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There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.

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
Economic
Sense
Problem
Never

More quotes by E. F. Schumacher

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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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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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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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Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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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.
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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
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Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
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.
E. F. Schumacher
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The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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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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
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The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
E. F. Schumacher
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There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price.
E. F. Schumacher
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Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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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Why precisely do we want to change land ownership? The answer seems to me to be quite clear: to inhibit land speculation, to inhibit the private exploitation of the scarcity-value of land, to inhibit as we might say the cornering of land.
E. F. Schumacher