Quotes About Systems

Just as you can't attribute the spin of a proton to any one of its constituents, you can't attribute an event in time to a single earlier cause. Complex systems have neither a useful notion of individuality nor a proper notion of causality.

You can often tell what style someone practices merely by looking at the type of knot someone has in the front of a hakama. Some iaido schools have elaborate systems for tying their hakama. My sensei uses a simple square knot: he's mostly concerned that the knot is properly placed and doesn't come undone. It's hard to be deadly while your pants are falling down.

My background is putting in large systems that change lives... The right kind of systems can bring honesty and efficiency.

We have to claim anarchy and realize that systems have a life of their own that is anti-humanist. There is definitely an anti-humanist tendency in all systems.

Sustainable development is a process which enables all people to realise their potential and to improve their quality of life in ways which protect and enhance the Earth's life support systems

WE CAN ALLOW SATELLITES, PLANETS, SUNS, UNIVERSE, NAY WHOLE SYSTEMS OF UNIVERSES, TO BE GOVERNED BY LAWS, BUT THE SMALLEST INSECT, WE WISH TO BE CREATED AT ONCE BY SPECIAL ACT. —Charles Darwin

THE GREATEST CHALLENGE today, not just in cell biology and ecology but in all of science, is the accurate and complete description of complex systems.

It is characteristic of all extension systems to be treated as distinct and separate from the user and to take on an identity of their own. Religions, philosophies, literature, and art illustrate this. After a time, the extended system accretes to itself a past and a history as well as a body of knowledge and skills that can be learned. Such systems can be studied and appreciated as entities in themselves.

Family systems theory offers therapists an invaluable way of understanding their clients' strengths and problems—clarifying the familial rules, roles, myths, communication patterns, and boundary issues that defined their clients' development.

The great lesson here for all imaginatively gridlocked systems is that the acceptance and even cherishing of uncertainty is critical to keeping the human mind from voyaging into the delusion of omniscience.

A constitution defines the mindset of the people and the trend of the state; it also designs the impact, for the discipline of its institutions since as a key to all systems, not the arrangement.

Never change such thoughts, which fragrance and please the hearts and minds of others, even though that break your beneficial objectives since such character qualifies and wins great humanity into inhuman systems.

The judiciary perpetuates a breath of state structure. If it fails to purify and justify itself; consequently, all of its systems evince a collapse; indeed, it embraces only the destruction.

I pay attention to every system of conventions and expectations, above all literary conventions and the expectations they generate in readers. But that law-abiding side of me, sooner or later, has to face my disobedient side. And, in the end, the latter always wins.

A good systems thinker, particularly in an organizational setting, is someone who can see four levels operating simultaneously: events, patterns of behavior, systems, and mental models.

Meaningful progress toward social justice cannot be made in sclerotic education systems that put adults' job security before children's civil rights.

It is impossible, in principle, to explain any pattern by invoking a single quantity.

I can't compare quarterbacks as apples and oranges in my mind because everybody's in a different system.

One word was floating around in stories about hackings of one sort or another: "cyber." The word had its roots in "cybernetics," a term dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, describing the closed loops of information systems. But in its present-day context of computer networks, the term stemmed from William Gibson's 1984 science-fiction novel, Neuromancer, a wild and eerily prescient tale of murder and mayhem in the virtual world of "cyberspace.

Morality is neither rational nor absolute nor natural. World has known many moral systems, each of which advances claims universality; all moral systems are therefore particular, serving a specific purpose for their propagators or creators, and enforcing a certain regime that disciplines human beings for social life by narrowing our perspectives and limiting our horizons.

From the systems point of view, it is evident that one of the main obstacles to organizational change is the — largely unconscious — embrace by business leaders of the mechanistic approach to management.

From the new systems point of view, knowledge is part of the process of life, of a dialogue between object and subject. Knowledge and life, then, are inseparable, and therefore, facts are inseparable from values.

all living systems are complex - i.e., highly nonlinear - networks …

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.