Self-Organization Quotes

The Constitution does not expressly provide for a right of association. Gradually, however, the 1st Amendment and the ‘liberty’ interest secured by the Fourteenth Amendment have been interpreted to protect a person's right to associate with others who share similar ideas, interests, and goals. Self-government is more than Self. In many ways, America is a nation of joiners. Americans band together to seek friendship, cooperation, and concerted action.

On what basis should our policy rest? It should rest on our own strength, and that means regeneration through one's own efforts. We are not alone; all the countries and people in the world opposed to imperialism are our friends. Nevertheless, we stress regeneration through our own efforts. Relying on the forces we ourselves organize, we can defeat all Chinese and foreign reactionaries.

The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.

Chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized.

Now technology gives you a chance to help organize. You don't have to wait for either the inefficiency or the corruption. You don't have to wait for government. You can actually self-organize and build institutions bottom up.

To a physicist life looks nothing short of a miracle. It's just amazing what living things can do.

I've done community organizing my whole life and I think to myself, as an organizer, we don't wait for people to come to us and say, 'Help us organize something.' We go out into the community, and we bring the skills to a group of people to organize themselves.

God put a secret art into the forces of Nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system.

Education is a work of self-organization by which man adapts himself to the conditions of life.

No amount of moral admonishment or "indirect pressure" will guarantee that our demands are met, in the absence of our own organizational presence on the ground. Only by struggling ourselves can we convince our allies of our attachment to the revolution, to the land, and to our national rights. And only by struggling ourselves will we have the chance to impose our demands, in the face of all reactionary opposition.

If I had to define life in a single phrase, I should clearly express my thought of throwing into relief one characteristic which, in my opinion, sharply differentiates biological science. I should say: life is creation.

I think the next century will be the century of complexity.

There is a tendency for things to right themselves.

You could not have evolved a complex system like a city or an organism - with an enormous number of components - without the emergence of laws that constrain their behavior in order for them to be resilient.

Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organise themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?

Living things have no inertia, and tend to no equilibrium.

Amazingly when you add life and consciousness to the equation you can actually explain some of the biggest puzzles of science.

Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.

Information is just simply bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels of self-reflection and self-coordination using whatever means are necessary.

I, and all the complex things around me, exist only because many things were assembled in a very precise way. The 'emergent' properties are not magical. They are really there and eventually they may start re-arranging the environments that generated them. But they don't exist 'in' the bits and pieces that made them; they emerge from the arrangement of those bits and pieces in very precise ways. And that is also true of the emergent entities known as "you" and "me".

Economics is concerned with what emerges, not what anyone intended.

I couldn't possibly have become a member of this Institute, you know, if I hadn't organized it myself.

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes--circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.

The self-organizing and self-correcting imprint is on all aspects of reality. So not only was your body formed by this invisible hand, not only does your body continue to work by this invisible hand, but every aspect of your life - emotionally, physiologically, and spiritually - is also programmed to thrive, is also programmed for self-organization and self-correction.

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.