Human Systems Quotes

#1. When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

N. T. Wright

#2. The real work of social innovation is to fix our broken human systems.

Cheryl Heller

#3. Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.

Paul Gibbons

#4. If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past
Security in human systems we're told will always always last
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast
Without the breath of real freedom we're getting nowhere fast.
(History Will Teach Us Nothing)

Sting

#5. The connections I draw between human nature and political systems in my new book, for example, were prefigured in the debates during the Enlightenment and during the framing of the American Constitution.

Steven Pinker

#6. Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

Herbert A. Simon

#7. Human sign systems are in this sense extensions of the various ways in which molecules read each other, cells read enzymes, organisms read sensations, and all write upon each other.

Christopher Vitale

#8. After fifty-five years of dedicating his life and work to the story of ethical systems, Sol Weintraub had come to a single, unshakable conclusion: any allegiance to a deity or concept or universal principal which put obedience above decent behavior toward an innocent human being was evil.

Dan Simmons

#9. Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite number of solar systems.

Matt Haig

#10. Space architectures capable of supporting a permanent human presence on Mars are extraordinarily complex, with many different interdependent systems.

Buzz Aldrin

#11. The morphic fields include all kinds of organizing fields ... : The organizing fields of animal and human behaviour, of social and cultural systems, and of mental activity can all be regarded as morphic fields which contain an inherent memory.

Rupert Sheldrake

#12. We are now heading down a centuries-long path toward increasing the productivity of our natural capital - the resource systems upon which we depend to live - instead of our human capital.

Paul Hawken

#13. Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

Honore De Balzac

#14. In the future, human rights will be increasingly a universal criterion for designing ethical systems.

Mahnaz Afkhami

#15. All political and religious systems have their root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and its intense fear of autonomy.

Suzanne La Follette

#16. The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.

Kurt Vonnegut

#17. The externalization of memory [via the use of external symbolic storage systems] has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory, the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern culture.

Merlin Donald

#18. The planet isn't improvising, it's creating dynamic tensions between complex living systems in a planetary choreography, a balancing act between physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and human components.

DJ Spooky

#19. Zoocentrism is the primary fallacy of human sociobiology, for this view of human behavior rests on the argument that if the actions of "lower" animals with simple nervous systems arise as genetic products of natural selection, then human behavior should have a similar basis.

Stephen Jay Gould

#20. Business and human endeavors are systems ... we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system. And wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.

Peter M. Senge

#21. The authority of Plato and Aristotle, of Zeno and Epicurus, still reigned in the schools; and their systems, transmitted with blind deference from one generation of disciples to another, precluded every generous attempt to exercise the powers, or enlarge the limits, of the human mind.

Edward Gibbon

#22. Ever since then, all descendant vertebrates have had the forward end of the digestive system and the forward end of the respiratory system very much involved with each other. This manifests itself in the human body with a crossing of the two systems in the throat.

George C. Williams

#23. The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value.

Sri Aurobindo

#24. Second by second, the Queng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth's moon. But if you looked at it still more closely ... the starting instant was actually about fifteen million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind's first computer operating systems.

Vernor Vinge

#25. I think buildings should imitate ecological systems. Ecological systems in nature before we had human beings interfere with them exist in a state of stasis - they are self-supporting, self-sustaining.

Ken Yeang

#26. That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.

Susan Jacoby

#27. How could you be so naive as to tell a human being the truth? Men live by embedding themselves in ongoing systems of illusion. Religion. Patriotism. Economics. Fashion. That sort of thing. If you wish to gain the favor of the two-legged ilk, you must learn to fabricate as wholeheartedly as they do.

Tom Robbins

#28. What it takes to do a job will not be learned from management courses. It is principally a matter of experience, the proper attitude, and common sense - none of which can be taught in a classroom ... Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.

Hyman G. Rickover

#29. For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough. For example, the human body is a system of systems. If just one system, such as the cardiovascular system, shuts down, death follows.

Robert Kiyosaki

#30. The truth is: there is on this frequency, from our human perspective, a planet, some beings, some resources; would it not be sensible to employ systems that benefit the planet, the beings, and the resources?

Russell Brand

#31. It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones.

Carl Sagan

#32. And the more technically developed a nation or race is, the more cruel, ruthless, predatory, and commercialized its systems tend to become ... all because we continue to think like animals and have not learned how to think consistently like human beings. A. K.

A.E. Van Vogt

#33. The basic tenet of black consciousness is that the black man must reject all value systems that seek to make him a foreigner in the country of his birth and reduce his basic human dignity.

Steven Biko

#34. From now on, how one arrives at a definition of the relationship of man's basic nature to his culturally conditioned control systems (extensions) is of crucial importance. For in our shrinking globe man can ill afford cultural illiteracy.

Edward T. Hall

#35. It seems to me that few concepts have offered greater scope for human cruelty than the idea of an immortal soul that stands independent of all material influences, ranging from genes to economic systems. And

Sam Harris

#36. Systems. They are self-evident and can easily be validated by any individual. It's almost as if these principles or natural laws are part of the human condition, part of the human consciousness, part of the human conscience. They seem to exist in all human beings, regardless of social conditioning

Stephen R. Covey

#37. The historical mission of our times is to re-invent the human - at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience.

Thomas Berry

#38. I would put all the efforts to humanize the "masculine" and "feminine" gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.

Gloria Steinem

#39. This year [2015] has shown with painful clarity that our existing systems, approaches, and funding, are inadequate to the task at hand, and to the amount of human suffering that is ongoing.

Lawrence O'Donnell

#40. All working, practical political systems, even those professing to originate in moral grandeur, are based upon and operate by contempt of human life and the individual fate ...

Katherine Anne Porter

#41. Depressing realization sets in. Writing was invented not by human beings but by accountants. Most of the early writing systems are records of how much crap people own, how much money they have, how much money they owe, and other lowering/boastful facts of human life.

Philip Hensher

#42. The only debatable issue, it seems to me, is whether it is more ridiculous to turn to experts in social theory for general well-confirmed propositions, or to the specialists in the great religions and philosophical systems for insights into fundamental human values.

Noam Chomsky

#43. I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs.

James Howard Kunstler

#44. There have been people who have categorized the bands of perception in different yogic systems. It gives them pleasure to create names and orders and to make catalogs. Human beings like that.

Frederick Lenz

#45. relationships are the real, evolving, living systems of human culture.

Steve McIntosh

#46. Doing a background check is still a very manual process, because the government agencies that create the records are largely paper-based systems. I'm not going to deny that there are errors, because in any system that involves human beings or technology, there are going to be errors.

James Lee

#47. Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

Miguel De Unamuno

#48. The impact of human intention on physical systems within as well as outside the body has been scientifically demonstrated and reveals a shortcoming of the conventional medical paradigm and highlights a strength of the energy medicine paradigm.

Jed Diamond

#49. Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture.

John McAfee

#50. Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.

Carl Sagan

#51. The disgraceful and shameful construction of walls, the increasing enforcement of security systems and increasing violation of human rights and labor rights will not protect the economy of the United States.

Tucker Carlson

#52. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature

Oscar Wilde

#53. The human body is a miraculous self-healing machine, but those self-repair systems require a nutrient-dense diet.

Joel Fuhrman

#54. Most specifically, irrationality means that rational systems are unreasonable systems. By that I mean that they deny the basic humanity, the human reason, of the people who work within or are served by them.

George Ritzer

#55. The idea is that human culture as broadly defined
art, politics, technology, religion, and so on
evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change.

Robert Wright

#56. It is not necessary to dwell on the political and social principles of Islam, to underline how close they also are in spirit to the concepts of human rights which govern the political and social systems of the West.

Aly Khan

#57. Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.

George Eliot

#58. It's much easier to learn what you should do in trading than to do it. Good systems tend to violate normal human tendencies.

William Eckhardt

#59. You cannot bring a fresh, new word about human flourishing and expect the old, established systems of oppression and power to stand by passively. Or, as Jesus put it, "You can't put new wine into old wineskins.

Rob Bell

#60. All human belief systems are inherently flawed.

Moby

#61. Human cultures construct an enormous variety of environments through language, technology, and institutions. We are born in and die in these systems of symbols and imagination.

William E. Paden

#62. A genuinely fundamental and hopeful improvement in "systems" cannot happen without a significant shift in human consciousness.

Vaclav Havel

#63. 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

#64. human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually.

Atul Gawande

#65. There are very important and practical issues raised by following this alternative route which says, let's look to material conditions, to the systems of production, to the needs that human beings have, and to competing alternative solutions to the satisfaction of those needs.

Marvin Harris

#66. This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.

Kevin Kelly

#67. We are evolving
from five-sensory humans into multisensory humans ...
The perceptions of the multi-sensory human
extend beyond physical reality
to the larger dynamical systems of which our physical reality is a part.

Gary Zukav

#68. Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#69. You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

Michael Schur

#70. Those (who) seek to establish systems of Government based on the regimentation of all Human Beings by a handful of individual rulers ... call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#71. Imagine connecting with the human spirit in each person in any situation at any time. Imagine interacting with others in a way that allows everyone's need to be equally valued. Imagine creating organizations and life-serving systems responsive to our needs and the needs of our environment.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#72. Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. You can't buy class.

Anne Perry

#73. A creative element is surely present in all great systems, and it does not seem possible that all sympathy or fundamental attitudes of will can be entirely eliminated from any human philosophy.

Morris Raphael Cohen

#74. Instead of using drugs to create system friendly humans, perhaps we should be creating human friendly systems that do not require people to take drugs to function.

Merlyn Gabriel Miller

#75. Not all the features of atypical human operating systems are bugs.

Steve Silberman

#76. Whether humanity is to comprehensively prosper ... depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems. The cosmic question has been asked: are humans worthwhile to universe invention?

R. Buckminster Fuller