Oliver Reiser Quotes

“As the world shrinks in size, as it progressively contracts in its spatial relations, social processes already at work are speed up. As the world becomes ‘one world’ through technological unifications by means of radio, airplanes, television, and the rest, the forces that make for destruction of friendly human adaptions are intensified and speed up, s that, in a sense, time moves faster and faster. This heightens the tensions and intensifies the struggles of conflicting forces—and the old time-scale breaks down. This means that if the world is not to destroy itself, the forces that make for integrative human relationships mist also be accelerated in their operations.”

“If, as Pareto says, human society as a system of molecules undergoing various combinations in space and time, some critics might like to raise the question of how it is that if we, as individuals, corresponding to the molecules of a gas we can know anything of the ‘total state’? As constituents of a statistical ensemble we see what happens within the system, but only a super-observer could note from without those changing combinations which constitute the cultural patterns. the impossibility of such a human super-observer would seem to place a limitation upon the possibility of a science based on such assumption.”

“The problem of the origin of life is one of the oldest enigmas with which the human mind has been concerned; and yet it is a problem which is ever-recurring, seemingly as insurgent as life itself.”