Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

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

A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.

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.

Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.

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

Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.

DNA has been aptly described as the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.

There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.

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

The world moves into the future as a result of decisions, not as a result of plans. Plans are significant only insofar as they affect decisions.

The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.

Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.

The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.

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

Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods.

Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?

The tourist business is a trap, it is a tained honey; Man clearly should have stayed in bed, and not invented money.

In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

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

Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.

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

With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic.

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

We make our tools, and then they shape us.

[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.

We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information.

The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism.

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

The process of consumption is the final act in the economic drama.

I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.

[The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.

One reason why the progressive state is 'cheerful' is that social conflict is diminished by it.

Where there is hypocrisy, there is hope.

The concept of a value-free science is absurd.

... the fouling of the nest which has been typical of man's activity in the past on a local scale now seems to be extending to the whole world society.

We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink.

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

[on the theory of the firm] It is exactly analogous to the analysis of the reactions of a consumer by means of indifferent curves. Indeed, a consumer is merely a 'firm' whose product is 'utility.'

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

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

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

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

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

The greater the penalties laid on sellers in the black market... the higher the black market price.

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.

[The question for the behavioral disciplines is simply] what is better, and how do we get there?

There is something, however humble, which can properly be called skill among those who recognise themselves as economists.

What exists, is possible.

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.

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.