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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.
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
Tends
Environment
Technology
System
Nature
Balancing
Part
Adjusting
Self
Cleansing
Men
Ecology
More quotes by E. F. Schumacher
The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
E. F. Schumacher
Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
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
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
Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
E. F. Schumacher
Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
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
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
The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
E. F. Schumacher
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and 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
Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
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
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
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
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.
E. F. Schumacher
I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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 is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E. F. Schumacher