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The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.
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
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More quotes by Kenneth E. Boulding
[The question for the behavioral disciplines is simply] what is better, and how do we get there?
Kenneth E. Boulding
Communication can only take place among equals.
Kenneth E. Boulding
Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.
Kenneth E. Boulding
Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.
Kenneth E. Boulding
The concept of a value-free science is absurd.
Kenneth E. Boulding
The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.
Kenneth E. Boulding
The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution.
Kenneth E. Boulding
If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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
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
Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.
Kenneth E. Boulding
Political conflict rests to a very large extent on a universal ignorance of consequences, as the people who are benefited by any particular act or policy are rarely those who struggled for it, and the people who are injured are rarely those who opposed it.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
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
[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
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.
Kenneth E. Boulding
The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.
Kenneth E. Boulding
Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.
Kenneth E. Boulding
