Quotes from E. F. Schumacher

Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.

The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.

There is incredible generosity in the potentialities of Nature. We only have to discover how to utilize them.

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

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

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

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.

Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one's enduring powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.

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

Our faith gives us knowledge of something better.

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.

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

Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

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

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.