Don't go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability - whether they are easily measured or not.

The social system tends to be dominated by images... especially of the future, which act cybernetically, constantly guided by perceived divergences between the real and the ideal.

In 1859 the human race discovered a huge treasure chest in its basement. This was oil and gas, a fantastically cheap and easily available source of energy. We did, or at least some of us did, what anybody does who discovers a treasure in the basement - live it up, and we have been spending this treasure with great enjoyment

Don't go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as creativity, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability - whether they are easily measured or not.

[In science any model depends on a pre-chosen taxonomy] a set of classifications into which we divide the enormous complexity of the real world... Land, labor, and capital are extremely heterogeneous aggregates, not much better than earth, air, fire, and water.

The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. It is the great task of human knowledge to bridge this gap and to find those patterns in the past which can be projected into the future as realistic images.

The ability to work with systems of general equilibrium is perhaps one of the most important skills of the economist - a skill which he shares with many other scientists, but in which he has perhaps a certain comparative advantage.