Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

One of the best ways to know you're completely wrong, is to behave as if you're complete right.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

For most of modern life, our strong talents and desires for group effort have been filtered through relatively rigid institutional structures because of the complexity of managing groups. We haven't had all the groups we've wanted, we've simply had the groups we could afford. The old limits of what unmanaged and unpaid groups can do are no longer in operation.

The change we are in the middle of isn't minor and it isn't optional.

We systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.

What you need for a participatory system to work: "a plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain."