As the historian Robert Himmelberg has pointed out, many businessmen were not only desirous of modifying the antitrust laws in order to permit trade … - Butler D. Shaffer

Those who do not understand the Amish often imagine that their resistance to new technologies arises from a sense of ‘evil’ they see in such tools. But this is not the case. The Amish do employ tools, but if someone wants to consider bringing a new technology into the community, the Amish study it with this thought in mind: will acceptance of this technology make us dependent upon the external world, such that we will be tempted to change our ways? An automobile, for instance, would make the Amish have to rely on parts manufacturers, tire and battery sellers, and petroleum companies to keep it operative.

The efforts of one organism to live at the expense of another is, when confined to members of the same species, a form of cannibalism.

The pyramid expresses the essence of a world premised on vertical power, in which interpersonal relationships are yoked together in systems of domination and subservience. No more poignant image of a top-down world—one in which institutional violence operates as a kind of ersatz gravitational force—exists than this. Members of the institutional hierarchy—who long ago learned that they could more readily benefit by coercing their fellow humans than by trading with them—have seen to it that others be inculcated in a belief in the necessity of pyramidalism. Our entire institutionalized world—from the more violent political organizations to more temperate ideologies—is premised on the shared assumption that only in vertically-structured institutionalized authority can mankind find conditions of peace, liberty, and order.