The whole is not only grater than the sum of its parts. It also shapes the parts and their relations to each other, which in turn transform the whole.
Andre Gunder Frank (p. xxvii)

...to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economics gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational or less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct.
-- R H Tawney

It is obvious, indeed, that no change of system or machinery can avert those causes of social malaise which consist in the egotism, greed, or quarrelsomeness of human nature. What it can do is to create an environment in which those are not the qualities which are encouraged. It cannot secure that men live up to their principles. What it can do is establish their social order upon principles to which, if they please, they can live up and not live down.
-- R H Tawney

The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets.
-- Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 1944

We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will.
--Karl Marx

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
-- Stephen Hawking

From those to whom much is given, much is required.
--John F. Kennedy

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not more so.
--Albert Einstein