Quotes About Institutions

Chernobyl happened in April of 1986. A few months earlier, in January 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. It did not have the impact on the environment and the amount of lives that Chernobyl did, but it was the result of the same exact problem: a failure of a lot of people and institutions over a long period of time.

I remember Geauga Lake. I remember Six Flags. I remember going to the mall. I hung out there. These big, grand places that served as pinnacles of the community were not only institutions or places of commerce. They were communal spaces where a lot of people went and shared good memories. These are very nostalgic places.

The four most influential moderns: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and (the productive) Einstein were scholars but not academics. It has always been hard to do genuine - and no perishable - work within institutions

The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

In a few decades will we look upon the Nobel economics committee with the same smirk as when we look at the respected "scientific" establishments of the Middle Ages that promoted (against all observational evidence) the idea that the heart  was a center of heat? We have been getting things wrong in the past and we laugh at our past institutions; it is time to figure out that we should avoid enshrining the present ones.

awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.

later legitimized by some type of formalization. The knowledge we get by tinkering, via trial and error, experience, and the workings of time, in other words, contact with the earth, is vastly superior to that obtained through reasoning, something self-serving institutions have been very busy hiding from us.

That awareness of a problem does not mean much—particularly when you have special interests and self-serving institutions in play.

the notion of incentives as limited to financial gain cannot otherwise explain the very existence of an economics academia that promotes the idea of self-interest.

la conciencia de un problema no significa mucho, sobre todo cuando están en juego intereses personales o instituciones interesadas.

We are largely collaborative—except when institutions get in the way.

Four decades later, Samuel Eliot Morison, twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, closed his two-volume European Discovery of America with the succinct claim that Indians had created no lasting monuments or institutions.

Multiple causes for this turnaround have been suggested. But Goldstein, a leading scholar in this field, argues that the most important is the emergence of multinational institutions like the United Nations, which owe their origins to peace activists from the last century.

Once completely freed, the bankers very quickly ran their institutions off the cliff, taking much of the global economy with them. Not only did they create and sell a huge amount of junk, but they turned the financial system into a gigantic casino, one in which they played mainly with other people's money.

Chesnutt had spent most of his childhood in North Carolina and at the age of fourteen he had become a pupil-teacher at the Howard School, Fayetteville, one of many institutions founded for black students by the Freedmen's Bureau during the Reconstruction era.

The danger is not Islam or Christianity or any other religion. It is the human heart—the capacity we all have for evil. All human institutions with a lust for power give their utopian visions divine sanction

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit

Now the battle against communism has been reconfigured. The seat of Satan is no longer in the Kremlin. It has been assumed by individuals and institutions promoting a rival religion called "secular humanism.

We're charged by Congress with regulating financial institutions. We take that mission seriously. We are tough supervisors and regulators.

I don't think people understand the awesomeness of the destruction of this country - its institutions, its infrastructure, its law, its morals.

People are seeking more power in the individual and less in government and institutions; they want more cooperation and less competition.

All Moroccans are justifiably proud of the development of democratic institutions in Morocco.

It's not just that individuals have lost faith in the integrity of their leaders, it's that they no longer believe society's most powerful institutions are acting in their interests.

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.