Most pages on this website have quotations that represent the theme of Informationsphere and my general interests and work. That is, quotes refer to different ways of knowing, systems thinking, changing behaviors and perspectives, spirituality, and a smattering of other topical quotes that relate to the theme of the page. All sites quotes are found below. Jon

1. The eyes see only what the mind is prepared to comprehend (Henri Bergson).
2. Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel (old saying).
3. There is nothing more practical than a good theory (Einstein).
4. The first law of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts (Aldo Leopold).
5. A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices (David Bohm).
6. Changing people’s customs is an even more delicate responsibility than surgery (Edward Spicer).
7. We want facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t, it is easier to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions (Jessamyn West).
8. A boil on a man’s neck is more important to him than 40 floods in India (Dale Carnegie).
9. If everything in the universe depends upon everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation (Stephen Hawking).
10. Give me a lever long enough… and single-handed I can move the world (Archimedes).
11. That is our larger destiny: to allow the Earth to organize in a new way, in a manner impossible all the billions of years prior to humanity (Brian Swimme).
12. The probability of a shift in worldview is directly proportional to the extent we acknowledge that we are not dealing with isolated trends ( Mark Woodhouse).
13. Take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes (Morpheus).
14. You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea (Pearl Buck).
15. Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not an end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing (Denis Waitley).
16. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you know for sure that ain’t so (Mark Twain).
17. One must learn by doing the thing, for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try (Sophocles).
18. Most people believe they know how they themselves think, how others think too, and even how institutions evolve. But they are wrong. Their understanding is based on folk psychology, the grasp of human nature by common sense ¾ defined (by Einstein) as everything learned to the age of 18 ¾ shot through with misconceptions, and only slightly advanced over ideas employed by the Greek philosophers (E.O. Wilson).
19. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds (Bob Marley).
20. It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions (Thomas Huxley).
21. The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds ¾ and no programs (Daniel Quinn).
22. The essence of nature guiding is to travel gracefully rather than arrive (Enos Mills).
23. Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them (Einstein).
24. One of the greatest liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake during great periods of social change (Martin Luther King Jr.).
25. To optimize the whole, we must sub-optimize the parts (W. Edwards Deming).
26. History became legend and legend became myth (Fellowship of the Ring).
27. The best way to predict the future is to invent it (Alan Kay).
28. Observe how every truth and every error, each a thought of someone’s mind, clothes itself with societies, houses, cities, language, ceremonies, newspapers (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
29. Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion (Francis Bacon).
30. Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come (Victor Hugo).
31. Sustainability is especially ripe for political controversy and opposition because fundamentally it is a new paradigm that represents significant challenges to the status quo. The paradigm of sustainability, with its notions of limitations and carrying capacities confronts dominant paradigms of progress which do not recognize limits to unchecked growth (Hazel Henderson).
32. Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change (Thomas Kuhn).
33. Only God and I knew what I meant when I wrote it, now only God knows (Robert Frost).
34. Too often people enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought, never taking a principled stand. True justice will never come until those who are not injured are just as indignant as those who are (Kweisi Mfume).
35. We shape our buildings, and then our buildings shape us (Winston Churchill).
36. For every thousand hacking away at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root (Henry David Thoreau).
37. The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes (Marcel Proust).
38. Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival (W. Edwards Deming).
39. When one does not see what one does not see, one does not see that one is blind (Paul Veyne).
40. The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science (Einstein).
41. The illiterate of the 21 st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn (Alvin Toffler).
42. Together you bond. Each one defined as three; all three connected as one. A celebration of life (Marie Mongan).
43. A baby is a blank check made payable to the human race (Barbara Christine Seifert).
44. You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete (F. Buckminster Fuller).
45. Carving is easy, you just go down to the skin and stop (Michelangelo).
46. It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia (Donella Meadows).
47. Political revolutions aim to change political institutions in ways that those institutions themselves prohibit. Their success therefore necessitates the partial relinquishment of one set of institutions in favor of another, and in the interim, society is not fully governed by institutions at all (Thomas Kuhn).
48. The wise man doesn’t give the right answer ¾ he poses the right questions (Claude Levi Strauss).
49. William James used to preach the “will to believe.” For my part, I wish to preach the “will to doubt.”… What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite (Bertrand Russell).
50. The invention of printing radically changed ways of thinking ¾ not just how things are communicated, but what can be thought (Derrick de Kerckhove).
51. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them (George Orwell).
52. No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit (Helen Keller).
53. The modern world arose as a volcanic eruption so suddenly and massively that it buried or transformed all that had preceded it, including landscapes and mindscapes (David Orr).
54. When a thing is funny, search for its hidden truth (George Bernard Shaw).
55. The public will believe a simple lie in preference to a complicated truth (de Tocqueville).
56. Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or sequester information (Donella Meadows).
57. The only thing that I know, is that I know nothing (DesCartes).
58. Human history becomes more a race between education and catastrophe (H. G. Wells).
59. Our culture does not nourish that which is best or noblest in the human spirit. It does not cultivate vision, imagination, or aesthetic or spiritual sensitivity. It does not encourage gentleness, generosity, caring, or compassion. Increasingly in the late 20th Century, the economic-technocratic-statist worldview has become a monstrous destroyer of what is loving and life-affirming in the human soul (Ron Miller).
60. An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you (Morris Berman).
61. The further within myself I go, the farther out to the world I can reach (Chaiwat Thirapantu).
62. In times of change learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists (Eric Hoffer).
63. History is a set of lies agreed upon (Napoleon Bonaparte).
64. Broad, wholesome, charitable views ... can not be acquired by vegetating in one’s little corner of the earth. (Mark Twain)