David Bohm Quotes

I don't believe you can reduce the world to a mathematical formula. I start with the world, assume it's complicated, and ask where can I get help from a whole range of disciplines.

You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.

The most universal challenge that we face is the transition from seeing our human institutions as machines to seeing them as embodiments of nature.

In a few decades of reconstruction, even the mathematical natural sciences, the ancient archetypes of theoretical perfection, have changed habit completely!

What Copernicus really achieved was not the discovery of a true theory but of a fertile new point of view.

It is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. All of these positions were long defended by argument from parsimony, and they were all wrong.

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.

Talking about straws and camels' backs is just one way of approaching things. If you have enough camels, no backs need be broken.

The Venus Project is not about new cities or new architecture. It's about a way of thinking

The word change, so dear to our Europe, has been given a new meaning: it no longer means a new stage of coherent development (as it was understood by Vico, Hegel or Marx), but a shift from one side to another, from front to back, from the back to the left, from the left to the front (as understood by designers dreaming up the fashion for the next season).

Humanism . . . is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new centre of interest or point of sight.

Our ideas are only intellectual instruments which we use to break into phenomena; we must change them when they have served their purpose, as we change a blunt lancet that we have used long enough.

Before the 1940s the terms "system" and "systems thinking" had been used by several scientists, but it was Bertalanffy's concepts of an open system and a general systems theory that established systems thinking as a major scientific movement

Each part in itself constitutes the whole to which it belongs.

If we want to make relatively minor changes in our lives, we can perhaps appropriately focus on our attitudes and behaviors. But if we want to make significant, quantum change, we need to work on our basic paradigms.

Reductionism is merciless.

What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.

The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story.

There is nothing to be found in a beehive that is not submerged in a bee. And yet you can search a bee forever with cyclotron and fluoroscope, and you will never find the hive.

I love seeing things that work in the micro and work in the macro.

Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic character. If anything, partial 'solutions' serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.

The history of acceptance of new theories frequently shows the following steps: At first the new idea is treated as pure nonsense, not worth looking at. Then comes a time when a multitude of contradictory objections are raised, such as: the new theory is too fancy, or merely a new terminology; it is not fruitful, or simply wrong. Finally a state is reached when everyone seems to claim that he had always followed this theory. This usually marks the last state before general acceptance.

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

I love to try to understand first principles and be guided by that. But then, enrich them, because they won't last forever, just like everybody thought Newton had all the answers. And you probably read that, in the last of the 19th century, Harvard and others were discouraging people from going into physics because we have all the answers. And right after that, of course - we have - all this stuff is thrown out the window. And now we have whole new answers.