Quote

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

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Kenneth E. Boulding
Age: 83 †
Born: 1910
Born: January 18
Died: 1993
Died: March 18
Author
Economist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
City of Liverpool
Kenneth Ewart Boulding
Difficult
Scientific
Problem
Conflict
Nothing
Failure
Subcultures
Much
Failing
Subculture
Like
Perhaps
Arises
Community
Fails
Success
Ethical
Learn
Arise

More quotes by Kenneth E. Boulding

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All knowledge is gained through an orderly loss of information.
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The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.
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Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.
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The economy of the future might be called the spaceman economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.
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Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man? ... Does man have any responsibility for the preservation of a decent balance in nature, for the preservation of rare species, or even for the indefinite continuance of his race?
Kenneth E. Boulding
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... the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.
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Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.
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The concept of a value-free science is absurd.
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[The question for the behavioral disciplines is simply] what is better, and how do we get there?
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The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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
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The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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There is a quiet, open place in the depths of the mind, to which we can go many times in the day and lift up our soul in praise, thankfulness and conscious unity. With practise this God-ward turn of the mind becomes an almost constant direction, underlying all our other activities.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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
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Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Economists and technologists bring the bits, but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the wits.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments
Kenneth E. Boulding