Top 82 E.F. Schumacher Quotes
#1. If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters.
E.F. Schumacher
#2. Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.
E.F. Schumacher
#3. Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.
E.F. Schumacher
#4. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
E.F. Schumacher
#5. Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex ... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
E.F. Schumacher
#6. Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.
E.F. Schumacher
#7. Nobody really likes large-scale organizations; nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders ...
E.F. Schumacher
#8. The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
E.F. Schumacher
#9. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear
E.F. Schumacher
#11. The modern world tends to be skeptical about everything that makes demands on man's higher faculties. But it is not at all skeptical about skepticism, which demands hardly anything.
E.F. Schumacher
#12. There are three things healthy people most need to do - to be creatively productive, to render service, and to act in accordance with their moral impulses. In all three respects modern society frustrates most people most of the time.
E.F. Schumacher
#13. A way of life that ever more rapidly depletes the power of the Earth to sustain it and piles up ever more insoluble problems for each succeeding generation can only be called violent.
E.F. Schumacher
#14. By means of trees, wildlife could be conserved, pollution decreased, and the beauty of our landscapes enhanced. This is the way, or at least one of the ways, to spiritual, moral, and cultural regeneration.
E.F. Schumacher
#15. I certainly never feel discouraged. I can't myself raise the winds that might blow us or this ship into a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that when the winds comes, I can catch it.
E.F. Schumacher
#16. The purpose of work is to give people a chance to utilize and develop their faculties; to enable them to overcome their ego-centeredness by joining others in a common task; and to bring for the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.
E.F. Schumacher
#17. There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
E.F. Schumacher
#18. An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
E.F. Schumacher
#19. I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.
E.F. Schumacher
#20. An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.
E.F. Schumacher
#21. If greed were not the master of modern man, how could it be that the frenzy of economic activity does not abate as higher standards of living are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness?
E.F. Schumacher
#22. Modern economic thinking ... is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
E.F. Schumacher
#23. Anything that we can destroy but are unable to make is, in a sense sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not really explain anything.
E.F. Schumacher
#24. To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.
E.F. Schumacher
#25. Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist.
E.F. Schumacher
#26. Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.
E.F. Schumacher
#27. Is there enough to go around? What is enough? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues economic growth as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of enough.
E.F. Schumacher
#28. We think work with the brain is more worthy than work with the hands. Nobody who thinks with his hands could ever fall for this.
E.F. Schumacher
#29. Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.
E.F. Schumacher
#31. . . . our most important task is to get off our present collision course. And who is there to tackle such a task? I think every one of us, whether old or young, powerful or powerless, rich or poor, influential or uninfluential.
E.F. Schumacher
#32. Work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.
E.F. Schumacher
#33. The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
E.F. Schumacher
#34. The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.
E.F. Schumacher
#35. Our task - and the task of all education - is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.
E.F. Schumacher
#37. We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature ...
E.F. Schumacher
#38. Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
E.F. Schumacher
#39. I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
E.F. Schumacher
#40. Our intentions tend to be much more real to us than our actions, and this can lead to a great deal of misunderstanding with other people, to whom our actions tend to be much more real than our intentions.
E.F. Schumacher
#41. Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be "uneconomic" you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.
E.F. Schumacher
#42. I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
E.F. Schumacher
#43. Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance.
E.F. Schumacher
#44. There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E.F. Schumacher
#45. An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods ...
E.F. Schumacher
#46. It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.
E.F. Schumacher
#47. There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.
E.F. Schumacher
#48. It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work.
E.F. Schumacher
#49. Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organization, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped, potential.
E.F. Schumacher
#50. If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.
E.F. Schumacher
#51. Why precisely do we want to change land ownership? The answer seems to me to be quite clear: to inhibit land speculation, to inhibit the private exploitation of the scarcity-value of land, to inhibit as we might say the cornering of land.
E.F. Schumacher
#52. Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side
E.F. Schumacher
#53. The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
E.F. Schumacher
#54. We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.
E.F. Schumacher
#55. Many of them had a better time than they ever had in their lives because they were discovering the new freedom - the less you need, the freer you become.
E.F. Schumacher
#56. The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to a gift of material things.
E.F. Schumacher
#57. The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers.
E.F. Schumacher
#58. Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
E.F. Schumacher
#59. The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed ... The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.
E.F. Schumacher
#60. Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.
E.F. Schumacher
#61. There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: 'Halt! We have enough'? There is none.
E.F. Schumacher
#62. It is amazing how much theory we can do without when work actually begins.
E.F. Schumacher
#63. To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now.
E.F. Schumacher
#64. Man's needs are infinite, and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.
E.F. Schumacher
#65. No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
E.F. Schumacher
#66. The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.
E.F. Schumacher
#67. Scientific and technological "solutions" which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.
E.F. Schumacher
#68. Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.
E.F. Schumacher
#69. Many people love in themselves what they hate in others.
E.F. Schumacher
#70. Perhaps we cannot raise the winds. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it.
E.F. Schumacher
#71. After all, for mankind as a whole there are no exports. We did not start developing by obtaining foreign exchange from Mars or the moon. Mankind is a closed society.
E.F. Schumacher
#72. Many have no desire to be in it, because their work does not interest them, providing them with neither challenge nor satisfaction, and has no other merit in their eyes than that it leads to a pay-packet at the end of the week.
E.F. Schumacher
#73. The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
E.F. Schumacher
#74. You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.
E.F. Schumacher
#75. True art is the intermediary between man's ordinary nature and his higher potentialities.
E.F. Schumacher
#76. It has been universally recognized, in all authentic teachings of mankind, that every being born into this world has to work, not merely to keep himself alive, but to strive towards perfection.
E.F. Schumacher
#77. Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
E.F. Schumacher
#78. The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
E.F. Schumacher
#79. The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
E.F. Schumacher
#80. Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.
E.F. Schumacher
#81. At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if produces more wisdom.
E.F. Schumacher
#82. The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.
E.F. Schumacher
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