11 quotes
The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)
It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
Small is Beautiful (1973)
Scientific and technological “solutions” which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)
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.
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.
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)
An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
Anything that we can destroy, but are unable to make is, in a sense, sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not explain anything.
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.
Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)