Systemic Quotes

As a nation, we are on a path of rapid and deep systemic change to our health system, and it's going to unfold for some time to come. It is already transforming the fundamental nature of the U.S. medical care delivery system. ~ John E. McDonough

…it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster pursuing its ends regardless of any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and to insist that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, lie real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. (…) the fate of whole swathes of society and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with a blessed indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, (…) its violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous - quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social reality. ~ Slavoj Zizek

The problems of the global economy are not based in perception, but in the reality of prices, balance sheets and income statements, vast concentrations of wealth and power, precarious systemic imbalances, ruthless exploitation, and command economies mismanaged by Central State/Bank policy and manipulation. ~ Charles Hugh Smith

Together, whether we are pro-life or pro-choice, Democrat or Republican," says Chai, "we can all agree that the systemic elimination of girls simply because they're girls is a crime that has to be stopped. ~ Marian V. Liautaud

I don't think that there's a guy behind the desk at every newspaper saying "No, woman" and sending her on her way, but that's what's systemic about it, right, like that people don't quite realize that maybe they're attracted to a male op-ed more than a female op-ed, or because of networking they know this person from going out to a bar with them. ~ Jessica Valenti

Repentance is not just sorrow and confession, it is the turning around of wrong behavior towards right and just action. Repentance from sinful corporate behavior therefore requires systemic change. For many, the cost of that repentance may be too high. ~ Soong-Chan Rah

Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged. ~ Jessica Valenti

America's still-segregated modern life is marked by three realities. First, geographic segregation has meant that - although places like Ferguson and Baltimore may seem like extreme examples - most white Americans continue to live in locales that insulate them from the obstacles facing many majority-black communities.21 Second, this legacy, compounded by social self-segregation, has led to a stark result: the overwhelming majority of white Americans don't have a single close relationship with a person who isn't white. Third, there are virtually no American institutions positioned to resolve these persistent problems of systemic and social segregation. ~ Robert P. Jones

Because we've been lied to and lied to, and it hurts to be lied to. It's ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts. It denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world. Especially if the lies are chronic, systemic, if hard experience seems to teach that everything you're supposed to believe in's really a game based on lies. Young Voters have been taught well and thoroughly. You may not personally remember Vietnam or Watergate, but it's a good bet you remember 'No new taxes' and 'Out of the loop' and 'No direct knowledge of any impropriety at this time' and Did not inhale' and 'Did not have sex with that woman' and etc. etc. It's depressing and painful to believe that the would-be 'public servants' you're forced to choose between are all phonies whose only real concern is their own care and feeding and who will lie so outrageously with such a straight face that you just know they have to believe you're an idiot. So who wouldn't fall all over themselves for a top politician who actually seemed to talk to you like you were a person, an intelligent adult worthy of respect? ~ David Foster Wallace

When even those who should be happy by any reasonable measure are also not happy, there's got to be a serious systemic problem in humanity's culture. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

In truth, in the fairy-tale version of bailing out Lehman, the next domino, A.I.G., would have fallen even harder. If the politics of bailing out Lehman were bad, the politics of bailing out A.I.G. would have been worse. And the systemic risk that a failure of A.I.G. posed was orders of magnitude greater than Lehman's collapse. ~ Andrew Ross Sorkin

We have gaps that are rooted in systemic racism. ~ Hillary Clinton

My preference is for the Federal Reserve to be the systemic risk regulator, because the responsibility for identifying and limiting potential problems is a natural complement to its role in monetary policy. ~ Henry Paulson

Many people believe trans women choose to engage in the sex trade rather than get a real job. That belief is misguided because sex work is work, and it's often the only work available to marginalized women. Though we act as individuals, we can't remove ourselves from the framework of society. Systemic oppression creates circumstances that push many women to choose sex work as a means of survival, and I was one of those women, choosing survival. ~ Janet Mock

Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the Fed, as presently constituted, carries out its systemic inflation and its control of the American monetary system. ~ Murray Rothbard

I'm not taking power. I'm catalyzing systemic change. ~ Ashraf Ghani

I'm afraid sometimes certain individual cases of defaults are unavoidable. What we should do is to step up monitoring, properly handle relevant matters, and ensure there is no regional and systemic financial risk. ~ Li Keqiang

The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike. ~ George Soros

… our nation's truly critical problems are built into the very structure of the economic and political system; they are not something passing in the night that will go away even when we elect forward-looking leaders and actively pressure them to move in a different direction. ~ Gar Alperovitz

If we all speak up and engage in small and large acts that pursue love, peace, and justice, we can dismantle the systemic structures that promote racism, xenophobia, White supremacy, and privilege. ~ Sheila Wise Rowe

insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn't its own leg up, as if it doesn't imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate... [is] wilful ignorance". ~ Reni Eddo-Lodge

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes, - two of blacks and three of whites; and in one of the houses of the whites a worthless black boy was harbored too openly two years ago; so he was hanged for rape. And here, too, is the high whitewashed fence of the "stockade," as the county prison is called; the white folks say it is ever full of black criminals, - the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma. ~ Morris Berman

Today, you have 20 percent of the world controlling 80 percent of the Gross Domestic Product; you've got a $30 trillion (US) world economy, and $24 trillion of it is in the developed countries ... These inequities can't exist. So if you are talking about systemic breakdown, I think you have to look in terms of social breakdown. ~ James Wolfensohn

The airport bookstore did not sell books, only bestsellers, which Sita Dulip cannot read without risking a severe systemic reaction. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. ~ Michael Lewis

When female stories are muted, we are teaching our kids that their dignity is second class and the historical accounts of their lives [are] less relevant. This lowered value carries over when women face sexual objectification and systemic brutalization from inside and outside the community. ~ Aurin Squire

Whether it's racism, patriarchy, warmongering, greed, or child trafficking, it's counter to God's Kingdom. But the people caught in those systems are rarely the enemies; often they are just as caught, as longing for a rescue as the rest of us. We don't battle against flesh and blood, not really, but against the powers and principalities that hold us all captive. ~ Sarah Bessey

The purpose of affirmative action is to give our nation a way to finally address the systemic exclusion of individuals of talent on the basis of their gender, or race from opportunities to develop, perform, achieve and contribute. Affirmative action is an effort to develop systematic approach to open the doors of education, employment, and business development opportunities to qualified individuals who happen to be members of groups that have experienced long-standing and persistent discrimination. ~ William J. Clinton

Every few months, white people trot out a new title in a series called Cops Keep Killing People. Each new release has the latest tragic scene on the cover. It sure seems to be the same book recycled over and over, but please don't form a judgment until you read all five hundred pages. Maybe this time the story will end differently and the cops will be the hero! ~ D.L. Hughley

The thing that makes systemic oppression so difficult to discuss is that when you do, you have to acknowledge your role in it. Often this means having to admit that you're part of the problem. It's not a comfortable experience when you learn that you further or benefit from the oppression of others. ~ Kevin A. Patterson

Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete. We ended up where banks couldn't liquidate their risk, and the system tended to freeze up. ~ Myron Scholes

White people covered the earth like lice. ~ Louise Erdrich

We are scripted to believe that reality is zero-based and that we live in a closed system. This paradigm of scarcity and insufficiency is the philosophy that undergirds our structures of systemic sin. We fear there won't be enough land, water, food, oil, money, labor to go around, so we build evil structures of sinful force to guarantee that those we call 'us' will have what we call 'ours.' We call it security. We call it defense. We call it freedom. What we don't call it is what it is - fear. ~ Brian Zahnd

Black Lives Matter, the movement founded by the activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Callie's, and Opal Tometi, began with the premise that the incommensurable experience of systemic racism creates an unequal playing field. The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality persist beneath the appearance of white civility. This assumption both frames and determines our individual interactions and experiences as citizens. ~ Jesmyn Ward

We must stop pointing to the exceptions - these bright shining stars who transcend circumstance. We must look to how we can best support the least among us, not spend all our time blindly revering and trying to mimic the greatest without demanding systemic change. ~ Roxane Gay

The politicians always told us that the Cold War stand-off could only change by way of nuclear war. None of them believed that such systemic change was possible. ~ Lech Walesa

If we want to talk about violence as form of illness, a form of dis-ease, that's fine. Let's talk about it. It's just that mental illness, which deals with an individual's struggle with experiences that prevent them from functioning the way they want to function, is exactly the wrong category for such a naming. Rather, violence represents a systemic un-health, an interaction between an individual and larger forces that are harmful, that are in-and-of-themselves violent. Paul called them "the powers and principalities. ~ David Finnegan-Hosey

Currently, we allow our political and business leaders to get away with murder. Now is the time to change that. We need direct liability for those who are destroying our future and this planet. We need fast, profound and systemic change. History only moves forward when courageous people get up and act. That's why I support this citizens' initiative to recognise ecocide as the crime it is. ~ Kumi Naidoo

People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse. ~ Matthew Specktor

We have a fundamental systemic flaw. We have managed to create scenarios where you can 'earn' a living without contributing. ~ Freequill

Thinking through how you find that intersection between individual, compelling human narratives and structural, systemic injustices - that's the place that's most interesting to me as a reporter. ~ Sarah Stillman

Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people. ~ Bruce D. Perry

Ford can't sell trucks currently, and GM is not selling as many cars as it would like to. That is a problem of product and pricing, not a systemic problem of abandonment by consumers. ~ Paul Taylor

Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot. ~ Tim Wise

Yeah... they tell you to work from the inside, which is perhaps their greatest deception of all... ~ Josh Burggraf

Without a national ID and the ability to create true data that can be be safely and securely sent between individuals, we are going to introduce new systemic risk back into the system. ~ Neal Patterson

Under the notion that unregulated market-driven values and relations should shape every domain of human life, the business model of governance has eviscerated any viable notion of social responsibility while furthering the criminalization of social problems and cutbacks in basic social services, especially for young people, the elderly, people of color, and the impoverished.36 At this historical juncture there is a merging of violence and governance along with the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy. This becomes obvious in the emergence of a surveillance state in which social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as both necessary and benign. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly regards each and every person as a potential terrorist suspect. ~ Henry A. Giroux

The church must reckon with the reality that ever since black people were stolen from Africa and trafficked to this land, they have been dehumanized, abused, criminalized, incarcerated, exploited for profit, and governed in distinctively sinister ways. This oppression has been personal, institutional, systemic, and legislative. It has been authorized and sanctioned by our local, state, and federal government. As the church, do we have the wherewithal to confront the austere reality that our national economy has been subsidized by a criminal justice system that is, and has been, predicated on the exploitation of cheap labor extracted from poor, racially profiled people of color? ~ Dominique DuBois Gilliard

Disability simulation fails to capture the nuance and complexity of living in a disabled body. And it certainly fails to give a deep understanding of systemic discrimination and abuse faced by disabled people. ~ Stella Young

Systemic value is the value of that structure of concepts by which all concepts, including those of value, are brought into a system. ~ John William Davis

The Federal Reserve has a responsibility to ensure the safety and soundness of financial institutions and to contain systemic risks in financial markets. ~ Bernie Sanders

The systemic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard. ~ Clay Shirky

regardless of the false nature of racial categories, the concept of race holds great social force. Our society uses race in spite of some people's disavowal and often treats us differentially as a result. Race has truly gotten under our skin, into our psyche, and lingers within the layers of our unconscious. To begin honestly, we must discuss what may be the most challenging aspect of any discussion of race. We must deal with the terms racist, racism, and systemic white supremacy. We must also confront the fact that some people might ask us to associate those words with our speech and actions. ~ Shelly Tochluk

The drug smuggling today had, as its godparents, the bootleggers nearly a hundred years ago. The syndicates, the systems, the psyches were created back then. ~ Louise Penny

Racism may be as systemic as it always was. It is the great problem of America. It's the one stumbling block that I don't believe was ever smoothed over. ~ Robert Guillaume

We cannot reform institutional racism or systemic policies if we are not actively engaged. It's not enough to simply complain about injustice; the only way to prevent future injustice is to create the society we would like to see, one where we are all equal under the law. ~ Al Sharpton

Regulators are a backstop: they don't own banks. The governance at the top of our leading banks has been shown to be lamentably weak. No one at the top of Barclays will take responsibility for systemic abuse. ~ Vince Cable

As boom- and bust-prone as high finance always has been and remains, the greatest systemic risk to our economy is not Wall Street It's the growing federal debt (and weakening dollar) being enacted by those Washington politicians - the ones who want to protect us from Wall Street. ~ Tony Blankley

A long way of saying I've seen a lot of kind of more systemic and processed changes. Although we still are providing the kind of material you're still seeing out there now. ~ Susan Downey

attacks, I often have them use systemic enzymes. It takes quite a few. I use PanZymes or Wobenzym. There is another one called Vitalzym. I have them use four to six capsules, three times a day, but it really starts reducing the inflammation, which can be the difference between struggling with asthma attacks and leading a relatively normal life. ~ Linda Rubright

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, ... has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' ... it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control. ~ Alfie Kohn

This is about systemic, institutional corruption, not personality. To ask the Democratic leadership to clean things up would be like asking the old Soviet bureaucracy under Brezhnev to reform itself. It ain't going to happen. ~ Newt Gingrich

an official with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission learned I was writing about specialization and contacted me to make sure I knew that specialization had played a critical role in the 2008 global financial crisis. "Insurance regulators regulated insurance, bank regulators regulated banks, securities regulators regulated securities, and consumer regulators regulated consumers," the official told me. "But the provision of credit goes across all those markets. So we specialized products, we specialized regulation, and the question is, 'Who looks across those markets?' The specialized approach to regulation missed systemic issues. ~ David Epstein

To quiet the land. When there has been unspecific trauma on the land and residents feel the impact, it is possible to do a constellation to identify the trauma and ask blessing of the land To inform land use: reforestation, development of both the land and communities that interface with the land To inform architectural design: Identify locations for green spaces and test environmentally sound building materials To inform energy choices: passive solar, hydro, wind, alternative building practices To support real estate transactions- Why won't a place sell, supporting potential buyers to be able to look at properties in a systemic way To support environmentally based community action agencies Work with pets- both for veterinary practice and to ~ Francesca Boring

Christian complicity with racism in the twenty-first century looks different than complicity with racism in the past. It looks like Christians responding to 'black lives matter' with the phrase 'all lives matter.' It looks like Christians consistently supporting a president whose racism has been on display for decades. It looks like Christians telling black people and their allies that their attempts to bring up racial concerns are 'divisive.' It looks conversations on race that focus on individual relationships and are unwilling to discuss systemic solutions. Perhaps Christian complicity in racism has not changed after all. Although the characters and the specifics are new, many of the same rationalizations for racism remain. ~ Jemar Tisby

People tend to personalize technology so they can't get to the systemic analysis. They say, "Oh, I can't give up my personal computer." Or, "I just love radio too much." ~ Chellis Glendinning

On average, our corps members stay in the classroom for eight years. But again, given the systemic nature of educational inequity, we know it is vital that some of our alumni take their experience outside the classroom. ~ Wendy Kopp

All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony--Lifestyle Wars. ~ Arundhati Roy

The notion that aid can alleviate systemic poverty, and has done so, is a myth. Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased. Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world. ~ Dambisa Moyo

The crisis created by an inability to distinguish the Bible on race from the Bible on slavery meant that when the Civil War was over and slavery was abolished, systemic racism continued unchecked as the great moral anomaly in a supposedly Christian America. ~ Mark A. Noll

Philosophy, like science, consists of theories or insights arrived at as a result of systemic reflection or reasoning in regard to the data of experience. It involves, therefore, the analysis of experience and the synthesis of the results of analysis into a comprehensive or unitary conception. Philosophy seeks a totality and harmony of reasoned insight into the nature and meaning of all the principal aspects of reality. ~ Joseph Alexander Leighton

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile. ~ James D. Bradley

There are many challenges in the global education ecosystem: from top-down systemic issues in how educational services are organized and delivered, to bottom-up issues of curriculum effectiveness, accountability, and human resource allocation. ~ Adam Braun

As journalist Matt Taibbi recalls in his book The Divide: It's become cliché by now, but since 2008, no high-ranking executive from any financial institution has gone to jail, not one, for any of the systemic crimes that wiped out 40 percent of the world's wealth. Even now, after JP Morgan Chase agreed to a settlement north of $13 billion for a variety of offenses.… the basic principle held true: nobody went to jail. Not one person. (...)

On the one hand, he finds, "Twenty-six billion dollars of fraud: no charges"; on the other, the San Diego County District Attorney's office conducts 26,000 warrantless, preemptive searches every year to make sure that welfare recipients really are exactly as poor as the poverty bureaucracy demands that they be. ~ Kristian Williams

Today's widespread social disharmony in relation to gender is not inevitable for human society, although it is the inevitable product of thousands of years of systemic gender injustice across the globe. Because we have never known anything else, it is difficult impossible for us to imagine what life would be like if we had grown up in a society that was truly integrated and healthy in relation to gender and sexuality. The entire fabric of human society would be vastly different from what we know today. ~ William Keepin

Even more systemic persecution was on the way, Messersmith wrote. He had learned that a draft existed of a new law that would effectively deprive Jews of their citizenship and all civil rights. Germany's Jews, he wrote, look upon this proposed law as the most serious moral blow which could be delivered to them. They have and are being deprived of practically all means of making a livelihood and understand that the new citizenship law is to practically deprive them of all civil rights. ~ Erik Larson

Specificity refers to the ability of any medicine to discriminate between its intended target and its host. Killing a cancer cell in a test tube is not a particularly difficult task: the chemical world is packed with malevolent poisons that, even in infinitesimal quantities, can dispatch a cancer cell within minutes. The trouble lies in finding a selective poison - a drug that will kill cancer without annihilating the patient. Systemic therapy without specificity is an indiscriminate bomb. For an anticancer poison to become a useful drug, Meyer knew, it needed to be a fantastically nimble knife: sharp enough to kill cancer yet selective enough to spare the patient. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Existing businesses aspiring to become adaptive corporations need to commit to understanding what exactly an adaptive innovator is and how that differs from both systemic designers and knowledge workers. In the end, they will actually need conscious planning to move them from a decades-imbedded orientation of knowledge work, to a new mindset of continuous adaptive innovation centered on the customer. ~ John Sculley

If there is one common theme to the vast range of crises ... it is that excessive debt accumulation, whether it be by the government, banks, corporations, or consumers, often poses greater systemic risks than it seems during a boom. ~ Carmen Reinhart

Systemic causation must be taught if the effects of global warming are to be seriously understood. The ~ George Lakoff

Systemic processes tend to reward people for making decisions that turn out to be right - creating great resentment among the anointed, who feel themselves entitled to rewards for being articulate, politically active, and morally fervent. ~ Thomas Sowell

The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons
it was systemic and it was complete. ~ Gary Shteyngart

No single example of sexism automatically gives rise to a specific incident of misogynistic violence, the picture is far more complex than that. But when you step back and join the dots between each of the different examples outlined in this book, it is very hard to deny that the bigger picture reveals systemic and widespread inequality ~ Laura Bates

The path to big, systemic change is collective action. That takes Sister Courage. ~ Gloria Feldt

Connectedness. One thing leads to another. Often in unexpected ways. ~ Holly Goldberg Sloan

Since sin is the multifaced distortion of humans in their relations with God, self, others, and the world, and since cracked Eikons create systemic injustice, inherent to the atoning work of God os restorative justice. God's redemptive intent is to restore and rehabilitate humans in their relationship with God, self, others, and the world, and when that happens justice is present and established. The followers of Jesus both proclaim and embody atoning justice by fighting injustice and establishing just that kind of justice. Their forward guard is surrounded with the banner of grace and forgiveness. ~ Scot McKnight

Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. The agency is devoted to one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp. ~ Glenn Greenwald

The custom to put others in the line of fire is a recurring theme in Judaism. It boils down to the Levite Korahites' willingness to sacrifice their ordinary Jewish subjects in order to ensure their own survival. This should be a historic warning to modern-day Israelites: their orthodox government would not hesitate to risk the lives of the many for the sake of the survival of the few in the orthodox elite. The citizens of Israel will have to think about how to remove the systemic threat that comes from within their own ranks. ~ A.J. Deus

To manage a system effectively, you might focus on the interactions of the parts rather than their behavior taken separately. ~ Russell L. Ackoff

Life and 'Mind' are systemic processes. ~ Gregory Bateson

Bad apple frame. Consider the saying "A bad apple spoils the barrel." The implication is that if you remove the bad apple or some small number of bad apples, the others will be fine. The rot is localized and will not spread. Rot here is a metaphor for immorality. In a case where there is immoral behavior, it points blame at one person or a few people - and not to any broader systemic immorality, an immoral policy, or an immoral culture. This ~ George Lakoff

I think the idea that the systemic problems in a society lead to illness is important to know. We shouldn't be separating out how we live with where we live, and what ails us with the environment we're in. ~ Claudia Rankine

several hundred thousand dollars in a challenging, relevant, and exciting systemic overhaul of our entire organization, focusing on our core competencies while maintaining full and listening cooperation with the communities we are proud to serve. We fully realize that our energetic attempts to mobilize the flawed infrastructure we inherited have been less than totally satisfactory, and hope and trust that our valued and loyal customers will bear with us in the coming months as we interact synergistically with change management in our striving for excellence. That is our mission." An ~ Terry Pratchett

Because revelations of systemic deception erode our most basic, default expectation of good faith, they play an outsize role in producing a crisis of authority. Each exposure of previously secret misdeeds - steroid use, Ponzi schemes, rigged intelligence - produces an acute and debilitating psychological effect. Vertigo sets in, similar to that experienced by a spouse who, after decades of what he thought was a happy, loyal marriage, discovers his wife has been cheating all along. Suddenly we realize we live in a world entirely more depraved than the one we thought we inhabited. ~ Christopher L. Hayes

Artists and celebrities are citizens, and as such you have a responsibility to keep fighting for justice because there are monolithic power structures and systemic oppression out there. ~ Emily Saliers

...large technologies such as Google need to be broken up and regulated, because their consolidated power and cultural influence make competition largely impossible. This monopoly in the information sector is a threat to democracy... ~ Safiya Umoja Noble

You who came of age in the past decade have had eight years of a Black U.S. president, and that gloss looked good, and there were even a few inches gained on some issues such as health care, and maybe that can cause a person to relax a bit. But think of how exponentially drone attacks increased under Obama, how many Black people were shot by police under Obama, because the violence is systemic. How many of the people now hearteningly pledging to sign up for a Muslim registry signed up for a Black Lives Matter or protested the discriminatory immigration program NSEERS? The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System subjected my students from the Middle East to hours of interrogation and intimidation every time they reentered after going home to visit their families, arbitrarily barred tons of innocent people from entry, and was ineffective against terrorism anyway. It's systemic injustice we are after changing, and we should not ever be lulled. ~ Mohja Kahf

When all great movements are in their infancy, they are nourished basically on the mother's milk of righteous indignation. It is a time of red-faced screaming and finger pointing. That's a good thing - we need to be angry to move toward any systemic change. But ultimately the fingers have to stop pointing and the hand has got to get down to work - and the work is always messy. ~ Jackson Galaxy