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Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.

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
Complication
Retain
Invent
Simplicity
Intelligent
Fool
Genius
Recapture
Takes
Complications

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I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
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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.
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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.
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Economic policies absorb almost the entire attention of government, and at the same time become ever more impotent. The simplest things, which only fifty years ago one could do without difficulty, cannot get done any more. The richer a society, the more impossible it become to do worthwhile things without immediate payoff.
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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.
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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.
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Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
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The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
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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.
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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.
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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
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The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.
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Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
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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.
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The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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