Systemic Change Quotes

The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.

Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.

The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed.

It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.

We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.

One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.

In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed... It means facing a system that does not lend its self to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.

I am convinced that unconditional love is the most powerful known stimulant of the immune system. If I told patients to raise their blood levels of immune globulins or killer T cells, no one would know how. But if I can teach them to love themselves and others fully, the same changes happen automatically. The truth is: love heals.

A bitter thing cannot be made sweet. The taste of anything can be changed. But poison cannot be changed into nectar

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.

If we want to cure the things that threaten life, limb and even survival, we need to heal our sick political system. That is, not just to address our physical ailments, but the things that determine whether we're going to survive into the next century. That is war, climate change, poverty, etc. We've got to fix our politics.

If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.

All of this got me thinking about the history of the westward expansion, and got me to wondering how the exploration of the Solar System would be changed if there were an indigenous presence out there.

Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people.

The population suffers from a fear of change, for their conditioning assumes a static identity, and challenging ones belief system, usually results in insult and apprehension, for being wrong is erroneously associated with failure. When in fact, to be proven wrong should be a celebrated, for it is elevating someone to a new level of understanding.

We do not experience things as they really are! We experience things only through a filter and that filter determines what information will enter our awareness and what will be rejected. If we change the filter (our belief system), then we automatically experience the world in a completely different way.

War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in a monetary system. That is, there will be very little significant change. It’s going to take the redesign of our culture and values.

Quite frankly, there is no answer to climate change without substantially, dramatically, increasing the amount of renewable energy in the global energy system.

Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes.

It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’

We must change the system of education and instruction.

Unfortunately, history has shown us that brotherhood must be learned, when it should be natural.

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are extracted from messes by analysis. Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.

We have to change the system. The system is very rotten. The executive is corrupt, the Congress is corrupt, the judiciary is corrupt. ... So what's left We really have to have a radical and surgical change to bring back the image of our country.

Developing countries like Malaysia should have a say in changing the world financial system since we have faced the problems that it has caused.

I want to expose and evaluate the fact that the seeing and sensing process is a system that should not be taken for granted as natural - it's a cultivated means of reality production that, as a system, can be negotiated and changed.

The virtue of a democratic system with a [constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech] is that it readily enables the people, over time, to be persuaded that what they took for granted is not so, and to change their laws accordingly.

How many businesses do you know that want to cut their revenue in half? That's why the healthcare system won't change the healthcare system.

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes; and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.

We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists 'of conspiring to teach [us] to do,' but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.

There can be no peace in the world so long as a large proportion of the population lack the necessities of life and believe that a change of the political and economic system will make them available. World peace must be based on world plenty.

Capitalism and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet...Climate change has placed all humankind before a great choice: to continue in the ways of capitalism and death, or to start down the path of harmony with nature and respect for life.

Each of us has some change within us, we cannot change the political or the social system of the world unless we change inside of us as individuals and that’s the direction I am in now which I call spiritual.

Real change comes when people are enabled to use their thinking and their energy in a new way, using a different system of thought, different language, and having fresh visions of the future.

The human mind moves always forward, alters its viewpoint and enlarges its thought substance, and the effect of these changes is to render past systems of thinking obsolete or, when they are preserved, to extend, to modify and subtly or visibly to alter their value.