The human experience can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all decisions are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior. The character and quality of the images of the future which prevail in a society is therefore the most important clue to its overall dynamics.

Production functions involving only land, labor and capital... never work and never explain economic development.

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.

[The historical] development in the international system may almost be defined as the process by which we pass from stable war to stable peace.

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.

With laissez-faire and price atomic, ecology's uneconomic, But with another kind of logic economy's unecologic.

Mathematicians themselves set up standards of generality and elegance in their exposition which are a bar to understand.