E. F. Schumacher Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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.

E. F. Schumacher
I certainly never feel discouraged. I can't myself raise the winds that might blow us or this ship into a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that when the winds comes, I can catch it.

E. F. Schumacher
There are three things healthy people most need to do - to be creatively productive, to render service, and to act in accordance with their moral impulses. In all three respects modern society frustrates most people most of the time.

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

E. F. Schumacher
Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organization, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped, potential.

E. F. Schumacher
The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and stultifying for the human person.

E. F. Schumacher
We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.

E. F. Schumacher
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.

E. F. Schumacher
The modern economist … is used to measuring the standard of living by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is better off than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.

E. F. Schumacher
It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.

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
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.

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
I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for giantism is to go for self-destruction.

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

E. F. Schumacher
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.

E. F. Schumacher
Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of 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.

E. F. Schumacher
The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing.

E. F. Schumacher
The greatest deprivation anyone can suffer is to have no chance of looking after himself and making a livelihood.

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
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.

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

E. F. Schumacher
An entirely new system of thought is needed, a system based on attention to people, and not primarily attention to goods....

E. F. Schumacher
Education can help us only if it produces whole men. The truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even the man who knows all the details of all subjects (if such a thing were possible): the whole man in fact, may have little detailed knowledge of facts and theories, he may treasure the Encyclopædia Britannica because she knows and he needn't, but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his view on the meaning and purpose of his life. He may not be able to explain these matters in words, but the conduct of his life will show a certain sureness of touch which stems from this inner clarity.

E. F. Schumacher
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.

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

E. F. Schumacher
The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.

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
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.

E. F. Schumacher