Quote

The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.

E. F. Schumacher

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

E. F. Schumacher
Age: 66 †
Born: 1911
Born: August 16
Died: 1977
Died: September 4
Economist
Philosopher
Statistician
Bonn
Germany
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher
Worthwhile
Pay
Becomes
Impossible
Society
Without
Things
Richer
Immediate

More quotes by E. F. Schumacher

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
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
Image
There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There are poor societies which have too little but where is the rich society that says: 'Halt! We have enough'? There is none.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
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
Image
The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
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
Image
There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
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
Image
I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
E. F. Schumacher
Image
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
Image
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