- "People do not want electricity or oil ... but rather comfortable rooms, light, vehicular motion, food, tables, and other real things."
- "There exists today a body of energy technologies that have certain specific features in common and that offer great technical, economic, and political attractions ... 'soft' energy technologies [which are] flexible, resilient, sustainable, and benign. They rely on renewable energy flows that are always there whether we use them of not, such as sun and wind and vegetation."
- "Soft technologies' matching of energy quality to end-use needs virtually eliminates the costs and losses of secondary energy conversion, [and] the appropriate scale of soft technologies can virtually eliminate the costs and losses of energy distribution."
– Amory Lovins, Soft Energy Paths, 1977, pp. 38–40.