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

Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values.

Integrative power [is] the ultimate power

Communication can only take place among equals.

The organization of science into disciplines sets up a series of ghettos with remarkable distances of artificial social space between them.

[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.

The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other.