All knowledge is gained through an orderly loss of information.

It is clear that the building of models is not a purely mechanical process but requires skill of a high order - not merely mathematical skill but a sensitivity to the relative importance of different factors and a critical, almost an artistic, faculty in the selection of behaviour equations which are reasonable, tentative hypotheses in explaining the behaviour of actual economies.

The social system tends to be dominated by images... especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal.

Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message.

The World is a very complex system. It is easy to have too simple a view of it, and it is easy to do harm and to make things worse under the impulse to do good and make things better.

Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

If the society toward which we are developing is not to be a nightmare of exhaustion, we must use the interlude of the present era to develop a new technology which is based on a circular flow of materials such that the only sources of man's provisions will be his own waste products.