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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

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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
Littles
Little
Halt
Enough
Societies
None
Says
Rich
Poor
Society

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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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Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.
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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.
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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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Is there enough to go around? What is enough? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues economic growth as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of enough.
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Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
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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.
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
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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.
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Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.
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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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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.
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Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
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The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
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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.
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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.
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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
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Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
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