Quotes About System

What a perversion of the normal order of things! ... to make power the primary and central object of the social system, and Liberty but its satellite.

a book by David K. Reynolds, who had, in the early 1980s, come up with a system he called Constructive Living, a Western combination of two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.

When we confine animals for food, destroying their family and community connections, obliterating their connection with the earth and with their habitats, and thwarting their intelligent drives, we commit extreme violence against not only these creatures, but against the whole interconnected system of intelligence that supports them and that they serve.

While he was to become adept at business, Hamilton, the man who was to found America's financial system, as a schoolboy had to struggle with mathematics.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.

Every organizational system has its own natural "immune system" whose task it is to resist unfamiliar, and so unrecognizable, signals. That is not necessarily bad.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…. A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.

The whole system of social regulation by boards, commissioners, and inspectors consists in relieving negligent people of the consequences of their negligence and so leaving them to continue negligent without correction. That

Schmandt-Besserat contends that the first writing system—the familiar Sumerian cuneiform script—evolved in this way directly from the token system.13

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

The name philosopher, which meant originally 'lover of wisdom,' has come in some strange way to mean a man who thinks it is his business to explain everything in a certain number of large books. It will be found, I think, that in proportion to his colossal ignorance is the perfection and symmetry of the system which he sets up; because it is so much easier to put an empty room tidy than a full one.

The human element in any system is always prone to error. Why should the courts be any different? They are not. Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance....

Our blind trust in the system is the product of ignorance and magical thinking,

efficiently the system worked. A courthouse is a factory, sorting violence into a taxonomy of crimes, processing

Here is the dirty little secret: the error rate in criminal verdicts is much higher than anyone imagines.

They were chosen for their perfect ignorance of these things. That is how the system works. In the end, the lawyers and judges happily step aside and hand the entire process over to a dozen complete amateurs. It would be funny if it were not so perverse.

The towering lie of the criminal justice system—that we can reliably determine the truth, that we can know "beyond a reasonable doubt" who is guilty and who is not—is built on this whopper of an admission: after a thousand years or so of refining the process, judges and lawyers are no more able to say what is true than a dozen knuckleheads selected at random off the street.

This"—she pinched the skin of her own arm and pulled up a sample of her own flesh—"the human body is a machine. It is a system, a very complex system made of molecules and driven by chemical reactions and electrical impulses. Our minds are part of that system.

there are wounds worse than fatal, which the law's little binary distinctions—guilty/innocent, criminal/victim—cannot fathom, let alone fix. The law is a hammer, not a scalpel.

And that is the terrible myth of organized society, that everything that's done through the established system is legal -- and that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life, and an order to a system, and that a person that goes through this order and is convicted, has gotten all that is due him. And therefore society can turn its conscience off, and look to other things and other times.

The law's not about justice. It's a system we've put in place because we can't have justice.

There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

On the other hand, he did make a big step towards the practical creation of a Turing machine by proposing that the binary system should be used, once again based on the kind of punchcards