Noam Chomsky

Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

The greatest progress is in the sciences that study the simplest systems. So take, say, physics - greatest progress there. But one of the reasons is that the physicists have an advantage that no other branch of sciences has. If something gets too complicated, they hand it to someone else.

Changes and progress very rarely are gifts from above. They come out of struggles from below.