Systems Work Quotes

#1. I want students to understand specific technologies, but the real goal is that they should be able to reason about how systems work and be intelligently skeptical about technology so that, when they're running the world in a few years, they'll do a good job.

Brian Kernighan

#2. I've always been fascinated with how transportation systems work and how cities are designed.

Logan Green

#3. Rating systems work perfectly for players who play only in round robin closed events. I think most of them are overrated. Organizers invite same people over and over because they have the same rating and their rating stays high.

Alexander Khalifman

#4. When you look at how American national freight systems are connected, it's a bit of a patchwork. When you look at how even road systems and rail systems work across state lines, it's a bit of a patchwork.

Anthony Foxx

#5. Coming down under a parachute is quite different as well. You hit the ground pretty hard, but all the systems work very well to keep it from hurting, so it doesn't even hurt when you hit. It was a great experience to be able to do both.

Leroy Chiao

#6. Don't be fooled by the many books on complexity or by the many complex and arcane algorithms you find in this book or elsewhere. Although there are no textbooks on simplicity, simple systems work and complex don't.

Jim Gray

#7. Basic trigonometric properties put forth by Muslim mathematicians serve as basis for how GPS systems work today

Firas Alkhateeb

#8. I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

Larry Wall

#9. Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists. But I would go further and say that making systems work - whether in healthcare, education, climate change, making a pathway out of poverty - is the great task of our generation as a whole.

Atul Gawande

#10. It is interesting that we know how the world and the planetary systems work, but we don't know how we think and why we are conscious.

Debasish Mridha

#11. My particular focus at the moment is on the development of genetic algorithms and neural networks that work together to create computer architectural systems.

Frederick Lenz

#12. As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

Dave Parnas

#13. 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

#14. Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.

Francis Bacon

#15. If you want to solve a big problem, you need to go from taking credit, to sharing credit, to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit. Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership. And the byproduct is both resilience and propulsion.

Thomas L. Friedman

#16. The passengers in our microbiome contain at least four million genes, and they work constantly on our behalf: they manufacture vitamins and patrol our guts to prevent infections; they help to form and bolster our immune systems, and digest food.

Michael Specter

#17. I felt strongly that marketing managers, in order to make better marketing decisions, needed to analyze markets and competition in systems terms, explicating the forces at work and their various interdependencies.

Philip Kotler

#18. What Canada has to do is to have a government connected to the priorities of the people of which it is elected to serve. Those priorities include ensuring medicare is sustainable, support for the military, and tax and justice systems that work.

Peter MacKay

#19. I had been here five years already, training very hard, learning about the systems, the shuttle, the station systems. But, everything really became real when I started to work with them.

Philippe Perrin

#20. Sun's role in the grand scheme of development is to work on the runtime environment and the APIs. The tools we produce are much more for systems programmers, not enterprise developers.

John Fowler

#21. Ethical systems and practices need to look good. They have to be desirable, well-designed and work well.

Adrian Grenier

#22. A project leader should always work with proven technologies in most of the systems as far as possible and experiment only from multiple resources.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

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

Cheryl Heller

#24. Opportunities change, strategies change, but people and psychology do not change. If trend-following systems don't work well, something else will. There's always money being lost, so someone out there has to win.

Gil Blake

#25. We are to build ourselves up, get to know God's will, build systems,structures, work hard towards His will and stop expecting miracles.

Sunday Adelaja

#26. I want to work with the Philippine people and make life better there; there are systems I can work with.

Suze Orman

#27. Sure, there were hopes that Constellation's systems could later be adapted to support more ambitious goals. But Apollo had those hopes, too. It didn't work in 1970, and it wasn't going to work in 2020.

Henry Spencer

#28. I think that life is a paradox and you have to embrace that in your work and your belief systems ... You can't be a literalist, and that's the trouble that people always find themselves in. That's why people always hit a wall with any of my stuff, because you can't take it literally.

Madonna Ciccone

#29. To me, there's so much talent in the world that's locked out for the wrong reasons, whether it's innovators at the highest end where we need to change the regulation systems, or whether it's the talented people who work here who the bureaucracy's holding back, or the amazing American people.

Megan Smith

#30. Our great common challenge ... is to free people from religion, get it out of our laws, our schools, our health systems, our government and, I would add, also our sporting events. I would really like to see some separation of church and stadium, if we could work on that.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#31. All the Ping-Pong and pool tables, on-site chefs, Nerf hoops, and stereo systems cannot make up for the truth that some places work people like dogs.

Ken Wilber

#32. In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.

Guido Van Rossum

#33. We are not here to adopt Western values, we are here to colonize the U.S. (and Canada) and spread Islamic sharia law Canada has one of the easiest legal systems to penetrate and advance sharia from within ... but if that doesn't work, we won't hesitate to use violent jihad.

Tariq Ramadan

#34. The people working in my field also are quite skeptical of our ability to do this. It ultimately boils down to the problem of building complex systems that are reliable and that work, and that problem has long predated the problem of access to encryption keys.

Matt Blaze

#35. The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.

James C. Scott

#36. The best way to prepare [to be a programmer] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.

Bill Gates

#37. Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home.

Steve Case

#38. Art is too popular. If plumbing was as popular as art is we would have amateur plumbers running around brandishing wrenches and Roto-Rooters, climbing in and out of sewers and writing gibberish about pipe systems. And none of our our toilets would work.

Walter Darby Bannard

#39. 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

#40. ...we need to remind ourselves that natural systems are much more finely tuned than we think, and if we like the way they currently work, then we should try very, very hard to not screw with them.

Rowan Jacobsen

#41. Over and over, people try to design systems that make tomorrow's work easy. But when tomorrow comes it turns out they didn't quite understand tomorrow's work, and they actually made it harder.

Ward Cunningham

#42. Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.

Susan Neiman

#43. An interesting side effect of pull systems is that they limit work-in-progress (WIP) to some agreed-upon quantity,

David J. Anderson

#44. The eventual goal is to marry all of my work together to make a high-speed, high-resolution, low-impact tool that can look deep inside biological systems.

Eric Betzig

#45. The ways creative work gets done are always unpredictable, demanding room to roam, refusing schedules and systems. They cannot be reduced to replicable formulas.

Rebecca Solnit

#46. Church and family are both primary influences designed by God for a purpose and when they work together, they are orange. Both are systems comprised of imperfect people - that's why God desires to use them as a platform to tell his story of restoration and redemption to the world.

Reggie Joiner

#47. We have the most generous immigration policy, but what is a concern is when illegal immigrants come and undermine a variety of the systems that work in order to make our society function.

Madeleine Albright

#48. Once a week, do a thorough review of all your projects in as much detail as you need to. If you do, your systems will work. If you don't, no system will work.

David Allen

#49. Freedom is the basic concept and construct of life everywhere, because freedom is the basic nature of God. All systems which reduce, restrict, impinge upon or eliminate freedom in any way are systems which work against life itself.

Neale Donald Walsch

#50. Someone is going to figure out how to make this work and when they do, all the anti-gambling, over-regulating authoritarian governments will be exposed as emperors without clothes. It might not be obvious that this is even happening at first, since these systems are by definition stealthy affairs.

Calvin Ayre

#51. Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.

David Suzuki

#52. We need a national infrastructure bank to rebuild our crumbling highways and water and sewer systems, thereby putting additional people back to work.

Robert Reich

#53. Because we often think of bias as a function of overt acts of bigotry, we can sometimes remain blind to the invisible structures, systems, and behaviors that bestow and reinforce that power and privilege on a daily basis.

Howard J. Ross

#54. One essential characteristic of modern life is that we all depend on systems - on assemblages of people or technologies or both - and among our most profound difficulties is making them work.

Atul Gawande

#55. You can find academic and industrial groups doing some relevant work, but there isn't a focus on building complex molecular systems. In that respect, Japan is first, Europe is second, and we're third.

K. Eric Drexler

#56. Building technical systems involves a lot of hard work and specialized knowledge: languages and protocols, coding and debugging, testing and refactoring.

Jesse James Garrett

#57. Leaders of all systems (Capitalism, Communism, etc.) in History claimed to serve the people. All Systems would work if the leaders meant it!

Francis Mont

#58. When I first started making ambient music, I was setting up systems using synthesizers that generated pulses more or less randomly. The end result is a kind of music that continuously changes. Of course, until computers came along, all I could actually present of that work was a piece of its output.

Brian Eno

#59. I have looked into the most philosophical systems and have found none that will not work without God.

James Clerk Maxwell

#60. Computer science doesn't know how to build complex systems that work reliably. This has been a well-understood problem since the very beginning of programmable computers.

Matt Blaze

#61. 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

#62. I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us.

Nathan Wolfe

#63. The important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail.

Cory Doctorow

#64. I strive to find materials that will engage students, expand their capacities as critical readers and thinkers, and feel immediately relevant to their daily lives and future work in court and social service systems.

Dean Spade

#65. 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

#66. Anything that you are achieving that undermines and threatens systems of power will meet with oppression. Systems of power don't say 'thank you.' What's important is not to focus all your efforts on the oppression, but to continue the constructive work.

Noam Chomsky

#67. The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

Kevin Kelly

#68. Open political and economic systems have been gaining ground and there's a good reason for it. They work better.

George P. Shultz

#69. If there's one thing government needs desperately, it's the ability to quickly try something, pivot when necessary, and build complex systems by starting with simple systems that work and evolving from there, not the other way around.

Jennifer Pahlka

#70. So we work for better political and economic systems, knowing that sin precludes any earthly utopia now, but rejoicing in the assurance that the kingdom of shalom that the Messiah has already begun will one day prevail, and the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord.

Ronald J. Sider

#71. We have to pay close attention to what we see, and be ready to work with the unexpected according to the basic principles of systems biology and medicine.

Mark Hyman

#72. As technology increasingly takes over knowledge-based work, the cognitive skills that are central to today's education systems will remain important; but behavioral and non-cognitive skills necessary for collaboration, innovation, and problem solving will become essential as well.

Klaus Schwab

#73. The urgency of the global situation is such that the foundation work of activating the totality of humankind via the Global Cooperative Forum must happen now, so that, during the next few years, there can be global conversion of all systems to a right functioning in the context of the total system.

Adi Da

#74. I learned to work on a computer years before I was placed under house arrest. Fortunately I had two laptops when I was under house arrest - one an Apple and one a different operating system. I was very proud of that because I know how to use both systems.

Aung San Suu Kyi

#75. Enterprise is hard work. You have to integrate the client with the optimized systems of all the servers and software.

Samuel J. Palmisano

#76. If a plethora of learning with a paucity of teaching is an approach to heaven and a plethora of teaching with a paucity of learning an approach to hell, the devil is hard at work in our educational systems.

Dee Hock

#77. Being a mother has absolutely forced me. You have to write things down and have systems for all of it. And then you set up systems and you realize they don't work.

Maggie Gyllenhaal

#78. A certain amount of friction is inevitable whenever peoples of different customs and assumptions meet.... What is miraculous is how often it is possible to work together to sustain joint performances in spite of disparate codes, evoking different belief systems to affirm that possibility.

Mary Catherine Bateson

#79. Infiltrating the records of a state penitentiary as well as the state and federal court systems was much more fun than deciphering art. -Phil Roach

Aleatha Romig

#80. No matter how non-technical your life and work, you're going to have to interact with technology and technical people. If you know something about how devices and systems operate, it's a big advantage.

Brian Kernighan