[on the theory of the firm] It is exactly analogous to the analysis of the reactions of a consumer by means of indifferent curves. Indeed, a consumer is merely a 'firm' whose product is 'utility.'

At the opposite pole from the gift is tribute - that is, a grant made out of fear and under threat. A threat is a statement of the form "you do something that I want or I will do something that you do not want.

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.

Economists are like computers. They need to have facts punched into them.

Any attempt to reduce the complex properties of biological organisms or of nervous systems or of human brains to simple physical and chemical systems is foolish.

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed.

We make our tools, and then they shape us.