Organization Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Twenty-seven years ago, as Emperor of Ethiopia, I mounted the rostrum in Geneva, Switzerland, to address the League of Nations and to appeal for relief from the destruction which had been unleashed against my defenceless nation, by the Fascist invader.
I spoke then both to and for the conscience of the world. My words went unheeded, but history testifies to the accuracy of the warning that I gave in 1936. Today, I stand before the world organization which has succeeded to the mantle discarded by its discredited predecessor. In this body is enshrined the principle of collective security which I unsuccessfully invoked at Geneva. Here, in this Assembly, reposes the best — perhaps the last — hope for the peaceful survival of mankind.

These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.

The military has always been a very introspective organization... One of the reasons why the army is so progressive is its always examining itself. The army is always looking for better ways to do its job.

Anarchy is a word that comes from the Greek, and signifies, strictly speaking, "without government": the state of a people without any constituted authority.
Before such an organization had begun to be considered possible and desirable by a whole class of thinkers, so as to be taken as the aim of a movement (which has now become one of the most important factors in modern social warfare), the word anarchy was used universally in the sense of disorder and confusion, and it is still adopted in that sense by the ignorant and by adversaries interested in distorting the truth.

Errico Malatesta

In Korea and Japan, the Chinese example began to find fertile ground as the political and social organization or those regions developed toward civilized complexity. Buddhist monks became the principle carriers of high Chinese culture to Korea and Japan.... The Chinese model, while of the utmost importance, never eclipsed the local differences that made Japan always and Korea sometimes so distinct from China as properly to constitute a separate civilization.

William Hardy McNeill

Many associate the word scientific with physics. But it means much more than that. Scientific management means a constant search for the facts, the true actualities, and their intelligent, unprejudiced analysis. Thus, and in no other way, policies and their administration are determined. I keep saying to the General Motors organization that we are prepared to spend any proper amount of money to get the facts. Only by increased knowledge can we progress, perhaps I had better say survive. That is really research, but few realize research can and should be just as effectively used in all functional branches of industry as in physics

Alfred P. Sloan

To make a great future India, the whole secret lies in organization, accumulation of power, co-ordination of wills.

Swami Vivekananda

All these peoples that now hope to be nations have long been nationalities. A nation is an organization for collective offence and defense, in peace and war, — essentially based on hate and fear of other nations; a nationality is a cultural group, bound together by home-bred affinities of language, tradition, use and wont, and commonly also by a supposed community race, — essentially based on sympathies and sentiments of self-complacency within itself.

Thorstein Veblen

There are two basic ways market organization is brought about... Some combination of the two is usual the case: Strategic structuring, informal or formal, whereby social agents, including the state, establish a rule regime regulating market access and transactions... Emergent structuring, whereby participants discover or adopt certain similar strategies within bounded rationality and situations with certain opportunity structures and incentive structures. Social network and ecological properties result in relatively well-defined aggregate performance characteristics...

There's no correlation between how good your idea is and how likely your organization will be to embrace it.

I also know that Christianity has held back any further advances in human consciousness for the past thousand years. And for the past century it's been in direct conflict with its illegitimate offspring, Communism (again with a capital C). Both ask the individual to sacrifice his self-interest to the higher goals of the organization. (Which is okay by me as long as it's voluntary; but as soon as either becomes too big—and takes on that damned capital C—they stop asking for cooperation and start demanding it.)
Any higher states of human enlightenment have been sacrificed between these two monoliths.

In a molecular organization the rings of responsibility are round and easily maneuvered. Power is handed off, shared, and reassigned as the need arises.

Almost every organization... exhibits two faces — a smiling face which it turns toward its members and a frowning face which it turns to the world outside.

Kenneth Boulding

Beyond the slogans of "a common language and a common citizenship" a program of Americanization has not been accepted. America, the greatest immigration country in the world, has no national domestic policy whatsoever and no organization as a government for dealing with race assimilation, its most delicate and fundamental problem. Americans like to think hi a crude way of this country as a melting pot, with peasants from Ellis Island going in at the top and citizens in American clothes going out at the bottom. We now know there has been little real change accomplished, and we are beginning to wonder whether the new arrival needs as much change as we thought he did to become one of us.

The man is picked out and somehow he gets to understand what's expected of him in the way of a contribution, and he ponies up—all from gratitude to the organization that honored him, see?

George Washington Plunkitt

Systems analysis, conceived in a policy sciences framework, is the macro instrument of the systems manager for understanding, evaluating and improving human systems — which are defined as goal oriented interdependent units incorporating people, organization and some form of technology for control, administration or output.

Richard F. Ericson

I don't think anybody who looks carefully at us thinks that we are a left-wing or a right-wing organization.

Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour

An organization is a group of living human beings. The formal or official design for living never completely accounts for what the participants do. It is always supplemented by what is called the informal structure, which arises as the individual brings into play his own personality, his special problems and interests. Formal relations co-ordinate roles or specialized activities, not persons.

Philip Selznick

An organization which depends solely upon its blueprints of prescribed behavior is a very fragile social system.

The criticality of a resource can be measured as the ability of an organization to function in the absence of the resource or in the absence of the market for the output.

Jeffrey Pfeffer

It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an elemental atom, than that this atom should embrace in its organization, and evolve, all the noble forms of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life.

The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.

Humberto Maturana

Good organization, said Magnus. I knew the man who founded it, back in the 1800s. Woolsey Scot. Respectable old werewolf family. Alec made an ugly sound in the back of his throat. Did you sleep with him, too? Magnus's cat eyes widened. Alexander!

Cassandra Clare

Why was it that the instant you sent someone a check, no matter how worthy the organization, the first thing they did was ask you for more? Irritating, and a waste of the money she had just sent them.