System Quotes

“High school is neither a democracy nor a dictatorship - nor, contrary to popular belief, an anarchic state. High school is a divine-right monarchy. And when the queen goes on vacation, things change.”
― John Green, Paper Towns

“The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic system. But one can't. One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing. One can't put things right in a hole-and-corner way, if you take my meaning.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“Life is a balanced system of learning and evolution. Whether pleasure or pain; every situation in your life serves a purpose. It is up to us to recognize what that purpose could be.”
― Steve Maraboli

“Come forward as servants of Islam, organize the people economically, socially, educationally and politically and I am sure that you will be a power that will be accepted by everybody.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“We must not offer people a system of redemption, a set of insights and principles. We offer people a Redeemer.”
― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“You have to stand guard over the development and maintenance of Islamic democracy, Islamic social justice and the equality of manhood in your own native soil.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“Our entire system, in an economic sense, is based on restriction. Scarcity and inefficiency are the movers of money; the more there is of any resource the less you can charge for it. The more problems there are, the more opportunities there are to make money.

This reality is a social disease, for people can actually gain off the misery of others and the destruction of the environment. Efficiency, abundance and sustainability are enemies of our economic structure, for they are inverse to the mechanics required to perpetuate consumption.

This is profoundly critical to understand, for once you put this together you begin to see that the one billion people currently starving on this planet, the endless slums of the poor and all the horrors of a culture due to poverty and pravity are not natural phenomenon due to some natural human order or lack of earthly resources. They are products of the creation, perpetuation and preservation of artificial scarcity and inefficiency.”
― Peter Joseph

“Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.
It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like 'They can't run me in; I haven't done anything wrong', or 'They can't do that; it's against the law', are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney's Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan's Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take places at the trials of conscientious objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a 'miscarriage of British justice'. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is 'just the same as' or 'just as bad as' totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct,national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the caster oil?
The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig,whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe,is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“In times of widespread chaos and confusion, it has been the duty of more advanced human beings--artists, scientists, clowns and philosophers--to create order. In times such as ours, however, when there is too much order, too much management, too much programming and control, it becomes the duty of superior men and women to fling their favorite monkey wrenches into the machinery. To relive the repression of the human spirit, they must sow doubt and disruption.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all.”
― Alain de Botton

“Losers have goals. Winners have systems.”
― Scott Adams

“The concept of “mental health” in our society is defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of stress.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“Can we drop the ‘artificial intelligence’? It’s a bit like me calling you a meat-based processing system.”
― Alastair Reynolds, On the Steel Breeze

“To see a man slip on a banana skin is to see a rationally structured system suddenly translated into a whirling machine.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“A system is corrupt when it is strictly profit-driven, not driven to serve the best interests of its people, but those of multinational corporations.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“The universe contains many planets which make it what it is – a unified system. In addition, our bodies contain many organs, and each part is congruent to a planet in our solar system. The universe we see out our eyes is a mirror of what is within us. This is what God meant by making man in his image. We are all made as a reflection of God and that reflection of him is within us. Furthermore, not only are all religions connected to the same Truth, or Cosmic Heart, but this concept is also mirrored in the pantheons of ancient religions, where each of the many gods simply represented one set of characteristics of the ONE. And in all cases, these many gods symbolized the planets, therefore mimicking the different parts of the universe and the ONE God’s many mirrors (He Who is All). The structure behind all polytheistic religions of the past and present is one and the same. They are all built on the same foundation as Nature.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“As your heart goes, so goes your family! If your heart isn't right, no child raising system, rules, or gimmicks will ever work. As your heart goes, so goes your parenting!”
― Jim George, A Man After God's Own Heart

“I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade is a system of selfishness, is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature much less by the sentiments of love and heroism but is a system of distrust not of giving, but of taking advantage.”
― Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End

“And the banks - hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created - are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.”
― Richard Joseph Durbin

“Systems cannot be adopted; they can only be developed.”
― Haresh Sippy

“Pattern is often predictable, and anything predictable can be hacked.”
― Aniekee Tochukwu Ezekiel

“Installing massive amounts of wireless devices into every city may eventually be proven to be a global weather modification system.”
― Steven Magee

“Stop Being Incremental! If your system no longer delivers the results you want, don’t go for incremental changes, instead go for complete transformation.”
― Abhishek Ratna, small wins BIG SUCCESS: A handbook for exemplary success in post Covid19 Outbreak Era

“In our own day, there has been too much of a tendency towards authority, and too little care for the preservation of initiative. Men in control of vast organisations have tended to be too abstract in their outlook, to forget what actual human beings are like, and to try to fit men to systems rather than systems to men.”
― Bertrand Russell, Authority and the Individual

“We might presume that a social contract should be a lengthy legal document with many provisions and clauses. But the real authority of a social contract does not derive from a piece of parchment, but from a few simple truths that we all abide by, truths that implicitly structure the relationship between individuals and the institutions we create to serve us. At its heart, a social contract defines what we owe one another.

Recall the terms of the Standardization Covenant:
Society is obligated to reward you with opportunity if and only if you abandon the pursuit of personal fulfillment for the pursuit of standardized excellence.
If we want a democratic meritocracy for ourselves and our children, then we must each choose to ratify a new social contract:
Society is obligated to provide you with the opportunity to pursue fulfillment, and you are accountable for your own fulfillment.
The supreme institutional obligation under the Dark Horse Covenant is to provide Equal Fit. The supreme individual obligation under the Dark Horse Covenant is Personal Accountability.”
― Todd Rose, Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment

“Simplify to amplify. Streamlining your systems is like decluttering your mind; it frees up mental real estate, enhances focus, and unleashes your full potential. So, ditch the complexity, embrace simplicity, and watch your performance skyrocket.”
― Felecia Etienne, Overcoming Mediocrity: Limitless Women

“So what is gratitude, really, but reverence for a system that gives and deprives at random? No, not at random. The non-randomness is exactly the point, right?”
― Alexis Schaitkin, Saint X