Complex Institutions Quotes & Sayings

They are the key components of our civilization. I want to show that inside these political, economic, legal and social black boxes are highly complex sets of interlocking institutions. Like the circuit boards inside your computer or your smartphone, it is these institutions that make the gadget work. And if it stops working, it is probably because of a defect in the institutional wiring. You cannot understand what is wrong just by looking at the shiny casing. You need to look inside. — Niall Ferguson

We are so accustomed to the miracle of private enterprise that we habitually take it for granted. But how does private industry solve the incredibly complex problem of turning out tens of thousands of different goods and services in the proportions in which they are wanted by the public? ... It solves these problems through the institutions of private property, competition, the free market, and the existence of money - through the interrelations of supply and demand, costs and prices, profits and losses. — Henry Hazlitt

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. — Will Durant

The blanket assertion that corporations are people obfuscates the complex issues at play in the changing business world. Corporation are institutions. People are people. — Don Tapscott

These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have. — Abraham Lincoln

What's the worst that can happen?" said Teatime. "You'll lose your job. Whereas if you don't, you'll die. So if you look at it like that, we're actually doing you a favor. Oh, do say yes. — Terry Pratchett

In a culture that worshipped its ancestors, to die without offspring was next of kin to damnation. — Joseph Duncan

Differences between Catholic and Protestant countries did not incite rivalries between European states, or cause the growing sense of national identity and, sometimes, isolationism that was developing among the countries of Europe. These were happening anyway, for a complex variety of political and economic reasons. But religious differences did, at times, contribute to them - for example in Spain, where the inward-looking institutions of the Counter-Reformation seemed aimed at creating a nation of soldiers and ecclesiastics in great contrast to the outgoing, trade-based, profit-minded society of the Calvinist Netherlands. These generalizations hide many local variations - there were busy Spanish merchants, and contemplative, spiritual, people in many Protestant lands. But travelers across Europe remarked on the increasingly striking differences between nations. — Fiona MacDonald

The issue of homosexuality in the church is complex, highly charged, and defined by misrecognized fears related to rapid social change and the perceived threat to familiar social institutions and the sense of security they represent. Underlying this conflict are the church's historic discomfort with issues of sexuality, and dualistic constructions that codify that unease into categories of sexual insiders (monogamous heterosexuals and celibates) and outsiders (everybody else). These have been magnified in recent years by cultural differences between different generations and African countries where the church has grown. — Jane Ellen Nickell

The experiences of other totalitarian dictatorships show that behind the centralized and hierarchical communication and decision-making structures, apparently so clearly ordered by way of Party or dictators' decrees, lurked considerably more complex processes and structures. Under National Socialism there was a polycratic jumble of competing institutions and organizations (Wehrmacht, economy, NSDAP, SS). It was characteristic of Hitler to go long periods of time without making any clear-cut decisions or to circumvent these decisions by building new institutions. The — Jens Gieseke

When I have people around, I'm a chatterbox. But when I'm alone, I never speak. I don't talk to myself; it's just not my schtick. — J. C. Chandor

Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. — H.G.Wells

Labelling is no longer a liberating political act but a necessity in order to gain entrance into the academic industrial complex and other discussions and spaces. For example, if so called "radical" or "progressive" people don't hear enough "buzz" words (like feminist, anti-oppression, anti-racist, social justice, etc.) in your introduction, then you are deemed unworthy and not knowledgeable enough to speak with authority on issues that you have lived experience with. The criteria for identifying as a feminist by academic institutions, peer reviewed journals, national bodies, conferences, and other knowledge gatekeepers is very exclusive. It is based on academic theory instead of based on lived experiences or values. Name-dropping is so elitist! You're not a "real" feminist unless you can quote, or have read the following white women: (insert Women's Studies 101 readings). — Krysta Williams

Mills surveyed a postwar landscape in which Mass Man had been successfully alienated from the actual levers of power in the society. As institutions grew larger, and war and governance more complex, a subclass of men that Mills dubbed the "Power Elite" exerted more and more control over the nation's pillar institutions. "Insofar — Christopher L. Hayes

It's not often in life that you can misbehave for the good of the cause — Amin Maalouf

In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women's prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts. — Angela Y. Davis

What does it mean that the most popular and unifying form of entertainment in America circa 2014 features giant muscled men, mostly African-American, engaged in a sport that causes many of them to suffer brain damage? What does it mean that our society has transmuted the intuitive physical joys of childhood - run, leap, throw, tackle - into a corporatized form of simulated combat? That a collision sport has become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning, and the undisputed champ of our colossal Athletic Industrial Complex? — Steve Almond

That doesn't mean that the top fifteen institutions in the ranking somehow don't belong there at all. But what is the difference between number two and number eight in any meaningful sense? As an administrator who worked to build a complex university, I find the assumption slightly offensive. We need to be committed to excellence, not to lists. — Henry Rosovsky

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. — Sigmund Freud

I think that it [the Church] stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonisms in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces towards the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom. — H.G.Wells

Europe has shown how government can be organised in a network. Its institutions both compete and co-operate and include a directly elected parliament that does not appoint the executive, independent judiciaries and a complex set of relationships between the Commission, the Council of Ministers and the Parliament. — Geoff Mulgan

One of the Arsenal players came up to me afterwards and said it had been an honor to be on the same pitch as me. I thought, My God, that is a great thing to say when your team has just lost. — Lionel Messi

It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them. — Charles Horton Cooley

As the society has gotten larger and more complex, individuals have lost their ability to influence any of the institutions that affect their lives. — Robert Teeter

Economic management involves the operation of economic frameworks in real time - for example, in the private sector, the management of complex financial institutions or, in the public sector, the day-to-day supervision of those institutions. — Ben Bernanke

Children's games constitute the most admirable social institutions. The game of marbles, for instance, as played by boys, contains an extremely complex system of rules - that is to say, a code of laws, a jurisprudence of its own. — Jean Piaget

If a writer knows everything that is going to happen, then his book is dead before he begins it. — V.S. Naipaul

By and large, the answer to the question "How do large institutions survive?" is "They don't!" The vast majority of large modern-day institutions some of them extremely vital to the functioning of our complex civilization simply fail to exist in the first place. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I live in New York, but I'm gone 310, 320 days a year. My apartment is storage. — Christian Scott

Modern society is large and complex, with institutions wielding great power over the lives of many. This is why Johnson and Fowler added a dire parting shot in their predictions. Since you are programmed to become increasingly overconfident the less you understand about any given scenario, you can expect to find the most destructive overconfidence in places that are exceedingly complicated and unpredictable. — David McRaney

We deceive ourselves if we believe we can hold on to old models as ideologies whimper off to a shallow grave in prolonged agony of people, institutions and cultures. — Said Elias Dawlabani

The World Trade Organization, The World Bank, The International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions virtually write economic policy and parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent, historically complex societies and devastate them, all under the fluttering banner of 'reform'. — Arundhati Roy

What you haven't done by thirty you're not likely to do. What you have done you'll do lots more. — John Updike

The reasons why institutions fail and societies change are complex, and simplistic explanations should evoke automatic suspicion. Sometimes external causes - droughts, plagues or foreign invasions - can unsettle a nation, or its leadership may prove inadequate because of personal factors. In every case, a society faces problems, and is solutions or lack of response set a course for the future. — Thomas W. Africa

Inflation is the fiscal complement of statism and arbitrary government. It is a cog in the complex of policies and institutions which gradually lead toward totalitarianism . — Ludwig Von Mises