Top 60 Kenneth E. Boulding Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Kenneth E. Boulding

2. “The economy of the future might be called the “spaceman economy,” in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

3. “There is no such thing as economics, only social science applied to economic problems.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

4. “Deciding under uncertainty is bad enough, but deciding under an illusion of certainty is catastrophic.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

5. “DNA was the first three-dimensional Xerox machine.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

6. “Canada has no cultural unity, no linguistic unity, no religious unity, no economic unity, no geographic unity. All it has is unity.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

7. “Theories without facts may be barren, but facts without theories are meaningless.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

8. “Know this: though love is weak and hate is strong, Yet hate is short, and love is very long.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

9. “Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

10. “There is a quiet, open place in the depths of the mind, to which we can go many times in the day and lift up our soul in praise, thankfulness and conscious unity. With practise this God-ward turn of the mind becomes an almost constant direction, underlying all our other activities.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

11. “The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

12. “The concept of a value-free science is absurd.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

13. “Equilibrium is a figment of the human imagination.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

14. “Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

15. “Conflict may be defined as a situation of competition in which the parties are aware of the incompatibility of potential future positions, and in which each party wishes to occupy a position that is incompatible with the wishes of the other.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

16. “Don’t go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability-whether they are easily measured or not.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

17. “We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

18. “Mathematics brought rigor to Economics. Unfortunately, it also brought mortis.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

19. “We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

20. “Are we to regard the world of nature simply as a storehouse to be robbed for the immediate benefit of man?”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

21. “Economic problems have no sharp edges. They shade off imperceptibly into politics, sociology, and ethics. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the ultimate answer to every economic problem lies in some other field.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

22. “We never like to admit to ourselves that we have made a mistake. Organizational structures tend to accentuate this source of failure of information.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

23. “If a totally new image is to come into being however, there must be sensitivity to internal messages, the image itself must be sensitive to change, must be unstable, and it must include a value image which places high value on trials, experiments, and the trying of new things.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

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

— Kenneth E. Boulding

25. “A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable, still using the forms of democratic government.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

26. “All knowledge is gained through an orderly loss of information.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

27. “Communication can only take place among equals.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

28. “Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

29. “The future is bound to surprise us, but we don’t have to be dumbfounded.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

30. “Political conflict rests to a very large extent on a universal ignorance of consequences, as the people who are benefited by any particular act or policy are rarely those who struggled for it, and the people who are injured are rarely those who opposed it.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

31. “The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

32. “If we saw tomorrow’s newspaper today, tomorrow would never happen.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

33. “The world moves into the future as a result of decisions, not as a result of plans. Plans are significant only insofar as they affect decisions.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

34. “Humble, honest, ignorance is one of the finest flowers of the human spirit.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

35. “Economics has been incurably growth-oriented and addicted to everybody growing richer, even at the cost of exhaustion of resources and pollution of the environment.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

36. “What exists, is possible.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

37. “The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

38. “The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

39. “Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

40. “With laissez-faire and price atomic, Ecology’s Uneconomic, But with another kind of logic Economy’s Unecologic.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

41. “The use of isoquants to describe the production function did not develop to any great extent until the thirties.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

42. “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

43. “Perhaps the most difficult ethical problem of the scientific community arises not so much from conflict with other subcultures as from its own success. Nothing fails like success because we don’t learn from it. We learn only from failure.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

44. “Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

45. “It is absurd to suppose we can think of nature as a system apart from knowledge, for it is knowledge that is increasingly determining the course of nature.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

46. “Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

47. “In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

48. “The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

49. “Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding

50. “Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.”

— Kenneth E. Boulding