The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.
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.
We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us; for, assuredly, we have not come about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves
No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man. The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man as if people did not matter at all.
To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.
Our task - and the task of all education - is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.
If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.
Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
It is amazing how much theory we can do without when work actually begins.
An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment 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.
The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid , uninteresting, petty and chaotic.
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.
By means of trees, wildlife could be conserved, pollution decreased, and the beauty of our landscapes enhanced. This is the way, or at least one of the ways, to spiritual, moral, and cultural regeneration.
I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.
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.
...liberation from constraints that operate at the level of ordinary humanity---limits imposed by space and time, by the needs of the body, and by the opaqueness of the computer-like mind. All three examples [Jacob Lorber, Edgar Cayce, and Therese Neumann] illustrates the paradoxical truth that such 'higher powers' cannot be acquired by any kind of attack or conquest conducted by the human personality; only when the striving for 'power' has entirely ceased and been replaced by a certain transcendental longing, often called the love of God, may they, or may they not be 'added unto you.
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.
Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.
Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
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.
I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market
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