David Fleming Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

David Fleming
Large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.

David Fleming
Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.

David Fleming
I am a capitalist and I am a bit of a right winger, and I think in many ways the system we have got at the moment is really not a bad system. I think capitalism is a good thing. The only problem with capitalism is that it destroys the planet, and that it's based on growth. I mean apart from those two little details it's got a lot to be said in its favour.

David Fleming
'The harder I work, the luckier I get'. It was Thomas Jefferson who started the stream of variations on that theme. He should have added, 'The harder I work on one thing, the unluckier I get on all the other commitments I haven't had time for'.

David Fleming
While many principles in economics textbooks are grossly oversimplified with children's-storybook examples, it is also true that they can clarify some of the fundamental economic relationships: e. g. stories about Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday, or about a person whose shopping list contains just the two items – apples and pears, or cummerbunds and kumquats. The trouble is, some people who learn their economics in an engaging scale-model landscape find it hard to leave it. The models of great beauty and complexity which they produce can confirm the richly-misleading potential of absurd assumptions.

David Fleming
At present, we have a policy-response shaped by sophisticated climate science, brilliant technology and pop behaviourism, based on simple assumptions about carrot-and-stick incentives.

David Fleming
It's not necessarily against a system that it collapses, because most systems do collapse in the end. That's a part of the wheel of life - systems do collapse. So I'm to some extent slightly inclined to forgive capitalism for being about to collapse. I mean there are lots of fine things, lots of love affairs and the like which have come to a sticky end. On the other hand, it is quite an accusation - quite hard for it to live down - that it's going to destroy the entire planet with it.

David Fleming