Quotes About System

The point is, our health-care system is a terrible mess. It's expensive, wasteful, inefficient, unresponsive, and infested with lawyers. Which is why there has been a big push, in some quarters, to place it under the management of... The federal government. This is like saying that if your local police department has a corruption problem, the solution is to turn law enforcement over to the Sopranos.

Now I know what you're saying. You're saying: 'Dave, you have painted a distorted and inaccurate picture of the American health-care system. Not all patients wind up being as wretched as Mary! Many of them wind up being dead'.

But a single contained God implied or insisted upon a hierarchy that she didn't accept. God gave way to a system of extremes, and implied choices, and choices required separations, divisions, subtle condemnations.

It's fine to decide not to decide about something. You just need a decide-not-to-decide system to get it off your mind

Ask yourself, "When do I need to see what, in what form, to get it off my mind?" You build a system for function, not just to have a system.

It's OK to decide not to decide—as long as you have a decide-not-to-decide system.

Having an organizational tool that allows you to easily make lists such as these, ad hoc, is quite worthwhile.

Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection tool, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through. Second

The reason most organizing systems haven't worked for most people is that they haven't yet transformed all the stuff they're trying to organize. As long as it's still stuff, it's not controllable.

It now costs about thirteen million dollars per prisoner.

The people who benefit from the existing system won't willingly downsize government even if all the customers desert it.

violence doesn't stop merely by saying, 'we'll act based on love', because that can become just an idea that gets absorbed into the system.

The British signal system was archaic. In battle, British ships hoisted enormous 'battle ensigns' to prevent them from being mistaken for the other side, but the signal flags remained as small as ever, and easy to misinterpret in the heat of battle.

How can we set up a system which encourages individuals to strive and excel, and yet which shows some compassion to the weak, and weeds out madmen and tyrants?

I've put some thought to it. How can we set up a system which encourages individuals to strive and excel, and yet which shows some compassion to the weak, and weeds out madmen and tyrants?

I felt astonishment this system's folk put up with such a monarch. The attractions of kingship are well documented, but sentimental indulgence can become an illness if it isn't looked to.

We need feedback from outside ourselves. Life consists of interacting pieces, free to jiggle and rearrange themselves. That's how you make a working system, like an organism, or a culture, or a biosphere.

Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?

it's plausibly a case of any kind of system that's been under enormous silent pressure for some time, that when the system finally blows the accreted pressure's such that it's almost always a full-scale eruption.

It was the Greeks who turned math into an abstract system, a special symbolic language that allows people not just to describe the concrete world but to account for its deepest patterns and laws.

We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.

In order to destroy this system which we so much detest we are creating conditions over here which run contrary to our dearest p-principles.

The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring Russia, then prostrate, by one means or another, into the general democratic system lies heavy upon us today.

The jury system has come to stand for all we mean by English justice, because so long as a case has to be scrutinised by twelve honest men, defendant and plaintiff alike have a safeguard from arbitrary perversion of the law.