"Induction is the process of taking things within our experience to be representative of the world outside our experience. It is a process of projection or extrapolation."

"What underlies our assignment of probabilities in the real world?"

"Myself, I have never seen a bumper sticker saying "Hate if you Love Jesus", but I sometimes wonder why not. It would be a good slogan for the religious Right."

"Why should thinkers mock the simple pieties of the people?"

"But if nothing does as well as something about which nothing can be said, it vanishes."

"Nobody ever inferred from the multiple infirmities of Windows that Bill Gates was infinitely benevolent, omniscient, and able to fix everything."

"A god that created the world and then walked off the site leaving it to its own devices is not a fit object of worship, nor a source of moral authority."

"It can seem an amazing fact that laws of nature keep on holding, that the frame of nature does not fall apart."

"We can grieve over lost powers and memories, or rejoice over gained knowledge and maturity, according to taste."

"But it is logically impossible that there could exist an 'unowned' dent, a dent without a surface that is dented."

"There was content, but no container."

"If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling."

"In Michigan recently a man won a lawsuit for substantial damages because, he claimed, a rear-end collision in his car had made him a homosexual."

"Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility."

"Chance is as relentless as necessity."

"A signpost doesn't in and of itself represent the way to the village. We have to learn how to take it."

"Thoughts are strange things. they have 'representational' powers: a thought typically represents the world as being one way or another. A sensation, by contrast, seems to just sit there."

"The scientific world is to be less threatening than was feared. It is to be made safe for human beings. And the way to make it safe is to reflect on the foundation of knowledge."

"Since there is no telling in advance where it may lead, reflection can be seen as dangerous."

"In the end, it is ideas for which people kill each other."

"The word "philosophy" carries unfortunate connotations: impractical, unworldly, weird."

"An ethic gone wrong is an essential preliminary to the sweat shop or the concentration camp and the death march."

"We hope for lives whose story leaves us looking admirable; we like our weaknesses to be hidden and deniable... We want to enjoy our lives, and we want to enjoy them with a good conscience ... Ethics is disturbing. We are often vaguely uncomfortable when we think of such things as exploitation of the world's resources, or the way our comforts are provided by the miserable labour conditions of the third world ... Racists and sexists, like antebellum slave owners in America, always have to tell themselves a story that justifies their system."

"The study of human societies and economics is of great importance, and it is not the purpose of the book to suggest otherwise. Rather it is to argue that conventional economics offers a very misleading view of how the world actually operates, and that it needs to be replaced."

"But Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as well as an economist, famous in his time as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments as for The Wealth of Nations. And as he understood so well, society is more than the sum of its individual parts."

"Many Europeans, while admiring the strength and power of the American economy, undoubtedly feel that the system of social values which prevails in the United States, manifested in the acute problems evident in the inner cities and the level of violent crime, for example, leaves much to be desired."

"Even in financial markets, the concept of market efficiency does not hold."

"The linear, mechanistic view of the world which pervades orthodox economics is simply not capable of capturing the richness and complexity of the rhythms and fluctuations of developed economies."

"We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism."

"Keynes tried to show that market economies could settle in equilibrium states in which the labour market did not clear, and in which the level of unemployment was high. He believed that this was due to a particular example of market failure, developed in his concept of effective demand."

"Once the true relationship between inflation and unemployment is understood, with luck and skill, a free lunch is possible."

"In most Western economies, the general relationship is not in fact between the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment, but between the rate of change of inflation and the rate of change of unemployment."

"By any reasonable criteria, the discipline of economics as a whole, in its present state, is sadly lacking."

"Baseball players or cricketers do not need to be able to solve explicitly the non-linear differential equations which govern the flight of the ball. They just catch it."

"The reader might reflect that an awful lot of supposing has to take place in order for the quantity theory of money to be true."

"The behavior of the economy as a whole, at the aggregate, macro-level, is built up from the individual equations at the micro-level."

"The model of competitive equilibrium which has been discussed so far is set in a timeless environment. People and companies all operate in a world in which there is no future and hence no uncertainty."

"Despite the high salaries involved, employing economists is a cost-effective way for banks, and stockbrokers to secure exposure in the media."

"The second part of the New Right's policy package has been the belief that free-market solutions are always best. It is this latter view which is profoundly mistaken. Markets and profits are crucial, but the pure free-market model itself is deeply flawed."

"The temptation to use mathematics is irresistible for economists. It appears to convey the appropriate air of scientific authority and precision to economists' musings."

"At 2 per cent growth a year, an economy doubles in size in just thirty years."

"The importance to Smith of the overall set of values in which the economy operates is generally ignored by his followers in the late twentieth century. His economics, based upon individual self-interest, is remembered, but his moral framework is not."

"The obstacles facing academic economists are formidable, for tenure and professional advancement still depend to a large extent on a willingness to comply with and to work within the tenets of orthodox theory."

"We take as given the idea of distinction and the idea of indication, and that we cannot make an indication without drawing a distinction. We take, therefore, the form of distinction for the form."

"George Spencer-Brown—born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England 1923—has held a number of occupational roles, such as a mathematician, consulting engineer, psychologist, pilot, educational consultant, author and poet, adviser in military communications (coding and code-breaking), football correspondent to the Daily Express; he even practised car racing with Gavin Maxwell."

"To teach pride in knowledge is to put up an effective barrier against any advance upon what is already known, since it makes one ashamed to look beyond the bounds imposed by one's own ignorance."

"Let us consider, for a moment, the world as described by the physicist. It consists of a number of fundamental particles which, if shot through their own space, appear as waves, and are thus... of the same laminated structure as pearls or onions, and other wave forms called electromagnetic which it is convenient, by Occam’s razor, to consider as travelling through space with a standard velocity. All these appear bound by certain natural laws which indicate the form of their relationship."