Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the more they foster teaching.

The higher we are on the pyramid, the less likely we are to give up time to simple idleness and to apparently nonproductive pursuits.

Honesty requires that we each recognize the need to limit procreation, consumption, and waste, but equally we must radically reduce our expectations that machines will do our work for us or that therapists can make us learned or healthy. The only solution to the environmental crisis is the shared insight of people that they would be happier if they

Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision.

An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image.

We found that the industrialization of any service agency leads to destructive side effects analogous to the unwanted secondary results well known from the overproduction of goods.

An increase in social mobility can render society more human, but only if at the same time there is a narrowing of the difference in power which separates the few from the many.

People come to understand that an alternative society is possible by using clear language. They can bring it about by recovering consciousness of the deep structure by which, in their society, decisions are made. Such a structure exists wherever people form a community.

People have a native capacity for healing, consoling, moving, learning, building their houses, and burying their dead. Each of these capacities meets a need. The means for the satisfaction of these needs are abundant so long as they depend primarily on what people can do for themselves, with only marginal dependence on commodities. These activities