Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
E. F. Schumacher
Age: 66 †
Born: 1911
Born: August 16
Died: 1977
Died: September 4
Economist
Philosopher
Statistician
Bonn
Germany
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher
Problem
Technical
Real
Philosophical
Planet
Planets
Events
Problems
Unbridled
Philosophy
Challenged
Economic
Materialism
More quotes by E. F. Schumacher
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
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.
E. F. Schumacher
Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
E. F. Schumacher
Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
E. F. Schumacher
Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
E. F. Schumacher
Nobody really likes large-scale organizations nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders.
E. F. Schumacher
Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
E. F. Schumacher
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
There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E. F. Schumacher
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.
E. F. Schumacher
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.
E. F. Schumacher
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.
E. F. Schumacher
I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
E. F. Schumacher
The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
E. F. Schumacher
I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
E. F. Schumacher
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
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.
E. F. Schumacher
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
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
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
