My favorite quotes from the beginning of The Sovereign Individual:

"We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics."

"When most wealth can be earned anywhere, and even spent anywhere, governments that attempt to charge too much as the price of domicile will merely drive away their best customers. If our reasoning is correct, the nation-state will not survive in anything like its present form."

"The process by which the nation-state grew over the past five centuries will be put into reverse by the new logic of the Information Age. Local centers of power will reassert themselves as the state devolves into fragmented, overlapping sovereignties."

"The Don Quixote of the twenty-first century will not be a knight-errant struggling to revive the glories of feudalism but a bureaucrat in a brown suit, a tax collector yearning for a citizen to audit."

"If you fail to transcend conventional thinking at a time when conventional thinking is losing touch with reality, then you will be more likely to fall prey to an epidemic of disorientation that lies ahead."

“In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence.”

“You cannot depend upon conventional information sources to give you an objective and timely warning about how the world is changing and why. If you wish to understand the great transition now underway, you have little choice but to figure it out for yourself.”