Systemic Weakness Quotes

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

'Contagion' should serve as a wake-up call not only about the germs, but perhaps more importantly about the frailty of governance, nationally and worldwide.

As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God's anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex.

Governments do not know what they cannot do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction.

Global terrorism is extreme both in its lack of realistic goals and in its cynical exploitation of the vulnerability of complex systems.

I felt like power meant that you had to be engaged in a certain kind of struggle by force of movement and battle - and that's very exhausting. Now, power is more about certainty and stillness and realizing that the infrastructures that we gather around and worship are the least powerful things.

Clearly, the decision-making that we rely on in society is fallible. It's highly fallible, and we should know that.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

Beware of over-confidence; especially in matters of structure.

On balance, I would say that anybody who reminds our lords and masters that the computerized society is fragile... has definitely done a service to the public at large.

Mind, even more deadly to empires than to individuals, erodes them, compromises their solidity.

Every time something slips through the cracks, the cracks get bigger.

With the selection of Acting Secret Service Director Joseph P. Clancy as the director, President Obama has guaranteed that the agency will continue to lurch from one shocking security failure to another.

Unfortunately, the current format for this lottery program are subject to fraud and abuse and leave our nation exposed to those who may seek to do harm on American soil.

This is the problem we have with many Muslim leaders: They claim to differentiate between domestic and foreign issues and they are obsessed with being accepted, at sitting at the table of power in order to talk (or rather to listen) and to be tolerated. This is the starting point of our weakness. It is in our minds because we do not realize we are part of the system.