60 Quotes by Kenneth E. Boulding

The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.

Perhaps the most difficult ethical problem of the scientific community arises not so much from conflict with other subcultures as from its own success. Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.

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

Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology’s Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy’s Unecologic.

The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties.

The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.

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.

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.