Skip to content

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

— Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

Another quote →

Topics

More quotes by Kenneth Boulding

Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.

Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods.

Communication can only take place among equals.

The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.

One reason why the progressive state is 'cheerful' is that social conflict is diminished by it.

All Kenneth Boulding quotes →

You may also like

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

Attribution

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