E. F. Schumacher Quotes
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Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.
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Many people love in themselves what they hate in others.
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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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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
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If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters.
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Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.
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The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
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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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Scientific and technological 'solutions' which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.
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Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.
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An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
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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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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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Much of the economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world) is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.
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To organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence.
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You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.
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The Buddhist view, 'takes the function of work to be at least threefold': 'to give a man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his egocentredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.'
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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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Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.
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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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From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by automation. From the point of view of the workman, it is a 'disutility'; to work is to make a sacrifice of one's leisure and comfort, and wages are a kind of compensation for the sacrifice.
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The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.
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Anything that we can destroy, but are unable to make is, in a sense, sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not explain anything.
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Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist.