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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
Intelligent
Fool
Genius
Recapture
Takes
Complications
Complication
Retain
Invent
Simplicity

More quotes by 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.
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
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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.
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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
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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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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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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
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.
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Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
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There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
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.
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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.
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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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