

“Wherever the shadow of economic growth touches us, we are left useless unless employed on a job or engaged in consumption...We lose sight of our resources, lose control over the environmental conditions which make these resources applicable, lose taste for self-reliant coping with challenges from without and anxiety from within.”
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“All governments stress an employment-intensive force of production, but are unwilling to recognize that jobs can also destroy the use-value of free time. They all stress a more objective and complete professional definition of people's needs, but are insensitive to the consequent expropriation of life.”
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts...The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature's perennial contribution.”
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“Today, one must either be isolated and cut off, or a carefully guarded, affluent drop-out, to allow one's children to play in an environment where they listen to people rather than to stars, speakers, or instructors. All over the world, one can see the rapid encroachment of the disciplined acquiescence that characterizes the audience, the client, the customer.”
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies
― The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
― An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
― An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
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