Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

If God had meant there to be more than two factors of production, He would have made it easier for us to draw three-dimension al diagrams.

People try to contain things by putting them into categories. I don't.

The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.

It's always easy to describe something complex by applying to it an already known label.

The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

It seems we will continue to have problems with this classification and it may be because it comes under the heading of creation rather than preservation.

People tend to simplify things.

One thing scientists do is to find order among a large number of facts, and one way to do that across fields as diverse as biology, geology, physics and astronomy is through classification.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.

Taxonomy is described sometimes as a science and sometimes as an art, but really it’s a battleground.

A classification is a definition comprising a system of definitions.

It is the genus that gives the characters, and not the characters that make the genus.

One of the most basic and pervasive social processes is the sorting and labeling of things, activities, and people... Sorting and labeling processes involve a trade-off of costs and benefits. In general, the more finely the sorting is done, the greater the benefits - and the costs... Sorting and labeling, whether of people or of things, is a sorting and labeling of probabilities rather than of certainties.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

If we start to dumb down what has been made clear, where does that stop?

Our idea is to create a situation in which those lands to which we have obligations or in which we have interests, if they are ready to fight a fire, should be able to count on us to furnish the hose and water.

On those remote pages [of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia'] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

You know, we love to categorise or label everything in our lives: people, movies. But I think that those are just the decorations. They, of course, work. They're great, but that's not the thrust of the film.

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

Though a simple book can be written on selected topics, the central doctrines of economics are not simple and cannot be made so.

The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.

Life isn't divided into genres

there are two kinds of people in this world : those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.

The chicken is a dinosaur. I mean, it really is. You can't argue with it, because we're the classifiers and we've classified it that way.

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.