I quote my friend: "if Bitcoin is to cut the banks for people, Ethereum is to cut the laws."

My friend used to say "If Bitcoin is to cut banks, Ethereum is to cut laws."

Allow me to be more elaborate:

If Bitcoin is to cut banks from the flow of money, Ethereum is built to cut middle-men and centralized power from any other processes.

It allows the same piece of software to run on everybody's computer, and enables those computers to act like middle-men.

For example, Uber now acts like a middle-man for rider and driver. Every ride request and dispatch run thru their server, and they control all the info. With Ethereum, we write the software that handles ride request and dispatch, and let it run on everybody's computer, and these computers form a network. This network will handle all the requests and dispatches. But since this network is formed by everybody's computer, there is not centralized power like a company to control the process of ride sharing.