Ludwig von Bertalanffy

"If someone were to analyze current notions and fashionable catchwords, he would find "systems" high on the list. The concept has pervaded all fields of science and penetrated into popular thinking, ja…"

"We find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a buildin…"

"It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation, but also to solve the decisive problems found in organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts, …"

"While we can conceive of a sum as being composed gradually, a system as a total of parts with its interrelations has to be conceived of as being composed instantly."

"It is an empirical rule that living, evolutionary, psychological, social, etc., systems tend toward increasing differentiation and organization."

"If the variables are continuous, this definition corresponds to the description of a dynamic system by a set of ordinary differential equations with time as the independent variable. However, such rep…"

"Biologically, life is not maintenance or restoration of equilibrium but is essentially maintenance of disequilibria, as the doctrine of the organism as open system reveals. Reaching equilibrium means …"

"Systems thinking plays a dominant role in a wide range of fields from industrial enterprise and armaments to esoteric topics of pure science. Innumerable publications, conferences, symposia and course…"