Expansion Quotes - page 8
It is the refutation alike of communism and socialism that they thwart the instinct of expansion; that they substitute for individual energy the energy of the government; that they substitute for human personality the blind, mechanical power of the State. The one system, as the other, marks the end of individualism. The one system, as the other, would make each man the image of his neighbor. The one system, as the other, would hold back the progressive, and, by uniformity of reward, gain uniformity of type.
I can look forward to no blissful prospect for a race of men that, under the dominion of the State, at the cost of all freedom of action, at the cost, indeed, of their own true selves, shall enjoy, if one will, a fair abundance of the material blessings of life. ... Into that prison of socialism, with broken enterprise and broken energy, as serfs under the mastery of the State, while human personality is preferred to unreasoning mechanism, mankind must hesitate to step.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
The advent of the Computer age has stimulated a rapid expansion in the use of quantitative techniques for the analysis of economic, urban, social, biological and other types of systems in which it is the animate rather than in dominant role. At present, most of the techniques employed for the analysis of humanistic, i.e., human centred systems are adaptations of the methods that have been developed over a long period of time for dealing with mechanistic systems, i.e., physical systems governed in the main by-the laws of mechanics, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics. The remarkable successes of these methods in unraveling the secrets of nature and enabling us to build better and better machines have inspired a widely held belief that the same or similar techniques can be applied with comparable effectiveness to the analysis of humanistic systems.
Lotfi A. Zadeh