Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

Communication can only take place among equals.

[The consumer is] the supreme mover of economic order... for whom all goods are made and towards whom all economic activity is directed.

All knowledge is gained through an orderly loss of information.

It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature.

Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.

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.

Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.

Physicists can only talk to other physicists and economists to economists... sociologists often cannot even understand each other.

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

The social system tends to be dominated by images... especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal.

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

Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit

Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message.

Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.

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

Integrative power [is] the ultimate power

[The loss-of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.

Almost every organization... exhibits two faces a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.

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.

Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.

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