Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

It's from love and knowledge of nature that any sensible understanding must come. Technology is essentially antagonistic to nature - that in fact is why it's created, to do something to or with nature that wasn't there before, that wasn't natural.

I saw science as being in harmony with humanity.

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

Again and again we are confronted with the reality - some might say the problem - of sharing our space with other living things, be they dogs, trees, fish or penguins.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

Most of the time in the 21st century, we dominate our surroundings: We tweak the thermostat, and the temperature falls one degree. We push a button, and Taylor Swift sings for us. It's the opposite in the wilderness, which teaches us constantly that we are not lords of the universe but rather building blocks of it.

Simply to pit "society" against "nature," "humanity" against the "biosphere," and "reason," "technology," and "science" against less developed, often primitive forms of human interaction with the natural world, prevents us from examining the highly complex differences and divisions within society so necessary to define our problems and their solutions.

Descartes commanded the future from his study more than Napoleon from the throne.

The Knowledge of Nature tends to enlarge the human Mind, and give us more noble, more grand, and exalted Ideas of the Author of Nature, and if well pursu'd, seldom fails producing something useful to Man.

Our ignorance will always remain greater than our knowledge.

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

Nature is simply the environment on earth in which man finds himself, and to treat it as a separate being in the image of man is sheer nonsense.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

One reason that birds matter - ought to matter - is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They're the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

I love nature, and I love information.

Science is the natural ally of religion.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

It has become much harder, in the past century, to tell where the garden leaves off and pure nature begins.

Science is not wisdom.

Science is a mechanism, a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe, and seeing whether they match.

Science and religion are, of course, two different ways of looking at the universe; and it's the same universe with two different windows.

And what avails it that science has come to treat space and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as hypothetical, and withal our pretension of property and even of self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts are not finalities, but the incessant flowing and ascension reach these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day is yielding to a larger generalization?

Philosophy is true mother of the arts [of science].