"We have lived for 200 years in a growth economy. In this time we have come to believe that all our major economic ills – from unemployment and poverty to overpopulation and even environmental degradation – can be solved by more growth. And if the global economy existed in a void perhaps that would be true. But it does not."

“The cosmology of scientific materialism … considers the cosmos an absurd accident, and life within it to be no more than another accident.”

“Once we have replaced the basic premise of “more is better” with the much sounder axiom that “enough is best,” the social and technical problems of moving to a steady state become solvable, perhaps even trivial.”

“Current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.”

“There is something fundamentally wrong with treating the earth as if it were a business in liquidation.”

“If economic reality is actually so complex that it can only be described by complicated mathematical models that add epicycles to epicycles and externalities to externalities, then the reality should be simplified.”

“It is imaginable that someday we will discover how to create materials from nothing, how to achieve perpetual motion, how to reverse time’s arrow, and so on. But to take such science-fiction miracles as a basis for economic policy would be absurd.”