Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

Even though our non-Indian friends may cherish (the Declaration of Independence), I would say that we probably meet it with some mixed emotions among the Indian people. I would hope that during my lifetime, that people of all races would live up to the statements in the document.

I think the best thing that can happen to the Republican Party is that it is identified as a party organized around a set of principles, ideals and ideas for our future.

To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.

In the culture we live in, there's this pervasive, shared agreement that there's a certain body type to admire, and it isn't actually based on anything real or substantive.

The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men

If swans weren't real myths'd make up.

Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.

I know some real intellectual people who might laugh, very close friends who might laugh when I'm said to be an intellectual.

Since you are an integral part of a social system, let every act of yours contribute to the harmonization of social life. Any action that is not related directly or remotely to this social aim disturbs your life, and destroys your unity.

Human learning presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them

Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

"Adjust to changing times but sticking to unchanging principles" - committing me and all Americans to real ideals of justice and truth, no matter what difficulties faced us.

It is not primarily ideas that have a history; it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process.

[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.

I'm nothing like Romeo in real life.

We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavor to shine. We labor unceasingly to adorn and preserve this imaginary existence and neglect the real.

Friendship is the only point in human affairs concerning the benefit of which all, with one voice, agree.

Ideals are great in theory ... but they don't work too well in real life.

The power of painter or poet to describe what he calls an ideal thing depends upon its being to him not an ideal but a real thing. No man ever did or ever will work well but either from actual sight or sight of faith.

On parties it's not about who you are. The real reason to which a party revolves is how good you look.

Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

Life feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.

The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.