Quakers

"Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time. It has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time."

"I hope I've done nothing so monosyllabic as to cheat, A spade is never so merely a spade as the word Spade would imply."

"I tell you, Miss, I knows an undesirable character When I see one; I've been one myself for years."

"In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults. They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for. Have they ever stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat? Hugged any grownup with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?"

"Only a fool would refuse to enter a fool's paradise — when that's the only paradise he'll ever have a chance to enter."

"In my time and neighborhood (and in my soul) there was only one standard by which a woman measured success: did some man want her?"

"We can love an honest rogue, but what is more offensive than a false saint?"

"I never meet anyone nowadays who admits to having had a happy childhood. Everyone appears to think happiness betokens a lack of sensitivity."

"Superstition saw Something it had never seen before: Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear, Beauty so sudden for that time of year."

"O singers, resinous and soft your songs Above the sacred whisper of the pines, Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines, Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs."

"One seed becomes An everlasting song, a singing tree, Caroling softly souls of slavery, What they were, and what they are to me, Caroling softly souls of slavery."

"And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds, His belly close to ground. I see the blade, Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade"

"I should have done violence to my convictions of duty, had I not made use of all the lawful means in my power to liberate those people, and assist them to become men and women, rather than leave them in the condition of chattels personal. I am called an abolitionist, once a name of reproach, but one I am ever proud to be considered worthy of being called."

"Friend, I haven't a dollar in the world; but if thee knows a fugitive who needs a breakfast send him to me."

"I rejoice that I have lived to see this day, when the colored people of this favored land, by law, have equal privileges with the most favored. And I have faith to believe that ere long equal justice will be granted to the poor Indians and the Chinese."

"They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them."

"When a man sets out to paint a monumental painting, or to write an epic, men think of and , and vote all such efforts dull and pompous. Certainly it is safer to paint , or write little lyrics exquisitely. But knew that subject counts for a great deal in art. The choice of a subject obviously matters immensely, because no one works well on a subject that does not interest him; and a great subject, though it does not make a feeble treatment of it great is necessary for calling out a man's utmost powers. Resistance in one's material is a fine spur to effort; and many artists have never realised a tenth of their own latent powers till brought to grapple with a subject which perhaps, at the time, utterly defeated them. Now Watts had a natural bent towards imaginative subjects on the heroic plane. Watts was very English ..."

"We are living in a time of trouble and bewilderment, in a time when none of us can foresee or foretell the future. But surely it is in times like these, when so much that we cherish is threatened or in jeopardy, that we are impelled all the more to strengthen our inner resources, to turn to the things that have no news value because they will be the same to-morrow that they were to-day and yesterday — the things that last, the things that the wisest, the most farseeing of our race and kind have been inspired to utter in forms that can inspire ourselves in turn."

"The should not be confused with the profit system. By the profit system, of course, we mean the institution of private property in capital goods and the free private enterprise that goes along with it. There is no reason why the "profit motive" should be necessarily connected with the profit system. In a profit system there is nothing to prevent anyone acting on altruistic lines; there is no law that says a businessman must maximize his profits. If a businessman chose to operate with outputs, prices, and wages that yielded him a smaller profit than the maximum, but which he felt were socially more desirable, there is nothing in the profit system that would prevent him from doing this. Nothing in the profit system would prevent the most ardent liberal from refusing an increase in wages, or from accepting an unpleasant and poorly paid job. At the other extreme, there is nothing in a communist system that would do away with the profit motive, or the "advantage motive.""

"General systems theory is considered as a formal theory (Mesarovic, Wymore), a methodology (Ashby, Klir), a way of thinking (Bertalanffy, Churchman), a way of looking at the world (Weinberg), a search for an optimal simplification (Ashby, Weinberg), didactic method (Boulding, Klir, Weinberg), metalanguage (Logren), and profession (Klir)."

"“In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.”"

"Kenneth E. Boulding was a most extraordinary economist. The narrow bounds of the economics discipline could not contain his interests and talents. In addition to economics, Professor Boulding made important contributions to the fields of , sociology, philosophy, and . His forays into subjects outside the usual concerns of economists were not an intellectual dilettantism; rather, they were a result of his conviction that an understanding of human behavior can only be accomplished by studying man in his totality. Much of Boulding's work was an attempt to move beyond the narrow economic view of humans as self-interested, rational utility maximizers to a general social science exploiting the full range of our rational, instinctual, and mystical knowledge."

"If we saw tomorrow’s newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen."

"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."

"“Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.”"

"Kenneth Boulding, a well-known economist and widely-read author. Boulding used an ecological model for understanding corporations and individuals as actors within a social system. His 1956 book, The Image is an early discussion of mental models. His 1978 book, Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Societal Evolution summarizes much of his earlier work."

"The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism."

"The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state."

"Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits.""

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."

"[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."

"Production functions involving only land, labor and capital... never work and never explain economic development."

"Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis"

"Boulding was not left-wing in his politics nor involved in the radical economics of the time. In fact he was always hostile to Marx’s theory of capitalism and its emphasis on class conflict. What he did feel strongly about was the cause of peace, having become a Quaker early in life, and having been active throughout his career in a variety of ways in the cause of peace. Moreover, he himself saw peace and conflict research as his largest area of work (Boulding, 1989), and regarded his involvement in the founding of the ' and the as important lifetime achievements."

"We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality."

"...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"

"Integrative power [is] the ultimate power"

"It is much more accurate to identify the factors of production as know-how (that is genetic information structure), energy, and materials, for, as we have seen, all processes of production involve the direction of energy by some know-how structure toward the selection, transportation, and transformation of materials into the product"

"We cannot walk befor we toddle, Though we may toddle far too long, If we embrace a lovely Model That is consistent, clear, and wrong. - Experts from "Notes from Wooods Hole", unpublished, 1976."

"Prediction of the future is possible only in systems that have stable parameters like celestial mechanics. The only reason why prediction is so successful in celestial mechanics is that the evolution of the solar system has ground to a halt in what is essentially a dynamic equilibrium with stable parameters. Evolutionary systems, however, by their very nature have unstable parameters. They are disequilibrium systems and in such systems our power of prediction, though not zero, is very limited because of the unpredictability of the parameters themselves. If, of course, it were possible to predict the change in the parameters, then there would be other parameters which were unchanged, but the search for ultimately stable parameters in evolutionary systems is futile, for they probably do not exist... Social systems have Heisenberg principles all over the place, for we cannot predict the future without changing it."

"The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love."

"My father, William C. Boulding, was a working plumber in business for himself. At the back of the house was the yard, a corrugated iron shed full of pipes, wrenches, and blow torches, and other mysterious and rather frightening apparatus. He had two faithful employees, Billy Fox, who was moody and regarded as a little queer, and Billy Sankey, who was short and cheerful. They and my father always smelled strongly of some kind of grease. My father was a gentle man. I never I never heard his voice raised in anger. He had had a very hard childhood. His father died soon after he was born; his mother married again, a man known in the family legends as "Pa Hardacre," about whom endless stories were told. He was a bigamist. He drove my father out of the house at the age of twelve to earn his own living on the streets of Liverpool. He constantly mistreated my half-aunts, Ethel and Rosie. He died before I was born, but my mother's accounts of him sounded like something out of Dickens."

"I was born on January 18, 1910 at 4 Seymour Street, off. London Road, Liverpool, Lancashire, England, Great. Britain, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe. Writing out my full address like this was a great satisfaction when I was a boy. Seymour Street had a solid row of narrow, four-story houses on both sides, each with a flight of steps leading up to the front door, and what we called an "airy," a rectangular hole in front of the basement window, often with steps leading down to a basement underneath the front door. The streets of the neighborhood spoke of the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century— St. Vincent Street, Rodney Street, Lord Nelson Street. Close by was dirty Lime Street Station; St. George's Hall, a magnificent classical structure the center of Liverpudlian splendor; the theaters; and the great Picton Library with its huge circular reading room. The neighborhood was very mixed; we belonged to the English minority in Liverpool, a city largely populated by the Irish and the Welsh."

"The trouble with taxonomic boxes is... that that they tend to be empty, however beautiful they are on the outside."

"Economics deals with the behavior of commodities rather than with the behavior of men."

"[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."

"[Boulding once said, in response to a forecast that someday every American would be earning $100,000 per year] So what? Someone will still have to take out the garbage."

"In modern industry, research Has come to be a kind of Church Where rubber-aproned acolytes Perform their Scientific Rites And firms spend funds they do not hafter In hope of benefits Hereafter."

"[Peace praxis is] a peace process that deals with conflict integratively."

"Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity."