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.

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.

The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge.

The only religion that still demands human sacrifice is nationalism.

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.

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

Justification, in terms of the broadening of freedom, for any particular form of institution of property must be argued in terms of whether the losses caused by the restrictions imposed are greater or less than the gains derived from the elimination of costly conflict.