Kenneth E. Boulding famous quotes

05-20-2025

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

#Fun #Believe #Forever
... 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

#Technology #Men #Waste
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

#Addiction #Growth #Cost
The love of God again makes us free, for it draws us to set a low value on those things wherein we are subject to others - our wealth, our position, our reputation, and our life - and to set a high value on those things which no man can take from us - our integrity, our righteousness, our love for all men, and our communion with God.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Integrity #Men #Our Love
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

#Responsibility #Men #Race
DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Science #Dna #Three
As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Memories #Two #Different
In 1859 the human race discovered a huge treasure chest in its basement. This was oil and gas, a fantastically cheap and easily available source of energy. We did, or at least some of us did, what anybody does who discovers a treasure in the basement - live it up, and we have been spending this treasure with great enjoyment
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Race #Oil #Energy
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

#Mother #Men #Bed
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

#Law #Iron #Earth
The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Future #Surprise
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

#Soul #Unity #Mind
In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Art #Novelty #Artistic
Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Strong #Hate #Deep Love
Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Needs #Facts #Computer
Physicists only talk to physicists, economists to economists-worse still, nuclear physicists only talk to nuclear physicists and econometricians to econometricians. One wonders sometimes if science will not grind to a stop in an assemblage of walled-in hermits, each mumbling to himself words in a private language that only he can understand.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Science #Nuclear #Language
The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Vision #Agnostic #Complexity
Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Flower #Humble #Ignorance
As long as man was small in numbers and limited in technology, he could realistically regard the earth as an infinite reservoir, an infinite source of inputs and an infinite cesspool for outputs. Today we can no longer make this assumption. Earth has become a space ship, not only in our imagination but also in the hard realities of the social, biological, and physical system in which man is enmeshed.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Reality #Men #Technology
Nothing fails like success because we don't learn from it. We learn only from failure.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Failure #Failing
Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Men #Benefits #World
With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology's Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy's Unecologic.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Laissez Faire #Logic #Kind
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

#Earth #Might #Economics
Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.
-- Kenneth E. Boulding

#Economics #Mathematics #Rigor
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

#Land #Should #Mankind

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