Bifurcation Quotes

• When systems come to be far from points of equilibrium, they reach bifurcation points, wherein multiple, as opposed to unique, solutions, to instability become possible.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Unique, Equilibrium, Multiple

  12 Copy quote

• One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.

  William Irwin Thompson

  Use, Development, Branches

  William Irwin Thompson (2015). “Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Cutlture, Second Enlarged Edition”, p.95, Andrews UK Limited

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Country, Fall, Oil

  8 Copy quote

• In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for “the snap”, that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history.

  Ralph Abraham

  Thinking, Self, Views

  12 Copy quote

• I think it's worrisome that Barack Obama actually contributed to the bifurcation of our society. I don't think that he made nearly enough effort to be a uniter. And there's, I think, been a backlash against him, and some of that has been reflected in Trump's success. And I think it's really sad, and that's part of Obama's legacy.

  Mona Charen

  Thinking, Effort, Legacy

  "Barbershop: Trump's Tweets, Press Conference And Obama's Farewell". "All Things Considered" with Michel Martin, www.npr.org. January 14, 2017.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a residual sense for me, having grown up in the early '70s, that I did not know I had, which was a sense that the military are different than I. Because there was such a divide between the military world - and there still is, because there's no draft - and the civilian world is one of the rotten harvests of the Vietnam War, was this sort of bifurcation of America in that way.

  Stephen Colbert

  Military, War, America

  Source: www.wbur.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A bifurcation of loyalties that requires religious to put canon law above civil law and moral law puts us in a situation where the keepers of religion may themselves become one of the greatest dangers to the credibility - and the morality - of the church itself.

  Joan D. Chittister

  Loyalty, Religious, Law

  35 Copy quote

• We seem to be in the midst of a process of cascading bifurcations that may last some 50 more years. We can be sure some new historical order will emerge. We cannot be sure what that order will be. Concretely, we may symbolize the first bifurcation as the effect of the world revolution of 1968 which continued up to and including the so-called collapse of the communisms in 1989, the social bifurcation.

  Immanuel Wallerstein

  Order, Years, Historical

  9 Copy quote