Quotes About Systems

Well, we're grasping for two things at once. Partly for communion with others that's the deepest instinct in us. And partly, we're seeking security. By constant communion with others we hope we shall be able to accept the horrible fact of our total solitude. We're always reaching out for new projects, new structure, new systems in order to abolish partly or wholly our insight into our loneliness. If it weren't so, religious systems would never arise.

In healthy systems, dialogue is encouraged to inform the best possible decision.

The challenge we face is not (only) to reduce or stabilize concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, but to live in productive relationship with the dynamic systems that govern a changing planet. This is a new challenge because humanity is young and now constitutes an important planetary force in a way that is unprecedented. Anthropogenic climate change is the harbinger of a new world in which humans have become a dominant force on Earth's natural systems.

You know, this idea of going around the world imposing democracy by growing a middle-class, a trading merchant class that is independent of your faith, is a good notion, but we're all partially different - it's no good imposing systems on people that it doesn't suit.

I can say pretty assuredly that most churches don't set out to control or hurt people. And most don't. But it does happen. Over time, churches can change and begin to place a higher value on their systems and programs than on the people they are called to serve.

Building purpose in a creative group is not about generating a brilliant moment of breakthrough but rather about building systems that can churn through lots of ideas in order to help unearth the right choices. This is why Catmull has learned to focus less on the ideas than on people—specifically, on providing teams with tools and support to locate paths, make hard choices, and navigate the arduous process together.

All great entrepreneurs are Systems Thinkers. All who wish to become great entrepreneurs need to learn how to become a Systems Thinker…to develop their innate passion for seeing things whole.

What are the determinants in how we age? The different systems in our brains age at different rates. Some systems decline as others actually increase in efficiency and effectiveness. The basic message

We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.

While many hackers have the knowledge, skills, and tools to attack computer systems, they generally lack the motivation to cause violence or severe economic or social harm.

A key initiative that was launched was Project Triggerlock, which targeted for federal prosecution violent felons who illegally possessed guns. It used our very strong federal gun laws to put those people away for a long period of time, a resolution that we couldn't get from many of the state systems.

Videogames are indeed design: They're sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

contact—emotional networks integrate with sensory and motor systems to connect social and emotional meaning with behaviors.

The drug smuggling today had, as its godparents, the bootleggers nearly a hundred years ago. The syndicates, the systems, the psyches were created back then.

I shall maintain that critique only becomes meaningful with respect to the order that it puts in crisis, but also, reciprocally, that the systems which ensure something like the preservation of an order only become fully meaningful when one realizes that they are based on the constant threat, albeit unequally depending on epochs and societies, represented by the possibility of critique.

Alas, this industrialized twelve-tone horse, dull on the outside and empty inside, constantly being perfected and dragged to a new Troy in shadow of an ideological war long since fought and won by responsible minds like Schoenberg, with neither systems nor scholarship for armor!

We have no alternative. We must break the sacred rule and question these rules because unless we talk about them, there is no way out. We must evaluate them in the light of our newfound knowledge of families as systems.

It would take me a long time to understand how systems inflict pain and hardship in people's lives and to learn that being kind in an unjust system is not enough.

Traditional agriculture was labour intensive, industrial agriculture is energy intensive, and permaculture-designed systems are information and design intensive.

The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties.

Flow systems have two basic features (properties). There is the current that is flowing (for example, fluid, heat, mass, or information) and the design through which it flows.

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

Design is a form of competitive advantage. People tend to think of design as good art, good visual language, which it absolutely has to be. But it's also about the ability to do systems thinking.