Top 40 Donella H. Meadows Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

— Donella H. Meadows

2. “Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and chaotic. It is dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity, not uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, that’s what makes it beautiful, and that’s what makes it work.”

— Donella H. Meadows

3. “The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.”

— Donella H. Meadows

4. “Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem, which prevents or distracts one from the harder and longer-term task of solving the real problem.”

— Donella H. Meadows

5. “The world is nonlinear. Trying to make it linear for our mathematical or administrative convenience is not usually a good idea even when feasible, and it is rarely feasible.”

— Donella H. Meadows

6. “Storing information means increasing the complexity of the mechanism.”

— Donella H. Meadows

7. “We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people.”

— Donella H. Meadows

8. “A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same.”

— Donella H. Meadows

9. “The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.”

— Donella H. Meadows

10. “The idea that there might be limits to growth is for many people impossible to imagine. Limits are politically unmentionable and economically unthinkable. The culture tends to deny the possibility of limits by placing a profound faith in the powers of technology, the workings of a free market, and the growth of the economy as the solution to all problems, even the problems created by growth.”

— Donella H. Meadows

11. “Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.”

— Donella H. Meadows

12. “God grant us the serenity to exercise our bounded rationality freely in the systems that are structured appropriately, the courage to restructure the systems that aren’t, and the wisdom to know the difference!”

— Donella H. Meadows

13. “A system is more than the sum of its parts. It may exhibit adaptive, dynamic, goal-seeking, self-preserving, and sometimes evolutionary behavior.”

— Donella H. Meadows

14. “Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.”

— Donella H. Meadows

15. “The balancing feedback loop that should keep the system state at an acceptable level is overwhelmed by a reinforcing feedback loop heading downhill. The lower the perceived system state, the lower the desired state. The lower the desired state, the less discrepancy, and the less corrective action is taken. The less corrective action, the lower the system state. If this loop is allowed to run unchecked, it can lead to a continuous degradation in the system’s performance.”

— Donella H. Meadows

16. “Because of feedback delays within complex systems, by the time a problem becomes apparent it may be unnecessarily difficult to solve. – A stitch in time saves nine.”

— Donella H. Meadows

17. “We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.”

— Donella H. Meadows

18. “Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space.”

— Donella H. Meadows

19. “The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behavior.”

— Donella H. Meadows

20. “It is to “get” at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny.”

— Donella H. Meadows

21. “Stocks usually change slowly. They can act as delays, lags, buffers, ballast, and sources of momentum in a system.”

— Donella H. Meadows

22. “Systems thinkers see the world as a collection of stocks along with the mechanisms for regulating the levels in the stocks by manipulating flows.”

— Donella H. Meadows

23. “If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.”

— Donella H. Meadows

24. “Don’t be stopped by the “if you can’t define it and measure it, I don’t have to pay attention to it” ploy. No one can define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”

— Donella H. Meadows

25. “If information-based relationships are hard to see, functions or purposes are even harder. A system’s function or purpose is not necessarily spoken, written, or expressed explicitly, except through the operation of the system. The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.”

— Donella H. Meadows

26. “Once you start listing the elements of a system, there is almost no end to the process. You can divide elements into sub-elements and then sub-sub-elements. Pretty soon you lose sight of the system. As the saying goes, you can’t see the forest for the trees.”

— Donella H. Meadows

27. “The model is constructed in such a way that the global population will eventually level off and start declining, if industrial output per capita rises high enough. But we see little “real world” evidence that the richest people or nations ever lose interest in getting richer. Therefore, policies built into World3 represent the assumption that capital owners will continue to seek gains in their wealth indefinitely and that consumers will always want to increase their consumption.”

— Donella H. Meadows

28. “You can’t navigate well in an interconnected, feedback-dominated world unless you take your eyes off short-term events and look for long term behavior and structure; unless you are aware of false boundaries and bounded rationality; unless you take into account limiting factors, nonlinearities and delays.”

— Donella H. Meadows

29. “A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements-as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact.”

— Donella H. Meadows

30. “Missing information flows is one of the most common causes of system malfunction. Adding or restoring information can be a powerful intervention, usually much easier and cheaper than rebuilding physical infrastructure.”

— Donella H. Meadows

31. “We know a tremendous amount about how the world works, but not nearly enough. Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so. We can improve our understanding, but we can’t make it perfect.”

— Donella H. Meadows

32. “In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.”

— Donella H. Meadows

33. “Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So.”

— Donella H. Meadows

34. “So, what is a system? A system is a set of things – people, cells, molecules, or whatever – interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time.”

— Donella H. Meadows

35. “A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long term delays. That’s why a massive central-planning system, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily functions poorly.”

— Donella H. Meadows

36. “Many of the interconnections in systems operate through the flow of information. Information holds systems together and plays a great role in determining how they operate.”

— Donella H. Meadows

37. “A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.”

— Donella H. Meadows

38. “You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams.”

— Donella H. Meadows

39. “Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.”

— Donella H. Meadows

40. “An important function of almost every system is to ensure its own perpetuation.”

— Donella H. Meadows

41. “Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe.”

— Donella H. Meadows

42. “Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.”

— Donella H. Meadows

43. “The world would be a different place if instead of competing to have the highest per capita GNP, nations competed to have the highest per capita stocks of wealth with the lowest throughput, or the lowest infant mortality, or the greatest political freedom, or the cleanest environment, or the smallest gap between the rich and the poor.”

— Donella H. Meadows

44. “The trick, as with all the behavioral possibilities of complex systems, is to recognize what structures contain which latent behaviors, and what conditions release those behaviors – and, where possible, to arrange the structures and conditions to reduce the probability of destructive behaviors and to encourage the possibility of beneficial ones.”

— Donella H. Meadows