p.14 A writer may try his best to draw a map of how things are, that will be equally valid for all; but
all he can really do is to paint a picture of what he sees from the unique and transient viewpoint which is his alone... It
is for the reader to say how much my view contributes to his own.
p.39 The relation between man and the urban environment is even more unstable
than that between them and the natural environment - and for the same reason. The activities which the city expresses
change it and change the needs (and thus the activities) of those who live in it on a destabilizing scale... They
generate conflicting demands which the city cannot satisfy... In theory, the city could be so planned as
to provide a far better combination of answers to these competing demands than it commonly does today; and undoubtedly
it will be the major task of the immediate future to try to realize some of these possibilities.
p.53 We are in sight of a technology which would recreate a paradise for the economic man. A system
of specification and testing would record on computers, centrally, reliable information on every product. A retrieval system
would enable any inquirer anywhere to elicit from the central data bank particulars of all existing products in any field
which concerned him, with the data needed for him to make any of those comparisons which the economic man was supposed
to do in his head. This organization, though expensive, would be easily paid for by a levy on producers not heavier than their
present advertising appropriations, and as these would no longer be necessary no additional expense would be involved. The
consumers would be far better served with information than they are now [JLJ - Google Shopping, perhaps?]
p.72 the first requisite of all regulation, a standard of what ought to be, by which deviation may
be recognized and measured.
p.76 Learning what to want is the most radical, the most painful and the most creative art of life.
p.84 let me insist now that I fully share the view of authorities quoted later that our more important mental
processes are not digital and cannot be imitated by digital computers, however elaborate. [JLJ - oh, I don't know about that,
perhaps the task involves clever programming]
p.95-96 The most striking feature of men, when compared with other animals, is
not their ingenuity in doing... but their capacity for knowing where they are [JLJ - orienting]... I
have in mind the power of conscious reflection which enables us to represent to ourselves our relations with people and events
and the relations of others which involve us. This enables us to 'understand' - or perhaps misunderstand - them and
to exercise judgement about them by comparing them with standards at which we have somehow arrived, of what we expect
or desire or think right or acceptable... These representations - and this is a strange and most
important point - include the dimension of time. We can represent to ourselves the real
or hypothetical course of events... and the engagement of our hypothetical selves. It is a limited and fallible instrument,
supported by subconscious processes which we may never be able to identify, and is far too weak for our present needs; but
it is none the less potent and astonishing.
p.98 Our appreciated world is given meaning by our standards of judgement... What happens
- or might happen - is compared not only with our expectations but with this battery of standards by which we judge it to
be welcome, important, acceptable, good, right or the reverse.
p.98-99 I have already stressed that 'standards', 'norms', by whatever name called, are fundamental
to any kind of control... The generation of multiple and partly conflicting standards is the distinguishing mark of man and
their management is his human business. 'Values' in this sense discriminate and select facts, as well as give meaning
to them.
p.99 The appreciated world, as it grows, organizes our further experience and mediates
our communication, as well as guides our actions.
p.108 In building its appreciation of where it is, the mind... selects facts and abstracts general
and statistical laws. But the events which it needs to understand involve facts systematically organized and require it to
understand how systems hang together and what happens when they become unstable. These systematic objects of our
attempted knowing... change constantly in the search for stability which their own actions disturb... In an appreciative system,
regulation, equally mediated by information, is the process of adjustment
p.122 All kinds of relations... are now conceived as matters for regulation.
p.128 The meaning of stability is likely to remain obscured in Western cultures until they rediscover the
fact that life consists in experiencing relations, rather than in seeking goals or 'ends'... the object of
the exercise is to... sustain through time a relationship which needs no further justification, because it
is or is expected to be satisfying in itself.
p.131 Regulation to be successful cannot be left to massive operations, triggered by emergencies,
but consists in making rules which anticipate emergencies - in other words, in devising just those social
constraints which defy the operational approach.
p.134 general organizations... must decide not only what to do but what to want - more exactly,
what to value most in the concrete situation of every decision. They must define and redefine the unacceptable,
not in one dimension alone but in many.
