[The loss-of-strength gradient is] the degree to which military and political power diminishes as we move a unit distance away from its home base.

In calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy; society is an example of the general concept of an "ecosystem" that is, an ecological system of which biological systems - forests, fields, swamps - are other examples.

I have been gradually coming under the conviction, disturbing for a professional theorist, that there is no such thing as economics - there is only social science applied to economic problems.

Economists and technologists bring the "bits", but it requires the social scientists and humanists to bring the "wits.

Private property is a means, and neither its abolition nor its unrestricted right should be an end in itself.

There are, of course, a number of epistemological questions, some of which lie more in the province of the philosopher than they do the economist or the social scientist. The one with which I am particularly concerned here is that of the role of knowledge in social systems, both as a product of the past and as a determinant of the future.

Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message.