“Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter.”— Mary Douglas
“Wherever there is a system, there is a risk of it being observed, and this observation may reduce the entropy of the system.”— Alan Perlis
“Social systems are not natural systems whose parts are in a state of mutual dependence; they are, on the contrary, riddled with conflict and contradiction.”— Max Gluckman
“The idea that there are 'systems' which are represented by state vectors, and 'apparatus' which are not, is surely something that we must grow out of.”— John Stewart Bell
“Every organized being forms a whole, a unique and closed system, whose parts mutually correspond and concur to the same definitive action by a reciprocal reaction.”— Georges Cuvier
“I'd do it again. I was exploring a system. I was a neophyte. I was learning a system. The phone company is a system. A computer is a system, do you understand? If I do what I do, it is only to explore a system.”— John Thomas Draper
“Emergence means complex systems and complexity, to be sure, but it also means that the whole is not only more than but also very different from the sum of its parts.”— Robert B. Laughlin
“The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.”— Donella Meadows
“If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory.”— Robert M. Pirsig
“The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system.”— Ferdinand de Saussure