The most fundamental form of integrative power is the power of love.

Thus we seem to be on the verge of an expansion of welfare economics into something like a social science of ethics and politics: what was intended to be a mere porch to ethics is either the whole house or nothing at all. In so laying down its life welfare economics may be able to contribute some of its insights and analytical methods to a much broader evaluative analysis of the whole social process.

The love of God again makes us free, for it draws us to set a low value on those things wherein we are subject to others - our wealth, our position, our reputation, and our life - and to set a high value on those things which no man can take from us - our integrity, our righteousness, our love for all men, and our communion with God.

[Even the mechanism can be endowed with an image. Thus] the thermostat has an image of the outside world in the shape of information regarding its temperature. It has also a value system in the sense of the ideal temperature at which it is set. Its behavior is directed towards the receipt of information which will bring its image and its value systems together.

Conventions of generality and mathematical elegance may be just as much barriers to the attainment and diffusion of knowledge as may contentment with particularity and literary vagueness... It may well be that the slovenly and literary borderland between economics and sociology will be the most fruitful building ground during the years to come and that mathematical economics will remain too flawless in its perfection to be very fruitful.

Economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought.

The thing that distinguishes social systems from physical or even biological systems is their incomparable (and embarrassing) richness in special cases. Generalizations in the social sciences are mere pathways which lead through a riotous forest of individual trees, each a species unto itself. The social scientist who loses this sense of the essential individuality and uniqueness of each case is all too likely to make a solemn scientific ass of himself, especially if he thinks that his faceless generalizations are the equivalents of the rich vareity of the world.