Institutional Flexibility Quotes

It doesn't really matter what one writes into a constitution. The important thing is what the collective instinct eventually makes of it.

Societies' abilities to cope with the unknown depend on the flexibility of their institutions and individuals, and on their capacity to experiment freely with alternative forms of adaptation to the risks which threaten them.

Every human institution (justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way.

The office is there, ready to be molded by the occupant. I don’t think the structure is ever anything permanent. What is gained by one president can be lost, voluntarily or not, by the next.

Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

The problem of the negro is so criminal that many individuals and organizations are going to have to sacrifice what they call their organizational principles if someone comes up with a solution that will really solve the problem.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Some men look at Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in Government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.

It is not we as individuals, then, who must bend uncomfortably around the institution of marriage; rather, it is the institution of marriage that has to bend uncomfortably around us.

The most that the Convention could do in such a situation, was to avoid the errors suggested by the past experience of other countries, as well as of our own; and to provide a convenient mode of rectifying their own errors, as future experience may unfold them.

It's hard to give someone advice when you're an institution. I don't really put a lot of pressure on it - I'm just open to doing stuff that's challenging.

A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. Such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.