The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.

I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.

I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .

There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: 'Halt! We have enough'? There is none.

It has been universally recognized, in all authentic teachings of mankind, that every being born into this world has to work, not merely to keep himself alive, but to strive towards perfection.

Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.