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The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.

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
Much
Striking
Requires
Accomplish
Industry
Modern
Littles
Little
Thing
Accomplishes

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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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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.
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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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Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.
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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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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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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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I'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
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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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I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.
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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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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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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 substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.
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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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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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There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.
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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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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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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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