Top 99 Boulding Quotes
#1. The sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed the problem of our times as "temporal exhaustion": "If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future.
Stewart Brand
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#6. 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
#9. [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
#10. Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit
Kenneth E. Boulding
#11. I have long been convinced that families are the primary agents of social change in any society.
Elise M. Boulding
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#18. [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
#20. The trouble with taxonomic boxes is ... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#21. One reason why the progressive state is 'cheerful' is that social conflict is diminished by it.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#23. [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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#28. For the real difference between happiness and joy is that one is grounded in this world, the other in eternity. Happiness cannot encompass suffering and evil. Joy can. Happiness depends on the present. Joy leaps into the future and triumphantly creates a new present out of it.
Elise M. Boulding
#29. The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#30. 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
#31. The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market ... the higher the black market price.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#32. Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad or an economist.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#33. We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#35. Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#36. A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#37. Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#38. Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#41. Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#42. 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
#43. Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#44. 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
#45. [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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. War is not inherent in human beings. We learn war and we learn peace. The culture of peace is something which is learned, just as violence is learned and war culture is learned.
Elise M. Boulding
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Production functions involving only land, labor and capital ... never work and never explain economic development.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#54. Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Fasting and feasting are universal human responses, and any meal, shared with love, can be an agape.
Elise M. Boulding
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. There is something, however humble, which can properly be called skill among those who recognise themselves as economists.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#61. Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself
Kenneth E. Boulding
#64. The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#66. There is no time left for anything but to make peace work a dimension of our every waking activity.
Elise M. Boulding
#67. Peace cultures thrive on and are nourished by visions of how things might be, in a world where sharing and caring are part of the accepted lifeways for everyone.
Elise M. Boulding
#68. There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#69. 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
#70. Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#71. [Peace praxis is] a peace process that deals with conflict integratively.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#72. 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
#73. Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. [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
#81. [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
#82. We must look towards societies that set a high value on nonaggression and noncompetitive ness, and therefore handle conflicts by nonviolent means. We can see how child rearing patterns produce nurturing adult behaviors.
Elise M. Boulding
#84. Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things.
Elise Boulding
#85. A meal, however simple, is a moment of intersection. It is at once the most basic, the most fundamental, of our life's activities, maintaining the life of our bodies; shared with others it can be an occasion of joy and communion, uniting people deeply.
Elise M. Boulding
#86. 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
#87. [The question for the behavioral disciplines is simply] what is better, and how do we get there?
Kenneth E. Boulding
#88. With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology's Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy's Unecologic.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#89. When three generations are present in a family, one of them is bound to be revolutionary.
Elise M. Boulding
#90. 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
#91. [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
#93. In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists ... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.
Kenneth E. Boulding
#97. In the book of James the first chapter and the fourth verse it talks about letting patience have her perfect work in us. God knows how to make us wait to develop patience in us. Sometimes, the wait can seem unbearable. But it is in this place that He is maturing this fruit of the Spirit.
L. J. Boulding
#98. 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
#99. 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
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