Great Throughts Treasury

"The most worrisome smart-technology projects start from the assumption that designers know precisely how we should behave, so the only problem is finding the right incentive. A truly smart trash bin, by contrast, would make us reflect on our recycling habits and contribute to conscious deliberation—say, by letting us benchmark our usual recycling behavior against other people in our demographic, instead of trying to shame us with point deductions and peer pressure. There are many contexts in which smart technologies are unambiguously useful and even lifesaving. Smart belts that monitor the balance of the elderly and smart carpets that detect falls seem to fall in this category. The problem with many smart technologies is that their designers, in the quest to root out the imperfections of the human condition, seldom stop to ask how much frustration, failure and regret is required for happiness and achievement to retain any meaning. It's great when the things around us run smoothly, but it's even better when they don't do so by default. That, after all, is how we gain the space to make decisions—many of them undoubtedly wrongheaded—and, through trial and error, to mature into responsible adults, tolerant of compromise and complexity." - Evgeny Morozov

"I have the impression that despite the undeniable Ecotopian scientific achievements in plastics, the future may well belong to the purists. For in this as in many areas of life, there is still a strong trend in Ecotopia to abandon the fruits of all modern technology, however innocuous they may be made, in favor of a poetic but costly return to what the extremists see as ‘nature.’" - Ernest Callenbach

"All history – as well as all current experience – points to the fact that it is man, not nature, who provides the primary resource: that the key factor of all economic development comes out of the mind of man." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"An expansion of man's ability to bring forth secondary products is useless unless preceded by an expansion of his ability to win primary products from the earth; for man is not a producer but only a converter, and for every job of conversion he needs primary products." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"I have argued all along, no system of machinery or economic doctrine or theory stands on its own feet: it is invariably built on a metaphysical foundation, that is to say, upon man's basic outlook on life, its meaning and its purpose." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"In his urgent attempt to obtain reliable knowledge about his essentially indeterminate future, the modern man of action may surround himself by ever-growing armies of forecasters, by ever-growing mountains of factual data to be digested by ever more wonderful mechanical contrivances: I fear that the result is little more than a huge game of make-believe and an ever more marvelous vindication of Parkinson's Law. The best decisions will still be based on the judgments of mature non-electronic brains possessed by men who have looked steadily and calmly at the situation and seen it whole." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of "bread and circuses" can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The foundations of peace cannot be laid by universal prosperity, in the modern sense, because such prosperity, if attainable at all, is attainable only by cultivating such drives of human nature as greed and envy, which destroy intelligence, happiness, serenity, and thereby the peacefulness of man." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The poverty of the poor makes it in any case impossible for them successfully to adopt our technology. Of course, they often try to do so, and then have to bear the most dire consequences in terms of mass unemployment, mass migration into cities, rural decay, and intolerable social tensions. They need, in fact, the very thing I am talking about, which we also need: a different kind of technology, a technology with a human face, which, instead of making human hands and brains redundant, helps them to become far more productive than they ever have been before." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"The power of ordinary people, who today tend to feel utterly powerless, does not lie in starting new lines of action, but in placing their sympathy and support with minority groups which have already started." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"To mention these things, no doubt, means laying oneself open to the charge of being against science, technology, and progress. Let me therefore, in conclusion, add a few words about future scientific research. Man cannot live without science and technology any more than he can live against nature." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"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." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"We should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time bases, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher

"No good lawyer ever goes to court himself." - Italian Proverbs

"No one ever became poor through giving alms." - Italian Proverbs

"Those who begin many things finish but a few." - Italian Proverbs

"I know only two words of American slang, 'swell' and 'lousy'. I think 'swell' is lousy, but 'lousy' is swell." - J. B. Priestly, fully John Boynton Priestly

"All have their worth and each contributes to the worth of the others." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow in the waters that was soon lost in the West. There he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-Earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Clothes are of but little loss, if you escape from drowning." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Far, far below the deepest delvings of the dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"GOLLUM: Shut up! BILBO: I didn't say anything... GOLLUM: I wasn't talking to you." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

"He did not go much further, but sat down on the cold floor and gave himself up to complete miserableness, for a long while. He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs in his own kitchen at home - for he could feel inside that it was high time for some meal or other; but that only made him miserabler." - J. R. R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien