Top 27 Donella H. Meadows Quotes
#1. Here we meet a very important feature. It would seem as if this were circular reasoning; profits fell because investment fell, and investment fell because profits fell. - Jan Tinbergen,5 Jan Tinbergen,
Donella H. Meadows
#2. My word processor has spell-check capability, which lets me add words that didn't originally come in its comprehensive dictionary. It's interesting to see what words I had to add when writing this book: feedback, throughput, overshoot, self-organization, sustainability.
Donella H. Meadows
#3. [Language] can serve as a medium through which we create new understandings and new realities as we begin to talk about them. In fact, we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about.
Donella H. Meadows
#4. The world peeps, squawks, bangs, and thunders at many frequencies all at once. What is a significant delay depends - usually - on which set of frequencies you're trying to understand.
Donella H. Meadows
#5. We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people.
Donella H. Meadows
#6. The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.
Donella H. Meadows
#7. If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don't expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don't give up too soon.
Donella H. Meadows
#8. Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes ... Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. - RUSSELL ACKOFF,
Donella H. Meadows
#10. A vision should be judged by the clarity of its values, not the clarity of its implementation path
[in Mediated Modeling page 43]
Donella H. Meadows
#11. It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.
Donella H. Meadows
#12. Stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, "What's the system?" The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.
Donella H. Meadows
#13. These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.
Donella H. Meadows
#14. A system consists of elements, interconnections, and a purpose. Changing elements usually has the least effect on the system.
Donella H. Meadows
#15. We can't impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
Donella H. Meadows
#16. Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. - A stitch in time saves nine.
Donella H. Meadows
#17. The Earth was formed whole and continuous in the Universe, without lines.
Donella H. Meadows
#18. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.
Donella H. Meadows
#19. There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair.
Donella H. Meadows
#21. Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model. Get your model out there where it can be viewed. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.
Donella H. Meadows
#22. Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.
Donella H. Meadows
#23. Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe.
Donella H. Meadows
#24. Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.
Donella H. Meadows
#25. A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity. - Don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Donella H. Meadows
#26. Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space.
Donella H. Meadows
#27. Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So
Donella H. Meadows
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
