Top 85 Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes
#1. The economy of the future might be called the "spaceman economy," in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#2. The fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#3. Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#4. Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man? ... Does man have any responsibility for the preservation of a decent balance in nature, for the preservation of rare species, or even for the indefinite continuance of his race?
Kenneth E. Boulding
#5. [Peace praxis is] a peace process that deals with conflict integratively.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#6. Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#7. We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#8. There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#10. The perception of potential threats to survival may be much more important in determining behavior than the perceptions of potential profits, so that profit maximization is not really the driving force. It is fear of loss rather than hope of gain that limits our behavior
Kenneth E. Boulding
#13. Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself
Kenneth E. Boulding
#14. There is something, however humble, which can properly be called skill among those who recognise themselves as economists.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#15. Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#16. Almost every organization ... exhibits two faces a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#17. Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#18. At the opposite pole from the gift is tribute - that is, a grant made out of fear and under threat. A threat is a statement of the form you do something that I want or I will do something that you do not want.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#19. Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#20. Production functions involving only land, labor and capital ... never work and never explain economic development.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#21. Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#22. The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#23. Political conflict rests to a very large extent on a universal ignorance of consequences, as the people who are benefited by any particular act or policy are rarely those who struggled for it, and the people who are injured are rarely those who opposed it.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#24. All this talk about artificial intelligence is really just hype, it will take at least fifty years before we have to let them vote.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#25. Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists ... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#26. Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#27. Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#28. In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#30. [The theory of the firm] is exactly analogous to the analysis of the reactions of a consumer by means of indifferent curves. Indeed, a consumer is merely a 'firm' whose product is 'utility'.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#31. Conflict may be defined as a situation of competition in which the parties are aware of the incompatibility of potential future positions, and in which each party wishes to occupy a position that is incompatible with the wishes of the other.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#32. The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#33. [The question for the behavioral disciplines is simply] what is better, and how do we get there?
Kenneth E. Boulding
#34. If the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#36. [The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#37. [The loss- of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#38. The social system tends to be dominated by images ... especially of the future, which act cybernetically , constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal
Kenneth E. Boulding
#39. Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message
Kenneth E. Boulding
#40. Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#42. With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology's Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy's Unecologic.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#43. The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments
Kenneth E. Boulding
#44. Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#45. [In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world ... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#46. One reason why the progressive state is 'cheerful' is that social conflict is diminished by it.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#47. The trouble with taxonomic boxes is ... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#49. [The integrative system] deals with such matters as respect, legitimacy, community, friendship, affection, love, and of course their opposites, across a broad scale of human relationships and interactions.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#52. Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#53. It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature
Kenneth E. Boulding
#54. The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#55. The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#56. Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit
Kenneth E. Boulding
#57. [There will be movement toward] behavioral economics ... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#60. The world moves into the future as a result of decisions, not as a result of plans. Plans are significant only insofar as they affect decisions.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#61. The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#62. Don't go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability-whether they are easily measured or not.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#63. The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey; Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#64. The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#65. In calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy; society is an example of the general concept of an " ecosystem " that is, an ecological system of which biological systems
forests, fields, swamps
are other examples.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#66. If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#67. The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#68. There is a quiet, open place in the depths of the mind, to which we can go many times in the day and lift up our soul in praise, thankfulness and conscious unity. With practise this God-ward turn of the mind becomes an almost constant direction, underlying all our other activities.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#69. [The consumer is] the supreme mover of economic order ... for whom all goods are made and towards whom all economic activity is directed.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#70. Justification, in terms of the broadening of freedom, for any particular form of institution of property must be argued in terms of whether the losses caused by the restrictions imposed are greater or less than the gains derived from the elimination of costly conflict.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#71. Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#72. Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#73. Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#75. Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#76. Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#77. A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#78. Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#80. We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#81. Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#82. The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market ... the higher the black market price.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#83. The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#84. The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#85. Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.
Kenneth E. Boulding
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
