A Quote by William Ross Ashby

When a whole system is composed of a numbers of subsystems, the one that tends to dominate is the least stable.

William Ross Ashby

Quote Topics

Composed Dominate Least Numbers Stable System Tends Whole

Quote Author

William Ross Ashby
September 6, 1903 - November 15, 1972

Some scholars argue that although the brain might contain neural subsystems, or modules, specialized for tasks like recognizing faces and understanding language, it also contains a part that constitutes a person, a self: the chief executive of all the subsystems.

Paul Bloom

Money ... is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society.

Murray Rothbard

The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences.

Carroll Quigley

[The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.

Kenneth E. Boulding

If you're going to have a male dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

Gloria Steinem

If you're going to have a male-dominant system, to maintain the system, you have to teach men to dominate.

Gloria Steinem

The incentive for the outsider is to attack the system right up to the moment he is co-opted by it. The incentive for the insider -and this took some getting used to- is to allow yourself to be attacked, and then co-opt your most ferocious attackers, and their best ideas. The effect on the system as a whole is to make it more stable, because everyone winds up working on its behalf.

Michael Lewis

Government planning not only fails; it tends to produce outcomes that are the opposite of what its proponents say that they favor. The only stable and productive social system is one that embraces human liberty in its totality, and defends the market economy, private property, sound money, and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive.

Llewellyn Rockwell

When women and blacks were let in, the system didn't miss a beat. When gays are given their equality, the system will be as stable/unstable as it was before. And when animals are liberated one day, the world will be a beautiful place and the system will still function.

Gary Yourofsky

Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn't fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.

Theodore Kaczynski

As far as I'm concerned, the world is composed of stories. For architects, the world is composed of buildings, for actors the world is composed of theatres, or whatever... For me, the world is simply composed of stories, when I look, that's what I see.

Neil Gaiman

Everybody wants to see Ukraine - one of the largest countries in Europe - stable with a stable economic situation, because instability in Ukraine can bring instability in the whole region.

Vitali Klitschko

For it is precisely because certain groups have no representation in a number of recognized political structures that their position tends to be so stable, their oppression so continuous.

Kate Millett

When we trace the part of which this terrestrial system is composed, and when we view the general connection of those several parts, the whole presents a machine of a peculiar construction by which it is adapted to a certain end. We perceive a fabric, erected in wisdom, to obtain a purpose worthy of the power that is apparent in the production of it.

James Hutton

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.