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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

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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
Life
Turns
Economics
Nonviolent
Words
Violent
Evolving
Problem
Speed
Identical
May
Countries
Largely
Wells
Keys
Efficiency
Urbanization
Well
West
Quantity
Underdeveloped
Country
Turn
Evolve
Centralization
Way
Economic
Developing
Industrialization

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The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.
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We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us for, assuredly, we have not come about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves
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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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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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The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
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No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
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Nobody really likes large-scale organizations nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders.
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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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It might be said that it is the ideal of the employer to have production without employees and the ideal of the employee is to have income without work.
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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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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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The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
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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. . . .
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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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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'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
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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