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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.
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
Labor
Machinery
Amount
Leisure
Technology
Proportion
Wrong
Saving
Society
Prosperity
Think
Generally
Employs
Thinking
Genuine
Asserted
Available
Inverse
More quotes by E. F. Schumacher
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
The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers.
E. F. Schumacher
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
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
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
An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .
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
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
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.
E. F. Schumacher
There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E. F. Schumacher
Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
E. F. Schumacher
The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
E. F. Schumacher
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
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
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
The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.
E. F. Schumacher
If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
E. F. Schumacher
No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
E. F. Schumacher
Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
E. F. Schumacher
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