Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals. Kenneth E. Boulding More Quotes by Kenneth E. Boulding More Quotes From Kenneth E. Boulding The world moves into the future as a result of decisions, not as a result of plans. Plans are significant only insofar as they affect decisions. Kenneth E. Boulding decision world moving A somewhat casual observer from outer space might well deduce that the course of evolution in this planet had produced a species of large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains; peculiar animals which rested when they sent their brains away from them but performed in rather predictable manner when their brains were recalled. Kenneth E. Boulding space brain animal If we saw tomorrow's newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen. Kenneth E. Boulding saws tomorrow today Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed. Kenneth E. Boulding growing-up taste culture Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself. Kenneth E. Boulding ends should mean The love of God again makes us free, for it draws us to set a low value on those things wherein we are subject to others - our wealth, our position, our reputation, and our life - and to set a high value on those things which no man can take from us - our integrity, our righteousness, our love for all men, and our communion with God. Kenneth E. Boulding our-love integrity men We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information. Kenneth E. Boulding structure information mistake The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism. Kenneth E. Boulding demand sacrifice humans In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting. Kenneth E. Boulding artistic novelty art Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought. Kenneth E. Boulding medieval escaping economics Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity. Kenneth E. Boulding canada unity religious Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists-worse still, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand. Kenneth E. Boulding nuclear understanding science The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other. Kenneth E. Boulding organization energy people The human experience can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all decisions are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior. The character and quality of the images of the future which prevail in a society is therefore the most important clue to its overall dynamics. Kenneth E. Boulding keys character past At the opposite pole from the gift is tribute - that is, a grant made out of fear and under threat. A threat is a statement of the form "you do something that I want or I will do something that you do not want. Kenneth E. Boulding form opposites want A second possible approach to general systems theory is through the arrangement of theoretical systems and constructs in a hierarchy of complexity, roughly corresponding to the complexity of the "individuals" of the various empirical fields... leading towards a "system of systems." [...] I suggest below a possible arrangement of "levels" of theoretical discourse...(vi) [...] the "animal" level, characterized by increased mobility, teleological behavior and self-awareness... Kenneth E. Boulding mobility self animal The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties. Kenneth E. Boulding function productions use We make our tools, and then they shape us. Kenneth E. Boulding shapes tools Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic. Kenneth E. Boulding illusion certainty enough Perhaps the most difficult ethical problem of the scientific community arises not so much from conflict with other subcultures as from its own success. Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure. Kenneth E. Boulding conflict community problem
