Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
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
System
Nature
Balancing
Part
Adjusting
Self
Cleansing
Men
Ecology
Tends
Environment
Technology
More quotes by E. F. Schumacher
The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
E. F. Schumacher
An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .
E. F. Schumacher
Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's enduring powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.
E. F. Schumacher
No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
E. F. Schumacher
Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
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
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.
E. F. Schumacher
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
Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
E. F. Schumacher
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
Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
E. F. Schumacher
Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
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
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
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
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
There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.
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
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.
E. F. Schumacher
