Quotes About System

The absence of pandemic prevention was another example of a deficiency in the system.

The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European average—and it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.

What Milken was saying was that the entire American credit-rating system was flawed. It focused on the past when it should have focused on the future, and it was burdened by a phony sense of prudence.

A banking system is an act of faith: It survives only for as long as people believe it will.

I couldn't design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system," he said after his visit.

Josh instead found himself trying to save Americans from their public-health system.

Prime Health, they called the new system. The new logo was the iconic image of U.S. Marines raising a flag over Iwo Jima, and the new motto, below the logo, was: So exclusive you fought to get in.

Standing between the cure and the patient, in this case, was a U.S. medical-industrial complex that lurched between lethargy and avarice.

American society had no ability to deal with what she felt was coming. "The United States doesn't really have a public-health system," she said. "It has five thousand dots, and each one of those dots serves at the will of an elected official.

There was no system of public health in the United States, just a patchwork of state and local health officers, beholden to a greater or lesser degree to local elected officials. Three thousand five hundred separate entities that had been starved of resources for the past forty years.

A system was groping toward a solution, but the solution required someone in it to be brave, and the system didn't reward bravery. It was stuck in an infinite loop of first realizing that it was in need of courage and then remembering that courage didn't pay. Charity didn't think of it this way, but it was striking how often the system returned to her and very nearly sought her leadership, without ever formally acknowledging its need.

They had proven far less capable of grasping basic truths in the heart of the U.S. financial system than a one-eyed money manager with Asperger's syndrome.

the medical-industrial complex. It wasn't designed for a crisis; if it was designed for anything, it was to maximize the profits of companies that enjoyed monopoly power.

There is nothing sacred about the existing system. All economic and political institutions are contrivances that should serve the interests of the people.

Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By "rational" I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.

However, the process of legitimation through rectification is a two-edged sword. It must go far enough to demonstrate that the system is self-cleansing, but not so far as to destabilize the executive power.

In keeping with their system-sustaining function, the major news media present reality as a scatter of events and subjects that ostensibly bear little relation to each other or to a larger set of social relations.

One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens.

The soybean itself is a notably inauspicious staple food; it contains a whole assortment of antinutrients - compounds that actually block the body's absorption of vitamins and minerals, interfere with the hormonal system, and prevent the body from breaking down the proteins of the soy itself.

food system organized around quantity rather than quality has a destructive feedback loop built into it, such that the more low-quality food one eats, the more one wants to eats, in a futile—but highly profitable—quest for the absent nutrient.

Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat.

An alternative food system is rising up on the margins," Joel continued. "One day Frank Perdue and Don Tyson are going to wake up and find that their world has changed. It won't happen overnight, but it will happen, just as it did for those Catholic priests who came to church one Sunday morning only to find that, my goodness, there aren't as many people in the pews today. Where in the world has everybody gone?

A great many of the health and environmental problems created by our food system owe to our attempts to oversimplify nature's complexities, at both the growing and the eating ends of our food chain. At either end of any food chain you find a biological system- a patch of soil, a human body- and the health of one is connected- literally- to the health of the other.

Johnnie Cochran was such a heroic figure for getting the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, and the acquittal was such a historical event because it was the first time that I'd seen somebody who looked like me have the criminal justice system work in their favor rather than against.