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
Nature
Balancing
Part
Adjusting
Self
Cleansing
Men
Ecology
Tends
Environment
Technology
System
More quotes by E. F. Schumacher
There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E. F. Schumacher
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.
E. F. Schumacher
The purpose of work is to give people a chance to utilize and develop their faculties to enable them to overcome their ego-centeredness by joining others in a common task and to bring for the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.
E. F. Schumacher
I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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
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
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.
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
The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
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
There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.
E. F. Schumacher
Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
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
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
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
The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
E. F. Schumacher
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.
E. F. Schumacher
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
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
I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
E. F. Schumacher