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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
Much
Failing
Subculture
Like
Perhaps
Arises
Community
Fails
Success
Ethical
Learn
Arise
Difficult
Scientific
Problem
Conflict
Nothing
Failure
Subcultures

More quotes by Kenneth E. Boulding

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Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
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There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.
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
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With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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[The notion of equilibrium] is a notion which can be employed usefully in varying degrees of looseness. It is an absolutely indispensable part of the toolbag of the economist and one which he can often contribute usefully to other sciences which are occasionally apt to get lost in the trackless exfoliations of purely dynamic systems.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Where there is hypocrisy, there is hope.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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[The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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In calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy society is an example of the general concept of an ecosystem that is, an ecological system of which biological systems - forests, fields, swamps - are other examples.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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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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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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A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.
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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The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.
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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.
Kenneth E. Boulding