Stable Quotes - page 17
Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty', I don't mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk.
Donald Schön
A social system does not move smoothly from one state of its culture to another... Something old must come apart in order for something new to come together. But for individuals within the system, there is no clear grasp of the next stable state - only a clear picture of the one to be lost Hence, the coming apart carries uncertainty and anguish for the members of the system since it puts at risk the basis for self-identity that the system had provided.
Donald Schön
As we look around the organizational world we begin to see that it is possible to identify different species of organization in different kinds of environments. Just as we find polar bears in arctic regions, camels in deserts, and alligators in swamps, we notice that certain species of organization are better ‘‘adapted'' to specific environmental conditions than others. We find that bureaucratic organizations tend to work most effectively in environments that are stable or protected in some way and that very different species are found in more competitive and turbulent regions, such as the environments of high-tech firms in the aerospace and microelectronics industries.
Gareth Morgan
Gold, he learned, was considered to be a reliable store of value because extracting it from the ground required a certain amount of effort that tended to remain stable over time. When new, easy-to-mine gold deposits were found, or new mining technologies developed, the value of gold tended to fall. It didn't take a huge amount of acumen, then, to understand that the value of virtual gold in the game world could be made stable in a directly analogous way: namely, by forcing players to expend a certain amount of time and effort to extract a certain amount of virtual gold...
Neal Stephenson
The intimate coupling of two men or two women is not marriage. It is a pale and misshapen counterfeit that will only serve to empty marriage of its meaning and destroy the institution that is the keystone in the arch of civilization ... Marriage is the sine qua non for healthy children and a stable society. It is 'fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race'...
James Kennedy (televangelist)
Stabilizing the euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God.
Jonathan Sacks
The anorexic body is held in the grip of will alone; its meaning is far from stable. What it says - 'Notice me, feed me, mother me' - is not what it means, for such attentions constitute an agonising test of that will, and also threaten to return the body to the dreaded 'normality' it has been such ecstasy to escape.
Rachel Cusk
The proposition that markets drive economic efficiency is central to much of economics. Adam Smith illustrated that the "invisible hand” of the market drives efficient allocation of resources in a system of division of labor. Friedrich Hayek illustrated the central importance of the price system as an information processing mechanism more powerful than any centrally planned system could ever be. Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu illustrated that complete and perfect markets deliver a Pareto-efficient equilibrium, in which no one person can be made better off without making someone else worse off. And the development of the efficient- market and rational- expectations hypotheses suggested that financial markets are in fact efficient, and that the conditions required for efficiency and for rational and stable equilibria apply even in contracts between the present and the future, which financial markets provide.
Adair Turner, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell
I think I had been badly affected by.. ..the romance of Abstract Expressionism. ..particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like 'Art News' and 'Arts', which I read religiously. .I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo.. ..something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux. [reacting on a question about 'gesture' panting].
Frank Stella
