Krafft Arnold Ehricke Quotes

Maybe the preoccupation with technological progress has overshadowed our concern with human progress.

Above and beyond the question of how to grow the economy there is a legitimate concern about how to grow the quality of our lives.

The idea that only a limited number of people can live in a country is profound illusion. It all depends on their cooperative and inventive power.

We have such a great civilization.

The major challenge facing us is to elevate our national life to the highest level of civilization and prosperity.

We are living in a time when the comforts of life, and all the material wealth needed to bring happiness to every human being, can be produced in abundance. There is no need whatever for one human being to go hungry, homeless or naked. Man’s inventive genius has developed the tool to that point, and guided the natural forces to that degree, that abundance is possible to all.

Opulent, civilized, and industrious nations, are greater consumers than poor ones, because they are infinitely greater producers.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops,—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

The most remarkable aspect of the transition we are living through is not so much the passage from want to affluence as the passage from labor to leisure.

The problem of the minimum dwelling is that of establishing the elementary minimum of space, air, light, and heat required by man in order that he be able to fully develop his life functions without experiencing limitations due to his dwelling, i.e. a minimum modus vivendi in place of a modus non moriendi.

A country in which the people are not healthy physically and psychologically, are poorly educated and illiterate, will never rise to the peaks of world civilization.

There can be no high civilization where there is not ample leisure.

The cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.

As the twentieth century draws to a close it has become obvious that material yardsticks alone cannot serve as an adequate measure of human well-being. Even as basic an issue as poverty has to be re-examined to take into account the psychological sense of deprivation that makes people feel poor.

Civilization did not come with fire. It came with the discovery of how to use fire to heat water.

Civilization in certain respects is as inadequate as it was a thousand years ago.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

It is science alone that can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening custom and tradition, of vast resources running to waste, or a rich country inhabited by starving people... Who indeed could afford to ignore science today? At every turn we have to seek its aid... The future belongs to science and those who make friends with science.

Real progress cannot be measured by money alone. We must ensure that economic growth contributes to our quality of life, rather than degrading it

The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or imagine a few generations ago.

The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.

The resources of civilization are not yet exhausted.

Man is born barbarous--he is ransomed from the condition of beasts only by being cultivated.

Speed is one of the great curses of modern civilization, obsession with speed leads to quantitative approach; we come to believe that more is better. This is very materialistic, we have to realize that it is the quality of life, quality of relationships, quality of food, medicine, education and everything else which matters.

We are racing toward a world of abundance, and we are going to be increasing the quality of life for everyone on this planet. The world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.