Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear

Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.

The modern world tends to be skeptical about everything that makes demands on man's higher faculties. But it is not at all skeptical about skepticism, which demands hardly anything.

Many of them had a better time than they ever had in their lives because they were discovering the new freedom - the less you need, the freer you become.

Nobody really likes large-scale organizations; nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders.

Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the more impossible it become to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.

Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist.