you said my dispersal system would never work!”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Bite Club

Dead

“If you really feel hatred for someone, and kind of send it their way, then it’s out of your system and in their hands. I always think it’s therapeutic.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

Way , Feeling , Thinking

“She’d already decided to be with him. If only to wipe him from her mind, get him out of her system and
stop the fantasies plaguing her. If only to prove to herself that being with him would not be pleasurable for
her.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Pleasure

Pleasure

“Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.”

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

Men , Star , Reality , Future

“The brain weighs only three pounds, yet it is the most complex object in the solar system.”

Michio Kaku (1947) American theoretical physicist, futurist and author

Source: The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

“Listen -- strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”

Michael Palin (1943) British comedian, actor, writer and television presenter

Women , Lying

“How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Feeling , Beer

“Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire - in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

World , Star , Dead

“To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems.”

Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche

Source: Scaramouche

Change

“Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible

Source: The Poisonwood Bible

Marriage

“think about it: Romeo and Juliet bucked the system, and look where it got them. Superman has the hots for Lois Lane, when the better match, of course, would be with Wonder Woman.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Thinking

“Perfectionism is a self destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Pain , Feeling , Perfection

“Tradionally, parents made decisions for a child, because presumably they are looking out for his or her best interests. But if they are blinded, instead, by the best interests of another one of their children, the system breaks down.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Children , Parent , Decision

“Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

Personality

“When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don’t need ironing.”

Janet Evanovich Three to Get Deadly

Source: Three to Get Deadly

Clothes

“My bones are brittle, my heart weak and erratic, my esophagus and stomach riddled with ulcers, my reproductive system shot, my immune system useless… I'm not going to have a happy ending.”

Marya Hornbacher book Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Source: Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Heart , Happiness

“As one individual changes, the system changes.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Change

“Of course Evil's afoot. If it had switched to the metric system it'd be up to a meter by now.”

Jim Butcher (1971) American author

Evil

“The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Speech at the University of Las Villas (1959)
Source: Che Guevara Talks to Young People
Context: The walls of the educational system must come down. Education should not be a privilege, so the children of those who have money can study. Education should be the daily bread of the people of Cuba.

Money , Children , Education , Study

“Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Episode 1, Chapter 12
The Power of Myth (1988)
Context: This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? … If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4: 1944-1947

Faith , Religion

“Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

Source: 1960s-1970s, The Sciences of the Artificial, 1969, p. 53.

Behavior , Time

“So I learned another system: When in doubt, keep it out – out of earshot, out of the house – even if this meant, really, just keeping it in.”

Sarah Dessen book Just Listen

Source: Just Listen

Learning , Housing

“How do you make a girl know she's beautiful? What is the system for that, what do you show her, how do you give her a new set of eyes and turn her face back to the mirror?”

Michelle Tea (1971) American writer

Beauty , Girl

“It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: An Essay on the Restoration of Property

Education

“America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Source: Free the Airwaves! (2002)

Health

“Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.”

Don DeLillo book Cosmopolis

Source: Cosmopolis

Love , Sex

“We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever… and all the time it is carrying us about… It is the human nervous system itself.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

Source: Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

God , Secret , Time

“Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.”

Nick Hornby book A Long Way Down

Source: A Long Way Down

Way , Thinking

“Do things that make you happy within the confines of the legal system.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

Happiness

“… Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.”

Henry Jenkins (1958) American media scholar

Way

“yesterday someone sent a message that was signed GOD! bernard said.
really? dap said. i didn't know he was signed onto the system”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

God

“What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Source: The Power of Myth (book), p. 28
Context: Now, what is a myth? The dictionary definition of a myth would be stories about gods. So then you have to ask the next question: What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe - the powers if your own body and of nature.

Life , God , Motivation , Universe

“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) French sociologist, technology critic, and Christian anarchist

Death , Birth

“What was the self-sacrifice?"
I jettisoned half of a much-loved and I think irreplaceable pair of shoes."
Why was that self-sacrifice?"
Because they were mine!" said Ford, crossly.
I think we have different value systems."
Well mine's better.”

Douglas Adams book Mostly Harmless

Source: Mostly Harmless

Love , Shoe , Thinking

“There’s Socialism and Communism and Capitalism and there’s Feminism and Hedonism, and there’s Catholicism and Bipedalism and Consumerism, but I think Narcissism is the system that means the most to me.”

Tony Hoagland (1953–2018) American writer

Communication , Thinking

“I'm not really qualified to install a security system," said Dimitri.
"Really? There's something you can't do?" Adrian's voice was so soft that I could barely hear him, and he was sitting right next to me.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

Source: The Golden Lily

“If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

People , Travel , Star , Light

“The Great Depression in the United States, far from being a sign of the inherent instability of the private enterprise system, is a testament to how much harm can be done by mistakes on the part of a few men when they wield vast power over the monetary system of a country.”

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

Source: (1962), Ch. 3 The Control of Money, p. 50

Men , Parting , Country

“We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make -- and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

Ken Robinson (1950) UK writer

People , Education

“The brain controls pain. It controls fear. Sleep. Empathy. Hunger. Everything we associate with the heart or the soul or the nervous system is actually controlled by the brain. Everything. What if you could control it?”

Dennis Lehane book Shutter Island

Source: Shutter Island

Hunger , Pain , Fear , Soul

“As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide.”

Richard Matheson book What Dreams May Come

Source: What Dreams May Come

“Apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health… what have the Romans ever done for?

Brought peace!”

Graham Chapman (1941–1989) English comedian, writer and actor

Source: The Life Of Brian: Screenplay

Health , Education , Peace , Water

“To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds”

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

World , Fear , Sense , Change

“But that's the challenge -- to change the system more than it changes you.”

Michael Pollan book The Omnivore's Dilemma

Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Change , Motivational

“After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.”

Judith Lewis Herman (1942) American psychiatrist

Source: Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Ben wished the world was organized by the Dewey decimal system. That way you'd be able to find whatever you were looking for.”

Brian Selznick book Wonderstruck

Source: Wonderstruck

World , Way

“Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.”

Charles Stross The Atrocity Archives

Source: The Atrocity Archives

“With the breakdown of the Medieval system, the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendancy.”

John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces

Source: A Confederacy of Dunces (1980, posthumous), Ch. 2, opening line

God

“A belief system is nothing more than a thought you've thought over and over again.”

Wayne W. Dyer (1940–2015) American writer

“I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

People , Feeling

“The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons -- it was systemic and it was complete.”

Gary Shteyngart Super Sad True Love Story

Source: Super Sad True Love Story

Love , Training

“Supposed I don't want to redeem myself? Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

Pleasure , Fight

“It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

People , Way , Feeling

“hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Complete Poems, 1904-1962

Hate , World , Fear , Universe

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”

Jasper Fforde book First Among Sequels

Source: First Among Sequels

World , Light

“If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?”

Michael Connelly book The Concrete Blonde

Source: The Concrete Blonde

“We all live in our own world. But if you look up at the starry sky - you'll see that all the different worlds up there combine to form constellations, solar systems, galaxies.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Veronika Decides to Die

World

“Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?”

Sandra Day O'Connor (1930) Former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union, 545 U.S. 844 (2005) (concurring).
Context: Reasonable minds can disagree about how to apply the Religion Clauses in a given case. But the goal of the Clauses is clear: to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society. By enforcing the Clauses, we have kept religion a matter for the individual conscience, not for the prosecutor or bureaucrat. At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences of the assumption of religious authority by government, Americans may count themselves fortunate: Our regard for constitutional boundaries has protected us from similar travails, while allowing private religious exercise to flourish. [... ] Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: Why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?

Question

“Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Carl Sagan, author interview
PT Staff
Psychology Today
1996
January
01
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199601/carl-sagan?page=3

Nature , Science

“I pursue no objectives, no systems, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery. I steer clear of definitions. I don't know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 60, note 92

Time

“[The information available within a system constitutes what Boulding (1978) calls the noosphere. It is constituted by the collection of plans, of representations, of procedures, of ideas for the construction of objects or of instructions to realize certain interaction patterns, including] the totality of the cognitive content, including values, of all human nervous systems, plus the prostatic devices by which the system is extended and integrated in the form of libraries, computers, telephones, post offices, and so on.”

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

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 122, cited in: Jorge Reina Schement, Brent D. Ruben (1993) Information and Behavior - Volume 4. p. 517
Robert A. Solo (1994) " Kenneth Ewart Boulding: 1910-1993. An Appreciation http://www.jstor.org/stable/4226892" commented: "The image appears as crucial in Boulding's treatment of societal evolution. Here the record is in human artifacts, not only in material structures such as buildings and machines, telephones and radios, but also in organizations including the extended family, the tribe, the nation, and the corporation. All such artifacts originate in and are sustained by images in the human mind. Civilization and civilized man, in the language that he knows, the skills he acquires, the whole heritage of tradition and manners he has learned, are human artifacts."

Idea

“If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me … I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job … The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

Gary Webb (1955–2004) American investigative journalist

Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press.

People , Truth , Appearance

“While no politician or political system can ever afford to yield understandably and enthusiastically to their adversaries and opposers, all politicians can and will yield enthusiastically to the computers safe flight-controlling capabilities in bringing all of humanity in for a happy landing.”

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

1960s, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1963)

Understanding , Happiness

“The Chinese system must be classified as a syllabic system of writing. More specifically, it belongs to the subcategory that I have labeled meaning-plus-sound syllabic systems or morphosyllabic systems. I use the term morphosyllabic in two senses. The first applies to the Chinese characters taken as individual units. Individual characters are morphosyllabic in the sense that they represent at once a single syllable and a single morpheme (except for the 11 percent or so of meaningless characters that represent sound only). In this usage the term is intended to replace the more widely used expressions logographic, word-syllabic, and morphemic, all of which are applied to individual characters taken as a unit. The second sense of the term refers to the structure of Chinese characters and is intended to draw attention to the fact that, in most cases, a character is composed of two elements, a phonetic grapheme which suggests the syllabic pronunciation of the full character, and a semantic element which hints at its meaning.”

John DeFrancis (1911–2009) American linguist

Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989, pp. 115-116) http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/visible/index.html
Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems (1989)

Sense , Drawing

“Get the process of negotiation away from the small specialized group that some people have called the "nuclear theologians," who in effect said this is a complicated issue of seeing how little we can give away, how much we can extract from the other side; it's highly specialized. Only a few people can understand the nature of these weapons, the delivery systems, the targeting, the nature of the MIRV and the CRUISE, on down, and the MX. This kept the whole discussion to a very limited group of people who, in a way, had assumed responsibility for saying whether we should live or die.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism (1986)

People , Way , Understanding , Nature

“When you are in the position privileged access, like a system administrator, you are exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale then the average employee…”

Edward Snowden (1983) American whistleblower and former National Security Agency contractor

Praxis films, 2013
2013

“Decentralization may bring flexibility and fast response to changing business needs, as well as other benefits, but decentralization also makes systems integration difficult, presents a barrier to standardization, and acts as a disincentive toward achieving economies of scale. As a result, there is a need to balance the decentralization of IT management to business units with some centralized planning for technology, data, and human resources”

Gerardine DeSanctis (1954–2005) American organizational theorist

Gerardine DeSanctis, Brad M. Jackson, in: Coordination of information technology management: team-based structures and computer-based communication systems http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1189653, Journal of Management Information Systems - Special issue: Information technology and organization design Volume 10 Issue 4, March 1994, pp 85-110.

Business , Change