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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
Without
Things
Richer
Immediate
Worthwhile
Pay
Becomes
Impossible
Society

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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 task is to look at the world, and see it whole.
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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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The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
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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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Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.
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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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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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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.
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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.
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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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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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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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Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.
E. F. Schumacher
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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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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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The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.
E. F. Schumacher
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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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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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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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