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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
Retain
Invent
Simplicity
Intelligent
Fool
Genius
Recapture
Takes
Complications
Complication

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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.
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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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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
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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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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.
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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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Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.
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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.
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An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .
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The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
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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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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.
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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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Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
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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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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.
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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.
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The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
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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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