Quote

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

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E. F. Schumacher
Age: 66 †
Born: 1911
Born: August 16
Died: 1977
Died: September 4
Economist
Philosopher
Statistician
Bonn
Germany
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher
Long
Call
Immoral
Really
Future
Shown
Men
Peace
Destroying
World
Soul
Ugly
Uneconomic
Wells
Exist
Questioned
Well
Generations
Prosper
Right
Grow
Degradation
Thing
Grows
Peril

More quotes by E. F. Schumacher

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The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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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
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There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us for, assuredly, we have not come about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's enduring powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.
E. F. Schumacher
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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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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
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Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the nonviolent, the elegant and beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
E. F. Schumacher
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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