Kenneth Boulding Quotes

137 Sourced Quotes

This concept of capital-rebuilding is so important that it may be desirable to digress for a moment. In the broadest sense of the word, capital means the sum total of the valuable things possessed by the individuals of a society, excluding "claims," that is, mere titles to property. The word is used to mean both the inventory of these valuable things; the houses, factories, machines, livestock, stocks of raw materials, and goods in all stages of completion; and also to mean the sum of the values of these things. It should generally be clear from the context which of these two meanings is intended.

Kenneth Boulding
We can think of history as a kind of layer cake in which a number of different layers run side by side through time, each with a dynamic of its own, and yet each from time to time profoundly penetrating and interacting with others.

Kenneth Boulding
[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together

Kenneth Boulding
[Boulding grasps the significance of sociobiology's emphasis on biogenetics] that there are biogenetic factors in learning capacity and potential can hardly be denied... [yet] biogenetically imposed limits to human learning... seem to be much more remote... than are the limitations imposed by the biogenetic structure.

Kenneth Boulding
If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things.

Kenneth Boulding
[Peace praxis is] a peace process that deals with conflict integratively.

Kenneth Boulding
Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity.

Kenneth Boulding
The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments

Kenneth Boulding
It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order – not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies.

Kenneth Boulding
A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.

Kenneth Boulding
The gene is a wonderful teacher. It is, however, a very poor learner.

Kenneth Boulding
Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.

Kenneth Boulding
There are only two things we know about the future. One is where and when eclipses will take place and the other is that a kitten will never grow up into a rhinoceros.

Kenneth Boulding
The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we should find it hard to get rid of.

Kenneth Boulding
Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

Kenneth Boulding
The carbon atom, for instance, knows how to join with four hydrogen atoms or with two oxygen atoms. It also mysteriously enough knows how to join with one oxygen atom to form carbon monoxide. It is little more than a figure of speech, however, to regard this ability as knowledge.

Kenneth Boulding
Science might also be defined as the process of substituting unimportant questions which can be answered for important questions which cannot.

Kenneth Boulding