Skip to content

Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they're designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.

— Donella Meadows Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)

Another quote →

Topics

Future

More quotes by Donella Meadows

Models can easily become so complex that they are impenetrable, unexaminable, and virtually unalterable.

Meadows (1980)

The bounded rationality of each actor in a system may not lead to decisions that further the welfare of the system as a whole.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)

If you want to understand the deepest malfunctions of systems, pay attention to the rules and to who has power over them.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer (2008)

Calculating how much carbon is absorbed by which forests and farms is a tricky task, especially when politicians do it.

Meadows (2000)

Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals.

All Donella Meadows quotes →

You may also like

A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Donella Meadows (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.