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  • "Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood." - The Priest of Ungit in Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
  • "I am thoroughly convinced that much of the evil of our times is related to specialization and that we desperately need to develop an attitude of suspicious caution toward it. I think we need to treat specialization with the same degree of distrust and safeguards that we bring to nuclear reactors" - M. Scott Peck in People of the Lie
  • "And so we can say that the industrial economy's most-marketed commodity is satisfaction, and that this commodity, which is repeatedly promised, bought, and paid for, is never delivered. On the other hand, people who have much satisfaction do not need many commodities." - Wendell Berry in "The Whole Horse" in The Art of the Commonplace
  • "The problem is not just that more consumption doesn't yield more satisfaction (as in the extreme case where all satisfaction comes from relative position), but that it has a cost. The extra hours we have to work to earn the money cut into personal and family time. Whatever we consume has an ecological impact, whether it's the rain forests cleared to graze the cattle which become Big Macs, the toxins collecting in our bodies from the plastics that now dominate our material environment, or the pesticides used to grow the cotton fro our T-shirts. Americans increasingly resent paying taxes to buy public goods like parks, schools, the arts, or support for the poor because taxes are perceived as subtracting from the private consumption they deem absolutely necessary. We find ourselves skimping on invisibles such as insurance, college funds, and retirement savings as the visible commodities somehow become indispensable. In the process, we are threatening our temporal, social, and biological infrastructures. We are impoverishing ourselves in pursuit of a consumption goal that is inherently unachievable. - Juliet B. Schor in The Overspent American
  • "Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship... Salesmanship is the craft of persuading people to buy what they do not need, and do not want, for more than it is worth." - Wendell Berry in "The Unsettling of American" in The Art of the Commonplace
  • "They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny." - Laura Ingalls Wilder in Little House on the Prairie
  • "Animals and birds are lucky. They don't keep acquiring things, the way men do. You can teach a monkey to drive a motorcycle, but I have never known a monkey to go out and buy a motorcycle." - E. B. White in The Trumpet of the Swan.

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