E. F. Schumacher Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Errors, Intellectual, Environmental

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

  10 Copy quote

• The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid , uninteresting, petty and chaotic.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Lying, Ideas, Giving

  "SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL".

  5 Copy quote

• The most striking 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

  Imagination, Ordinary, Degrees

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

  10 Copy quote

• From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Buddhist, Mean, Views

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

  9 Copy quote

• The key words of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Life, Country, Keys

  34 Copy quote

• 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

  Technology, Self, Renewable Resources

  E.F.SCHUMACHER (1973). “SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Generosity, Healthy, Needs

  4 Copy quote

• Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Attitude, Greatness, Eagles

  40 Copy quote

• If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Errors, Things In Life, Missing

  13 Copy quote

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

  E. F. Schumacher

  Business, Angel, Rushing

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

  11 Copy quote

• No degree of prosperity could justify
  the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to
  make safe and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or
  even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself,
  a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime perpetrated by man.
  The idea that a civilization could sustain itself on such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economical affairs of man
  as if people did not matter at all.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Spiritual, Mean, Men

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Choices, Tasks, World

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

  9 Copy quote

• Modern economic thinking...is peculiarly unable to consider the long term and to appreciate man's dependence on the natural world.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Men, Thinking, Long

  7 Copy quote

• There is no economic problem and, in a sense, there never has been.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Problem, Economic, Economic Problems

  8 Copy quote

• By means of trees, wildlife could be conserved, pollution decreased, and the beauty of our landscapes enhanced. This is the way, or at least one of the ways, to spiritual, moral, and cultural regeneration.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Spiritual, Mean, Tree

  7 Copy quote

• It is amazing how much theory we can do without when work actually begins.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Theory, Can Do

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, World, Demand

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Beautiful, Real, Mean

  Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered pt. 2, ch. 5 (1973)

  9 Copy quote

• ...liberation from constraints that operate at the level of ordinary humanity---limits imposed by space and time, by the needs of the body, and by the opaqueness of the computer-like mind. All three examples [Jacob Lorber, Edgar Cayce, and Therese Neumann] illustrates the paradoxical truth that such 'higher powers' cannot be acquired by any kind of attack or conquest conducted by the human personality; only when the striving for 'power' has entirely ceased and been replaced by a certain transcendental longing, often called the love of God, may they, or may they not be 'added unto you.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Space, Personality, Humanity

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Government, Worthwhile Things, Years

  E.F. Schumacher (1975). “Small is Beautiful”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Animal, Missing, Doubt

  4 Copy quote

• I think I should not go far wrong if I asserted that the amount of genuine leisure available in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Technology, Thinking, Saving

  "Good Work". Book by E.F. Schumacher, p. 25, 1985.

  7 Copy quote

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

  E. F. Schumacher

  Eye

  5 Copy quote

• Nobody really likes large-scale organizations; nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Order, Organization, Likes

  E.F.SCHUMACHER (1973). “SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL”

  5 Copy quote

• Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.

  E. F. Schumacher

  Faith, Soulmate, Knowledge

  13 Copy quote

Page 3 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin