Quote

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

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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
Amount
Leisure
Technology
Proportion
Wrong
Saving
Society
Prosperity
Think
Generally
Employs
Thinking
Genuine
Asserted
Available
Inverse
Labor
Machinery

More quotes by E. F. Schumacher

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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
E. F. Schumacher
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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
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.
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The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
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There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
E. F. Schumacher
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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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No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
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
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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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
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Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
E. F. Schumacher
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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