Social Systems Quotes - Page 5

• We are, first of all, not solitary creatures and second of all, we are deeply embedded in the lives of others. It's very easy to forget that and to engage in an atomistic fallacy - where we think that all we have to do is study the individual components of a system in order to understand the system. That's clearly not the case when it comes to social systems.

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Thinking, Order, Humanity

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• Contrary to widespread faith in "communication" and "knowledge transfer," information has a social life, and unless new insights are embedded in the social system they evaporate.

  Richard Pascale

  Communication, Learning, Knowledge

  Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin (2013). “The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems”, p.120, Harvard Business Press

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• I think IT projects are about supporting social systems - about communications between people and machines. They tend to fail due to cultural issues.

  Tim Berners-Lee

  Communication, Thinking, Issues

  Donald Knuth, Grady Booch, Linus Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Vint Cerf (2011). “Leaders in Computing: Changing the Digital World”, p.44, BCS, The Chartered Institute

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• What are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is full of inequality, discrimination and other things, which conflict with our fundamental rights.

  B. R. Ambedkar

  Rights, Order, Liberty

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• What we require is not a formal return to tradition and religion, but a rereading, a reinterpretation, of our history that can illuminate the present and pave the way to a better future. For example, if we delve more deeply into ancient Egyptian and African civilisations we will discover the humanistic elements that were prevalent in many areas of life. Women enjoyed a high status and rights, which they later lost when class patriarchal society became the prevalent social system.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  Class, Rights, Way

  Nawal El Saadawi (1997). “The Nawal El Saadawi Reader”, Zed Books

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• The agricultural co-operative movement has been a severe ideological and political struggle from the very beginning. No cooperative can be established without going through such a struggle. Before a brand-new social system can be built on the site of the old, the site must be swept clean. Invariably, remnants of old ideas reflecting the old system remain in people's minds for a long time, and they do not easily give way. After a co-operative is established, it must go through many more struggles before it can be consolidated. Even then, the moment it relaxes its efforts it may collapse.

  Mao Zedong

  Struggle, Ideas, Long

  Zedong Mao (1972). “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung”, p.33, China Books

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• If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state.

  John Ralston Saul

  Running, Democracy, Natural

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• Every individual has to assume responsibility for his or her own actions, even the poor and the young. A social system that decrees otherwise is inviting intellectual atrophy and spiritual stagnation.

  Tom Robbins

  Spiritual, Responsibility, Intellectual

  Tom Robbins (2005). “Villa Incognito”, p.163, Bantam

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• A good social system is not to be secured by making people unselfish, but, by making their own vital impulses fit in with other peoples. This is feasible. Those who have produced stoic philosophies have all had enough to eat and drink. I feel I shall find the truth on my deathbed and be surrounded by people too stupid to understand—fussing about medicines instead of searching for wisdom. I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.

  Bertrand Russell

  Hate, Philosophy, Stupid

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• Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

  Aldous Huxley

  Squares, Social, Holes

  Aldous Huxley (1950). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Brave new world”

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• Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them.

  Carl Sagan

  Years, Survival, Answers

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• A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Two, Doe

  Ludwig Von Mises (1963). “Human action: a treatise on economics”

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• To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?

  Derrick Jensen

  Dream, Civilization, People

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• Religion is defined as social systems whose participants avow a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.

  Daniel Dennett

  Religion, Agents, Approval

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• If the bringing of children into the world is today an economic burden, it is because the social system is inadequate; and not because God’s law is wrong. Therefore the State should remove the causes of that burden. The human must not be limited and controlled to fit the economic, but the economic must be expanded to fit the human.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Children, Law, Causes

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• Competition on the market aims at assigning to every individual that function in the social system in which he can render to all his fellow men the most valuable of the services he is able to perform.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Men, Competition, Fellow Man

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• In order to survive, all systems must evolve by providing greater and greater access to the currents that flow through them. This applies to all physical, biological and social systems that survive and thrive.... But let’s take that one step forward... the systems just described are ... constantly evolving. This suggests another design principle: ... design for evolution rather than creating a static design optimizing for the present.

  John Hagel

  Order, Creating, Design

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• As thou thyself art a component part of a social system, so let every act of thine be a component part of social life. Whatever act of thine that has no reference, either immediately or remotely, to a social end, this tears asunder thy life, and does not allow it to be one, and it is of the nature of a mutiny, just as when in a popular assembly a man acting by himself stands apart from the general agreement.

  Marcus Aurelius

  Art, Men, Tears

  馬可•奧里略 (Marcus Aurelius) (2014). “沉思錄:讀了一百年還要再讀一百年的不朽鉅著”, p.247, 德威國際文化

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• If you do not know your place in the world and the meaning of your life, you should know there is something to blame; and it is not the social system, or your intellect, but the way in which you have directed your intellect.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Meaning Of Life, World, Way

  Leo Tolstoy (2010). “A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Se”, p.133, Simon and Schuster

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• Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

  A. J. Muste

  Fashion, Real, Struggle

  "American Power and the New Mandarins". Book by Noam Chomsky, 1969.

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• To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

  Noam Chomsky

  People, Principles, Social

  Source: chomsky.info

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• Terrorism is carried out purposefully, in a cold-blooded, calculated fashion. The declared goals of the terrorist may change from place to place. He supposedly fights to remedy wrongs -- social, religious, national, racial. But for all these problems his only solution is the demolition of the whole structure of society. No partial solution, not even the total redressing of the grievance he complains of, will satisfy him -- until our social system is destroyed or delivered into his hands.

  Benjamin Netanyahu

  Fashion, Religious, Fighting

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• If history could prove and teach us anything, it would be the private ownership of the means of production as a necessary requisite of civilization and material well-being. All civilizations have up to now been based on private property. Only nations committed to the principle of private property have risen above penury and produced science, art, and literature. There is no experience to show that any other social system could provide mankind with any of the achievements of civilization.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Wisdom, Art, Mean

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• The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don't start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don't start with psychiatrists. If you don't like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them 'till last.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Intellectual, Growth, Way

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

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• An optimist is somebody who thinks our various political and social systems, schools and churches, support groups and Boy Scout troops, jury trials and congressional committees, are on the up-and-up. That they are intended for the benefit of the members. The reality is that they are designed to keep everyone in line.

  Jack McDevitt

  School, Boys, Reality

  "Odyssey". Book by Jack McDevitt, 2006.

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