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

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
Pay
Becomes
Impossible
Society
Without
Things
Richer
Immediate
Worthwhile

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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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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
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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.
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The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
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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.
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The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
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Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.
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