E.F. Schumacher Quotes & Sayings

That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably 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 as a crime against humanity. — E.F. Schumacher

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

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

Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes. — E.F. Schumacher

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

To talk about the future is useful only if it leads to action now. — E.F. Schumacher

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. — E.F. Schumacher

The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is. — E.F. Schumacher

I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready. — E.F. Schumacher

The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology. — E.F. Schumacher

The direction of research . . .should be:
- toward non-violence rather than violence,
- towards a harmonious cooperation with nature rather than with warfare against nature;
- towards the noiseless, low-energy, elegant, and economical solutions normally applied in nature rather than [our often] noisy, high-energy, brutal, wasteful, and clumsy solutions. — 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

Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market. — E.F. Schumacher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — 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

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

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. — 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 is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them. — E.F. Schumacher

There can be nothing sacred in something that has a price. — E.F. Schumacher

It has been universally recognized, in all authentic teachings of mankind, that every being born into this world has to work, not merely to keep himself alive, but to strive towards perfection. — 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

If greed were not the master of modern man, how could it be that the frenzy of economic activity does not abate as higher standards of living are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness? — 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 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

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

Many people love in themselves what they hate in others. — E.F. Schumacher

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

The purpose of work is to give people a chance to utilize and develop their faculties; to enable them to overcome their ego-centeredness by joining others in a common task; and to bring for the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. — E.F. Schumacher

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

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

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. — E.F. Schumacher

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility. — E.F. Schumacher

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. — E.F. Schumacher

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

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 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

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. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum of our minds may only too easily be filled by some big, fantastic notion - political or otherwise - which suddenly seem to illumine everything and to give meaning and purpose to our existence. It needs no emphasis that herein lies one of the great dangers of our time. — E.F. Schumacher

The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product. — E.F. Schumacher

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. — E.F. Schumacher

After all, for mankind as a whole there are no exports. We did not start developing by obtaining foreign exchange from Mars or the moon. Mankind is a closed society. — E.F. Schumacher

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

If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters. — E.F. Schumacher

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see. — E.F. Schumacher

We think work with the brain is more worthy than work with the hands. Nobody who thinks with his hands could ever fall for this. — E.F. Schumacher

Modern man talks of a battle with nature, forgetting that, if he won the battle, he would find himself on the losing side — E.F. Schumacher

Our faith gives us knowledge of something better. — E.F. Schumacher

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be. — E.F. Schumacher

Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist. — 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. — 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

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. — 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

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

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

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

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 truly educated man is not a man who knows a bit of everything, not even a 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 ... but he will be truly in touch with the centre. He will not be in doubt about his basic convictions, about his own view on the meaning and purpose of 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 his inner clarity. — E.F. Schumacher

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. — E.F. Schumacher

The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation. — E.F. Schumacher

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. — E.F. Schumacher

For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He 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. Thus, if the purpose of clothing is a certain amount of temperature comfort and an attractive appearance, the task is to attain this purpose with the smallest possible effort, that is, with the smallest annual destruction of cloth and with the help of designs that involve the smallest possible input of toil. The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. — 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

. . . our most important task is to get off our present collision course. And who is there to tackle such a task? I think every one of us, whether old or young, powerful or powerless, rich or poor, influential or uninfluential. — E.F. Schumacher

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

Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance. — E.F. Schumacher

True art is the intermediary between man's ordinary nature and his higher potentialities. — 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

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

Anything that we can destroy but are unable to make is, in a sense sacred, and all our 'explanations' of it do not really explain anything. — E.F. Schumacher

We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature ... — E.F. Schumacher

Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: "Cease to do evil; try to do good." As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other's throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade. — E.F. Schumacher

Not mass production but production by the masses. — E.F. Schumacher

Many of them had a better time than they ever had in their lives because they were discovering the new freedom - the less you need, the freer you become. — E.F. Schumacher

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. — E.F. Schumacher

It is amazing how much theory we can do without when work actually begins. — E.F. Schumacher

Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole. — 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

Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity. — 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

No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom. — E.F. Schumacher

The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off. — E.F. Schumacher

The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events. — E.F. Schumacher

Every increase of needs tends to increase one's independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear — E.F. Schumacher