Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes

The idea that we cause harm by doing what we perceive to be the right thing, that's another theme that interests me. Because most people don't intend to cause harm, they cause harm by doing the right thing - in their mind.

Whatever harm the evil may do, the harm done by the good is the most harmful harm.

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

God save us from people who mean well.

We are trying to make the world a better place, but that is not necessarily what we accomplish. Many of the problems which preoccupy us are basically insoluble.

Any attempt to shape the world and modify human personality in order to create a self-chosen pattern of life involves many unknown consequences. Human destiny is bound to remain a gamble, because at some unpredictable time and in some unforeseeable manner nature will strike back. The multiplicity of determinants which affect biological systems limits the power of the experimental method to predict their trends and behavior.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.

The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.

I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintainence of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing and it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind. It requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in to do something about them you not only may make them worse, you will spread your tenticles and get bad results elsewhere.

What is the point? We assume that every time we do anything we know what the consequences will be, i.e., more or less what we intend them to be. This is not only not always correct. It is wildly, crazily, stupidly, cross-eyed-blithering-insectly wrong!

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends.

Bad decisions made with good intentions, are still bad decisions.

The consequences of our actions are always so complicated, so diverse, that predicting the future is a very difficult business indeed.

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.

Africa is people" may seem too simple and too obvious to some of us. But I have found in the course of my travels through the world that the most simple things can still givwe us a lot of trouble, even the brightest among us: this is particularly so in matters concerning Africa.

One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.

The real world, whether we like it or not, is right here, right now. All of this, every day, is important. Everybody matters. Everything we do has an effect on other, directly or indirectly, whether we realize it or not.

I have observed over the years that the unanticipated consequences of social action are always more important, and usually less agreeable, than the intended consequences.

Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error.

Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.

There's nothing more dangerous than someone who wants to make the world a better place.