The illusion that consumption - and its correlative, income - is desirable probably stems from too great preoccupation with what Knight calls "one-use goods," such as food and fuel, where the utilization and consumption of the good are tightly bound together in a single act or event. ... any economy in the consumption of fuel that enables us to maintain warmth or to generate power with lessened consumption again leaves us better off. ... there is no great value in consumption itself.

The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.

Nothing fails like success, because we do not learn anything from it. We only learn from failure, but we do not always learn the right things from failure. If there is a failure of expectations, that is, if the messages that we receive are not the same as those we expected, we can make three possible inferences.

[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.

The world moves into the future as a result of decisions, not as a result of plans. Plans are significant only insofar as they affect decisions.

The discounting presumably is to be done for each period of time at that rate of interest which represents the alternative cost of employing capital in the occupation in question; that is, at the rate which the entrepreneur could obtain in other investments