Systems Quotes

If I follow a particular method of knowing myself, then I shall have the result which that system necessitates; but the result will obviously not be the understanding of myself.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Foulmouthed individuals seem to have their neuron systems replaced by colon structures, given that their terminology profusely consists of "sh*t and f*ck". ("Tolerance zero")

Erik Pevernagie

Hierarchical organization in biological systems thus is characterized by an exquisite array of delicately and intricately interlocked order, steadily increasing in level and complexity and thereby giving rise neogenetically to emergent properties.

Clifford Grobstein

Very few of the common people realize that the political and legal systems have been corrupted by decades of corporate lobbying.

Steven Magee

Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

Grace Murray Hopper

Diversity, not uniformity, is what works.

Daniel Quinn

It’s all a risk. Always. That’s not true, actually. The only exception: it’s a certainty that there’s risk. The safer you play your plans for the future, the riskier it actually is. That’s because the world is certainly, definitely, and more than possibly changing.

Seth Godin

It's fun to invent systems and meanings and then poke holes in them.

Marty Rubin

We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

Donella H. Meadows

Most USA citizens never realize that the systems of public protection are essentially useless until they try to use them. At that point they learn the hard way that government agencies like OSHA, FCC, FDA, police internal affairs, disability, and the like do not work for them.

Steven Magee

Social networks are so full of wasted time - they could be compared to a waste disposal system. Flush, before you go and waste no time to go.

Will Advise

Soon it would be his turn. Kaine wondered how he would meet Death. His ship was a mess, in every sense of the word. Systems were in disarray, damaged equipment malfunctioning, and control panels shattered by blaster-fire littered the decks. In the fighting, severe hull damage had caused parts of the ship to be sealed off. Dead bodies – or raw red chunks of them – lay everywhere. The corridors were dark where the lights had failed. His footsteps echoed eerily as he ran down them. He’d been on the run for what felt like days. He felt naked, his tattered, sweat-drenched tunic clinging to his body, especially under his breastplate. Fatigue had caused him to discard his body amour. It was of no realistic use anyway, and just made him hotter and sweatier, made stealthy movement more difficult – and weighed him down.

Christina Engela

Instead of using drugs to create system friendly humans, perhaps we should be creating human friendly systems that do not require people to take drugs to function.

Merlyn Gabriel Miller

You see the mistakes of one system—the surveillance—and the mistakes of the other—the inequality—but there’s nothing you could have done in the one and nothing you can do now about the other. She laughs wryly. “And the clearer you see that, the worse you feel.

Anna Funder

One American in seven has no coverage, and one in three younger than sixty-five will lose coverage at some point in the next two years. These are people who aren't poor or old enough to qualify for government programs but whose jobs aren't good enough to provide benefits either.

Atul Gawande

When I worked at the W. M. Keck Observatory on the 13,796 feet very high altitude summit of Mauna Kea, we would routinely be engulfed in cold clouds of helium and nitrogen gas as we discharged it into the video camera systems daily. The management team never warned us that we were in a hazardous oxygen deprived environment during this activity that was known for its ability to adversely affect physical and mental health, and possibly bring on death by asphyxiation.

Steven Magee

Collision avoidance systems are the next big radio frequency (RF) toxin to hit the USA general population as they become standard safety equipment in most new cars.

Steven Magee

When value systems are embraced by a nation, when the citizens of a country are truly rich in virtues, then material wealth is a matter of time.

Sunday Adelaja

I have no faith in the USA corporate government systems of protection of public health and safety.

Steven Magee

Theory is relevant to you because it shows you a new, simpler, and more elegant side of computers, which we normally consider to be complicated machines. The best computer designs and applications are conceived with elegance in mind. A theoretical course can heighten your aesthetic sense and help you build more beautiful systems.

Michael Sipser

For a nation to be truly great, she must first identify her national values, enumerate her virtues and formulate her value system. But the most tasking of all these is to develop a culture in her people, that will best represent the proclaimed value systems of the nation.

Sunday Adelaja

As you may follow, they are an extremely hostile species (i.e. there is no word for ‘welcome’ in the Ruminarii language.) In four short centuries they had managed to lay waste to almost a thousand star systems, enslaving their populations and stripping them of all they wanted.

Christina Engela

It would take me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough.

Helen Prejean

Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change

Frank Herbert

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Hierarchy and discipline gave shape to the world;that was what he had always believed.Life was made easy by adherence toa rigid structure.But maybe that only really worked when you were at the top of the ladder,when you were doing well.The further down the rungs you went,the more of a victim of circumstances you became and the less it mattered whether or not you were in control.

James Lovegrove

System fails when people with ability don't have authority and people with authority don't have ability.

Amit Kalantri

I learned a lot about systems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once talking about gender and a man said to me, "Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a human being?" This type of question is a way of silencing a person's specific experiences. Of course I am a human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This same man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably have responded, "Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?")

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The top easily preventable health problems that I see in western societies are: 1. Eating chemically grown food. 2. Exposure to electronically generated harmonic energy from wind and solar power systems. 3. Exposure to harmonic energy from switched mode power supplies (SMPS) that come with modern electronic products. 4. Exposure to wireless radio frequency radiation (RF). 5. Light deficiency from an indoor lifestyle and Low-E double glazed windows. 6. Sound deficiency from heavily insulated homes that are devoid of natural sounds and are extremely quiet. 7. Pollen deficiency from living in man-made cities that are devoid of natural levels of pollen. 8. Natural radiation deficiency from living in homes that block natural levels of environmental radiation. 9. Open drain sickness that occurs when drain traps dry out and faulty vent valves that allow sewer gas to fill the home. 10. Drinking the wrong type of water.

Steven Magee

The era of biologically toxic wireless radio frequency (RF) radiation and harmonic electronic power generation from wind and solar systems with their adverse brain modifying effects that can bring on irritable and aggressive behaviors has made it a bad time to be a police officer.

Steven Magee

Regarding solar power systems, the bigger the system is, the more likely it may go on fire.

Steven Magee

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not.

Nick Harkaway

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else.

Nick Harkaway

As some people turned to religion for comfort, so, Highsmith wrote in her notebook in September 1970, she took refuge in her belief that she was making progress as a writer. But she realised that both systems of survival were, however, fundamentally illusory. She wrote, she said, quoting Oscar Wilde because, 'Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality'.

Andrew Wilson

As humanity progresses its technology on a global level, the observed degradation of natural processes and growth cycles are the alarm systems that nature uses to alert us that some of this progress is biologically toxic.

Steven Magee

The claim "oh, that's ancient history" is almost always a wish, am anxious attempt to put a boundary of time around some event that really is not over at all; it is a bid to silence the past.

Robert A. Orsi

Customer service has everything to do with consistency, systems, training, and the habits you and your team create.

Amber Hurdle

It is always easier to destroy a complex system than to selectively alter it.

Roby James

Nothing can be changed in the system when the system itself is revolting against those who opposed violence.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

A society is driven by “social fear” always produces the seeds of doubt and unhappiness.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The most fundamental problem is not that we don’t have a system to run but those with knowledge are cynically manipulating the system for petty personal desires.

Nilantha Ilangamuwa

The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behavior reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.

Marcus J. Borg

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

Erica Jong

Systems and processes will always surpass motivation.

Chris Matakas

Regarding beliefs and belief systems: We argue what and how we feel, rather than what we - actually - know or assume to be facts or factual evidence. Thus, it is justifiably prudent to challenge that which has been adopted or enforced by tradition. If such examination is discouraged by fearful tactics - we must not shy away from soulful searching.

T.F. Hodge

The essential fact which emerges ... is that the three smallest and most active reservoirs ( of carbon in the global carbon cycle), the atmosphere, the plants and the soil, are all of roughly the same size. This means that large human disturbance of any one of these reservoirs will have large effects on all three. We cannot hope either to understand or to manage the carbon in the atmosphere unless we understand and manage the trees and the soil too.

Freeman Dyson

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all.

Stuart A. Kauffman

The tendency has always been strong to believe that whatever received a name must be an entity or being, having an independent existence of its own. And if no real entity answering to the name could be found, men did not for that reason suppose that none existed, but imagined that it was something peculiarly abstruse and mysterious.

John Stuart Mill

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole.

Murray Gell-Mann

Big whirls have little whirls,That feed on their velocity;And little whirls have lesser whirls,And so on to viscosity.

Lewis Fry Richardson

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free

Stuart A. Kauffman

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.

Albert Einstein

Freeman Dyson

Stuart A. Kauffman

John Stuart Mill

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.

Arthur Stanley Eddington

Murray Gell-Mann

Big whirls have little whirls,That feed on their velocity;And little whirls have lesser whirls,And so on to viscosity.

Lewis Fry Richardson

Stuart A. Kauffman

Systems Quotes

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