To argue for a balance between people and their tools, between life and machinery, between biological and machine-produced energy, is to argue for restraint upon the use of machines. The arguments that rise out of the machine metaphor – arguments for cheapness, efficiency, labor-saving, economic growth, etc. – all point to infinite industrial growth and infinite energy consumption. The moral argument points to restraint; it is a conclusion that may be in some sense tragic, but there is no escaping it. Much as we long for infinities of power and duration, we have no evidence that these lie within our reach, much less within our responsibility. It is more likely that we will have either to live within our limits, within the human definition, or not live at all. And certainly the knowledge of these limits and of how to live within them is the most comely and graceful knowledge that we have, the most healing and the most whole.

Wendell Berry, “The Use of Energy” in The Unsettling of America

Do I wish to keep up with the times? No.

My wish simply is to live as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.

Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine” in What Are People For?

The question that we finally come to is a practical one, though it is not one that is entirely answerable by empirical methods: Can a university, or a nation, afford this exclusive rule of competition, this purely economic economy? The great fault of this approach to things is that it is so drastically reductive; it does not permit us to live and work as human beings, as the best of our inheritance defines us. Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. It is impossible not to notice how little the proponents of the ideal of competition have to say about honesty, which is the fundamental economic virtue, and how very little they have to say about community, compassion, and mutual help.

Wendell Berry, “Economy and Pleasure” from What Are People For?