Mumia Abu-Jamal
Mumia Abu-Jamal

The state would rather give me an uzi than a microphone.

Dean Acheson
Dean Acheson

My memory…is of a department without direction, composed of a lot of busy people working hard and usefully but as a whole not functioning as a foreign office. It did not chart a course to be furthered by the success of our arms, or to aid or guide our arms. Rather it seems to have been adrift carried hither and yon by the currents of war or pushed about by collisions with more purposeful craft.

Anna Andrejewna Achmatowa
Anna Andrejewna Achmatowa

I know beginnings, I know endings too,
and life-in-death, and something else
I'd rather not recall just now.

Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker

Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we'll start to be happy.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

In June of 1964 the research group and academic program moved to Penn bringing with it most of the faculty, students, and research projects. Our activities flourished in the very supportive environment that Penn and Wharton provided. The wide variety of faculty members that we were able to involve in our activities significantly enhanced our capabilities. By the mid-1960s I had become

uncomfortable with the direction, or rather, the lack of direction, of professional Operations Research. I had four major complaints.
First, it had become addicted to its mathematical tools and had lost sight of the problems of management. As a result it was looking for problems to which to apply its tools rather than looking for tools that were suitable for solving the changing problems of

management. Second, it failed to take into account the fact that problems are abstractions extracted from reality by analysis. Reality consists of systems of problems, problems that are strongly interactive, messes. I believed that we had to develop ways of dealing with these systems of problems as wholes. Third, Operations Research had become a discipline and had lost its commitment to

interdisciplinarity. Most of it was being carried out by professionals who had been trained in the subject, its mathematical techniques. There was little interaction with the other sciences professions and humanities. Finally, Operations Research was ignoring the developments in systems thinking — the methodology, concepts, and theories being developed by systems thinkers.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the "system" as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added… The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined

contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments… These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever-widening

spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

The basic managerial idea introduced by systems thinking, is that to manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

In reactive problem solving we walk into the future facing the past — we move away from, rather than toward, something. This often results in unforseen consequences that are more distasteful than the deficiencies removed.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

In the Systems Age we tend to look at things as part of larger wholes rather than as wholes to be taken apart. This is the doctrine of expansionism. Expansionism brings with it the synthetic mode of thought much as reductionism brought with it.

Russell Ackoff
Russell Ackoff

Because we cannot yet (1) characterize all the possible experimental designs along quantitative scales and (2) generate cost-of-error functions, comparisons must be made in specific contexts rather than by use of analytic optimizing.