Skip to content

If a government proclaims its interest in protecting the environment but allocates little money or efforts toward that goal, environmental protection is not, in fact, the government's purpose. Purposes are deduced from behaviour, not from rhetoric or stated goals.

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

Another quote →

Topics

Government

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)

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.

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)

All Donella Meadows quotes →

You may also like

Ill can he rule the great, that cannot reach the small.

Edmund Spenser The Faerie Queene (1589)

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

James Madison

Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other.

Leon Trotsky The Revolution Betrayed (1936)

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.

John Adams

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.