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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
Simplicity
Intelligent
Fool
Genius
Recapture
Takes
Complications
Complication
Retain
Invent

More quotes by 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.
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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
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There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
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There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
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The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.
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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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
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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.
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.
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I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
E. F. Schumacher
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Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
E. F. Schumacher
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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
E. F. Schumacher
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There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.
E. F. Schumacher
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Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
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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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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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
E. F. Schumacher