Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

I don't think any one person is the cause of all of someone else's problems.

We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.

Instead of seeking to pinpoint blame, seek to understand cause.

Life is to blame for everything.

We need to have an understanding of what causes what to happen in the world, and why.

What we do as a society is seek simple answers.

The world is interconnected and causations run in many directions at once.

The important thing in my view is not to pin the blame for a mistake on somebody, but rather to find out what caused the mistake.

You want to know what happened? YOU happened Rush. That's what happened.

Everybody has some responsibility. The point is, how are we going to fix it? And you don't fix it simply by blaming the other guy, or blaming the past.

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

Any problems that may occur have ultimately been caused by you, because you are responsible for where you are and what you are doing there.

Some people always assume that if you mention a problem, you caused it.

But things don't just fall apart. People break them.

I always think that's really lazy, when I'm watching a TV show or a movie or something, and there's a flashback and the idea is, 'This one moment is the reason that everything happened. This character saw this guy, and this guy said this thing to him, and that's why he is this way.' Because I think in real life, it's not so one-to-one.

There's an urgent need to stop reacting to each immediate vexing issue in isolation. Such response often creates unanticipated second-order effects and even more problems for us.

If we want to make sense of our behavior - all the best, worst, and everything in between - we're not going to get anywhere if we think it can all be explained with one thing, whether it's one part of the brain, one childhood experience, one hormone, one gene, or anything.

We have perfected the art of finding problems without fixing real-world issues. We focus too much on complexity, not harm.

Error is always talkative.

Always blame conditions, not men

We all have some proper noun to blame.

There are, of course, people who didn't create the trouble they're in, but lots of them do.

You make problem, you have problem

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.