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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
Worthwhile
Pay
Becomes
Impossible
Society
Without
Things
Richer
Immediate

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We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us for, assuredly, we have not come about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves
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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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I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
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There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.
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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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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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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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Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
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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.
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Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.
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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 is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
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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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Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
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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.
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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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The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
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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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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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Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher