The organizer who creates roles, who creates the holes that will force the pegs to their shape, is a prime creator of personality itself. When we ask of a man, "What is he?" the answer is usually given in terms of his major role, job, or position in society; he is the place that he fills, a painter, a priest, a politician, a criminal.

[The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.

Consumption is the death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in favor of death itself.

Conflict may be defined as a situation of competition in which the parties are aware of the incompatibility of potential future positions, and in which each party wishes to occupy a position that is incompatible with the wishes of the other.

In any evolutionary process, even in the arts, the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

It [knowledge] is clearly related to information, which we can now measure; and an economist especially is tempted to regard knowledge as a kind of capital structure, corresponding to information as an income flow. Knowledge, that is to say, is some kind of improbable structure or stock made up essentially of patterns - that is, improbable arrangements, and the more improbable the arrangements, we might suppose, the more knowledge there is.

[There will be movement toward] behavioral economics... [which] involves study of those aspects of men's images, or cognitive and affective structures that are more relevant to economic decisions.