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Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed

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
Tension
Opposites
Needed
Real
Life
Incompatibility
Tensions
Consists
Produced

More quotes by 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.
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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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There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.
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There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
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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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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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The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
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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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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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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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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 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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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
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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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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
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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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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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
E. F. Schumacher