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Quotes About System

Democracy is a poor system of government at best; the only thing that can honestly be said in its favor is that it is about eight times as good as any other method the human race has ever tried.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it's eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents—a
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it's eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents—a low level, but what can you expect?
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it's eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents—a low level, but what can you expect? So
~ Robert A. Heinlein
We have had enough guesses; I'll state the obvious: Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. And that is the one practical difference. He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better than that of any other class of rulers in history.
~ Robert A. Heinlein
Entropy requires no maintenance.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
I ask only one thing of skeptics: don't bring up Soviet Russia, please. That horrible example of State Capitalism has nothing to do with what I, and other libertarian socialists, would offer as an alternative to the present system.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system. Negentropy or information is a measure of the liveliness of a system.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The Chinese, who seem to have had more experience with this system than anybody else (more than the Hindus, even) define non-local experience in negatives — not mind, not self, not doing, not existence, even not non-existence.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
We have made a beautiful (we hope beautiful) model of consciousness in terms of brain hardware and software. Now we need to remember again that, while the brain can be modeled by a computer, the model is never the whole system. The model-maker or metaprogrammer is bigger than the model or program.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
In logic, there is no escape from a Strange Loop. In pragmatic life, there is an easy escape — reject one part of the system. Sombunall can be very helpful there. A disturbed patient is beginning to recover, for instance, when the last Strange Loop is modified to: A. I must obey sombunall of my parents' Game Rules. B. I must obey sombunall of society's Game Rules.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
More subtle and alarming issues arise when we consider the structure of a system of metaphors interlinked into a code or language.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The essence of authority, as he saw, was Law—that is, fiat—that is, effective communication running one way only. The essence of a libertarian system, as he also saw, was Contract—that is, mutual agreement—that is, effective communication running both ways. (Redundance of control is the technical cybernetic phrase.)
~ Robert Anton Wilson
The major operative principle seems to be that the human computer operates in such a way as to make signals out of noise and thus to create information out of random energies where there was no signal . . . The information "created" from the noise can be shown by careful analysis to have been in the storage system of the computer . . .
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Dr. Jack Sarfatti offers a different interpretation. The medium of the Bell interconnectedness, he says, is not consciousness but information. Now, information is very abstract in communication theory: it is the negative reciprocal of entropy, which means roughly that it is the opposite of disorder. It is almost what we call system or organization in daily speech. Information, Sarfatti proposes, is not bound by the same laws as energy and not subject to Einsteinian limits.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
There is no government, no industrial-military complex, no economic system, no mass media that can ever reduce us to puppets and robots as thoroughly as the biological and environmental dictatorships have. — F.M. Esfandiary, Upwingers
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Beta wave activity in the brain correlates with outer-directed activity and dominance of sympathetic nervous system functions. Alpha wave activity, and lower brain frequencies, correlate with inner-directed passivity and dominance of parasympathetic nervous system functions.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
I believe that's only because it's an unconventional idea. It breaks down our whole conditioned system. The first thing you learn in a logic class is the syllogism, "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal." And to knock that one over really disturbs people and I find it fascinating that they are disturbed because I don't think they really want to die; they just don't want to think a new thought.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Or maybe the universe has wobbles and weirdness indeed. Maybe belief in any system is maintained by forgetting all data that does not fit the system?
~ Robert Anton Wilson
To review: Each individual has a neurological system, or game, different from other members of the same society. In accord with Einstein's physical relativism, and anthropology's cultural relativism, we call this neurological relativism.
~ Robert Anton Wilson
Emotion is far more verb than noun, being not some entity or thing we can get out of our system but a vital process always in some degree of flux.
~ Robert Augustus Masters
She said, "Oh, Studly." I could see her smile. "The law is not about justice. You know that.
~ Robert Crais
Chee was clearly mystified and impressed at the vagaries of the federal system.
~ Robert Crais
Something about the desk bothered me. I sat and touched the keyboard. The monitors didn't respond. They powered up when I turned them on, but the screens showed only a bright blue field. I looked under and around her desk. I found all the necessary system components except for the brain that tied them together. Amy's computer was missing. I said, "Hmm." Detectives said things like this when they were suspicious. I
~ Robert Crais