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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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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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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Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
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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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Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
E. F. Schumacher
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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.
E. F. Schumacher
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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.
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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
E. F. Schumacher
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The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
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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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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 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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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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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
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Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
E. F. Schumacher
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To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.
E. F. Schumacher
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Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
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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