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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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E. F. Schumacher
Age: 66 †
Born: 1911
Born: August 16
Died: 1977
Died: September 4
Economist
Philosopher
Statistician
Bonn
Germany
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher
Missing
Chemical
System
Chemicals
Doubt
Extreme
Animal
Describe
Correct
Perfectly
Extremes
Except
Misses

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The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
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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.
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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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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
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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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No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.
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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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An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods. . . .
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There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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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.
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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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Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed
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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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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
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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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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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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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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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