“The new science keeps reminding us that in this participative universe, nothing lives alone. Everything comes into form because of relationship. We are constantly called into relationship — to information, people, events, ideas, and life. Even reality is created through our participation in relationships. We chose what we notice; we relate to certain things and ignore others. Through these chosen relationships we co-create our world. If we are interested in effecting change, it is crucial to remember that we are working within webs of relations, not with machines.
Margaret J. Wheatley (1999: 145)”
We share our posts with a hand picked quotes. They do remind us to why we are doing what we are doing. They help us to keep motivated and stay focused on our purpose.
More Quotes
As we let our own ligth shine, we give other people the permission to do the same.
Marianne Williamson
And one day we will wonder why it took us so long to fit beneath our feet a solid floor on which we can all stand.
Philippe Van Parijs
Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
Karl Popper
A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.
Grace Lee Boggs
You thought I knew where the road was and you followed me. But no. I didn’t know where the road was. We had to make the road together. That’s how we got where we wanted to be. We made the road. It wasn’t there.
Commandante Marcos, Chiapas.
Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing more; wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking. By walking ones make the road, and up on glancing behind onde sees the path that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road – only wakes upon the sea.
Antonio Machado
We make a way out of no way.
Martin Luther King
When an old culture is dying, the new culture is born from a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.
Rudolf Bahro
I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope. They are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on a social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.
Thomas Merton
Again and again, some people in the crowd wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and they emerge according to broader laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold gestures. The future speaks ruthlessly through them.
Ranier Maria Rilke
What makes us happy is agency, knowing that we have some control of what is going to happen in our life.
Seth Godin
The purpose of the crypto evolution and decentralisation movement is for us all to become more human again. It is not an evolution of polarization but inclusion.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci
If you don’t prioritize your life, someone else will.
Greg McKeown
Creativity is a combination of discipline and a childlike spirit
Robert Creene
The map is not the territory – but this maps opens the territory in which we ask the right questions and find …
Daniel Christian Wahl
When the window op opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shades.
Tom Peters
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. – T.S. Eliot
Goals become actions, actions become results – Brian Tracy
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.—Eleanor Roosevelt.
Reading is an act of civilization; it’s one of the greatest acts of civilization because it takes the free raw material of the mind and builds castles of possibilities. – Ben Okri
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T.S. Eliot
What we want is to cross different silos and you can only do that successfully if you speak the language of each silo. You come in as a designer trying to speak management, trying to speak accounting, trying to speak marketing, trying to speak software development, so you need to learn these languages. Then you become a translator between the different silos and that’s often the way to break them down. So, my advice to any kind of designer is learn besides your design skills, learn also something else. Become a subject matter expert on a different topic, immerse yourself in accounting (legal, marketing, management), learn the problems accounting are facing in an organization and then become a translator between fields. — Marc Stickdorn
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. – Naomi Klein
While design became a professional practice with the rise of the industrial culture, more fundamentally, as elemental to mind, it is and always has been, one of the designations of what it is to be human. In this frame, everyone is a designer.
– Tony Fry
You are only free when you realize that you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great. – Maya Angelou.
Privacy is actually a battle of control and acces. Privacy is a battle of who has rights to data and who doesn’t – Tim Chang.
Design with People and Nature first as the potential solution and then add Tech as a potential enabler (not the other way around) – unknown.
I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe. – Buckminster Fuller
Everey challenge you encounter in life is a fork in the road. You have the choice to choose which way you go – backward, forward, breakdown or breakthrough. – Enouh Onuoha
Seeing is not believing, believing is seeing ! You see things, not as they are, but as you are. – Eric Butterworth
Integrity is choosing courage over comfort; choosing what is right over what is fun, fast or easy; and choosing to practice our values rather than simply professing them. – Brené Brown.
Information is data with a purpose and a context.
Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy. Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship. – Peter Drucker.
If you are looking for a monument, look around you – Sir Christopher Wren.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that donors the servant and has forgotten the gift. – Einstein
People in systems do not actually do what the system says they are doing. – John Gall
Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.
— Robert L. Peters
The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. ― James Baldwin
Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is nog enough, we must do. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Privacy is espoused as the most fundamental of rights, marketed as the most desirable of commodities and pronounced dead twice a week. – Jonathan Franzen ‘Imperial Bedroom’
Design thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success. – Tim Brown.
I need the sea, because it teaches me. – Pablo Neruda.
Systems thinking has a certain simplicity and elegance to it — basically, a shift from seeing the world as a machine to understanding it as a network… To deal with nonlinear systems requires a change of perspective from objects to relationships, from measuring to mapping, and this is why visual thinking becomes important.
– Fritjof Capra
Those who love peace must learn to organise as effectively as those who love war.
– Martin Luther King
The major problems of the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way people think. – Gregory Bateson
Our sense of ‘separation from Nature’ corrupts us, it fuels an arrogance, a hubris, whereupon common sense becomes insanity. – Gregory Bateson
Community doesn’t just create abundance – community is abundance. If we could learn that equation from the world of nature, the human world might be transformed. – Parker J Palmer
Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
—M. Conway
When everything is connected to everything else, for the better or for worse, everything matters – Bruce Mau.
The individual can take initiatives without anybody’s permission. Only individuals can think. Only the individual disregards his fears and commits himself exclusively to reforming the human environment.
– Buckminster Fuller.
Good Design is Good Business. – Thomas Watson Jr.
Never let a good crisis go to waste – Winston Churchill
A goal without a plan is just a wish –
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
A near zero marginal cost communication/energy infrastructure for the Collaborative Age is now within sight. The technology needed to make it happen is already deployed. At present, it’s all about scaling up and building out.
– Jemery Rifkin.
Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era – it’s a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology useable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good. – Clement Mok
My idea of village SWARAJ is that is a complete republic, independent of its neighbors for its own vital wants, and yet interdependent for many others which dependence is a necessity. – Mahatma Gandhi.
Human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture – that is, when they are making history. – Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself. – Thomas Paine
Decoration perpetuates the status quo by making it palatable, design alters it. – Aral Balkan.
Design without ethics is manipulation. – Aral Balkan.
Form follows Function – Louis Sullivan
It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don’t require capitalism. – Jeremy Rifkin
Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology. – Jeremy Rifkin
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. –
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Markets are human artifacts, not natural phenomena. Market Design gives us a chance to maintain and improve some of humanity’s most ancient, essential inventions. – Alvine E. Roth
The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.
– Friedrich Hayek
Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principles of laissez faire. – Friedrich Hayek
Internet marketplaces have very precise rules, because when a market is on the web, its rules have to be formalized in software. – Alvine E. Roth
A market has to solve multiple problems; it has to strengthen all the links in the chain of potential failures enough so that none to them will break – Alvine E. Roth
Building a better mousetrap isn’t always rewarded when the mice have a say in the matter – Alvin E. Roth
We shape our tools and then our tools shape us –
Marshall McLuhan
Technology is neither good, nor bad, nor is it neutral –
Melvin Kranzberg
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. ―
Charles Darwin
I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.― Steven Wright
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. – J.F. Kennedy
There is no cloud, just other people’s computer
– Free Software Foundation
Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.
― Ram Dass
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
– E.O. Wilson
There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer. – Isaac Asimov.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
― Søren Kierkegaard
All human beings are entrepreneurs, when we were in the caves, we were self-employed, finding our food, feeding ourselves. That’s how human history began, but as civilization came, we suppressed it and we became labor. We forgot that we are entrepreneurs. – Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and pioneer of micro-finance.
Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet.
– Donella Meadow
You cannot step into the same stream twice. – Heraclitus
Not all those who wander are lost. – J.R.R. Tolkien
A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.
― Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
I have become my own version of an optimist. If I can’t make it through one door, I’ll go through another door – or I’ll make a door. Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present. – Rabindranath Tagore
I certainly never feel discouraged. I can’t myself raise the winds that might blow us or this ship into a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that when the winds comes, I can catch it.
– E.F. Schumacher
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. ― Steve Jobs
Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.
― Karen Armstrong
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy? ― Albert Einstein
Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. ― Brené Brown
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one. ― Malcolm Forbes
Be yourself, everyone else is already taken. ― Oscar Wilde
Your playing small does not serve the world.
– Marianne Williamson
We’ve learned that we’ve allowed technological capabilities to dictate policies and practices, rather than ensuring that our laws and values guide our technological capabilities.
–Edward Snowden
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. – Barack Obama
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
– Maya Angelou
The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
― Voltaire
It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it. – Oscar Wilde
You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ― R. Buckminster Fuller