E. F. Schumacher Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

E. F. Schumacher
Man's needs are infinite, and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.

E. F. Schumacher
There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: 'Halt! We have enough'? There is none.

E. F. Schumacher
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

E. F. Schumacher
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.

E. F. Schumacher
An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.

E. F. Schumacher
That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitable produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of bread and circuses can compensate for the damage done—these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence—because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society.

E. F. Schumacher
Our task - and the task of all education - is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.

E. F. Schumacher
The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.

E. F. Schumacher
Small is beautiful. A study of economics as if people mattered.

E. F. Schumacher
At present, there can be little doubt that the whole of mankind is in mortal danger, not because we are short of scientific and technological know-how, but because we tend to use it destructively, without wisdom. More education can help us only if produces more wisdom.

E. F. Schumacher
Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed

E. F. Schumacher
Without... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.

E. F. Schumacher
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.

E. F. Schumacher
The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.

E. F. Schumacher
The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to a gift of material things.

E. F. Schumacher
The generosity of the Earth allows us to feed all mankind; we know enough about ecology to keep the Earth a healthy place; there is enough room on the Earth, and there are enough materials, so that everybody can have adequate shelter; we are quite competent enough to produce sufficient supplies of necessities so that no one need live in misery.

E. F. Schumacher
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.

E. F. Schumacher
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.

E. F. Schumacher
It was not the power of the Spaniards that destroyed the Aztec Empire but the disbelief of the Aztecs in themselves.

E. F. Schumacher
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.

E. F. Schumacher
There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.

E. F. Schumacher
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.

E. F. Schumacher
I started by saying that one of the most fateful errors of our age is the belief that the problem of production has been solved. This illusion, I suggested, is mainly due to our inability to recognize that the modern industrial system, with all its intellectual sophistication, consumes the very basis on which is has been erected. To use the language of the economist, it lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.

E. F. Schumacher
Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.

E. F. Schumacher