Quotes About System

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the tax authorities, the education system or any other complex bureaucracy knows that the truth hardly matters. What's written on your form is far more important.

If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.

In order to function, the people who operate such a system of drawers must be reprogrammed to stop thinking as humans and to start thinking as clerks and accountants.

Religion can thus be defined as a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws.

Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.

El dinero es el más universal y más eficiente sistema de confianza mutua que jamás se haya inventado.

Despite their having no real bodies, the American legal system treats corporations as legal person, as if they were flesh-and-blood human beings.

This is no kindergarten fairy tale, but an extremely powerful myth that continues to shape the lives of billions of humans and animals in the early twenty-first century. The belief that humans have eternal souls whereas animals are just evanescent bodies is a central pillar of our legal, political and economic system. It explains why, for example, it is perfectly okay for humans to kill animals for food, or even just for the fun of it.

The system may prefer downgraded humans not because they would possess any superhuman knacks, but because they would lack some really disturbing human qualities that hamper the system and slow it down.

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the others.

If cooperation is the key, how come the ants and bees did not beat us to the nuclear bomb even though they learned to cooperate en masse millions of years before us? Because their cooperation lacks flexibility. Bees cooperate in very sophisticated ways, but they cannot reinvent their social system overnight. If a hive faces a new threat or a new opportunity, the bees cannot, for example, guillotine the queen and establish a republic.

Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self, and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. For centuries this made good sense, because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of the narrating self.

If, as is being demonstrated today so clearly, the patriarchal system has been based on unfounded myths rather than on biological facts, what accounts for the universality and stability of this system?

commandment is to link everything to the system, including heretics who don't want to be plugged

At the end of the day, humankind won't abandon the liberal story, because it doesn't have any alternative. People may give the system an angry kick in the stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back.

the details of every legal proceeding

The rich are taught to disregard the poor, while the poor are taught to disregard their true interests. No amount of self-reflection or psychotherapy will help, because the psychotherapists are also working for the capitalist system.

Less fortunate members of the old animist system lost their stature and became either extras or silent decor in the great drama of man's relationship with the gods

I understand Tea Partyers' anger with the system, but they are in way over their heads and often racially motivated, and I can't be part of that.

Whether you are on the Right or the Left, everyone can agree that there are a lot of outside influences in American politics that are not good for the system. There's just too much money.

and even in our decimal system we count from one to twelve, and only after twelve do we return to "ten and three" (thirteen), "ten and four," and so on...

The undercommons "cannot be satisfied with the recognition and acknowledgement generated by the very system that denies a) that anything was ever broken and b) that we deserved to be the broken part.

The challenges of a universal politics are double: first, to block the system's revival, the return to its exploitive and naturalizing machinery; second, to gesture to a life after the system, a life that is more just and egalitarian, but not without lack or alienation (a difficult pill for the Left to swallow—given its dream or fantasies of direct democracy, unalienated labor, and harmonious coexistence).