Quotes for December 8 - 2024

 Good morning all - I hope you are finding this Sunday morning a good one where you find yourself.

Here is a subset of the quote that showed in my Readwise feed this morning.

Quotes for today, Sunday (not Sundae), December 8th

"For most of the history of Western political thought, writers focused on demagoguery only in the context of arguing that democracy was a poor form of government. Aristocratic critics such as Thucydides and Plato blamed popular leaders for dismissing experts, exploiting the poor and soaking the rich, sparking factional violence, and starting foreign wars to distract the populace from their tyrannical tendencies."
–nytimes.com, Opinion | How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump

"For me, if you’re not in the arena getting your ass kicked, I’m not interested in your feedback."
–Brené  Brown, Rising Strong

"If the upside of strongman rule is the ability to make difficult decisions quickly, the downside is that it greatly raises the odds of making costly blunders. The consensus-based decision-making of the earlier era might have been slow and inefficient, but it prevented radical or risky ideas from becoming policy."
–foreignaffairs.com, China’s Coming Upheaval

Systems Quotes

"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, Thinking in Systems

"A shadow network is not active all the time and so does not have maintenance costs, but it can be quickly brought into play without the normal period of trust building required for a network to operate."
–Brian Walker, David Salt, Resilience Practice

"An analysis of global governance in Science (Walker et al. 2009) found that the global institutions that do exist tend to address the concerns they were set up to deal with largely in a silo fashion."
–Brian Walker, David Salt, Resilience Practice