Quotes from E. F. Schumacher

Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Many people love in themselves what they hate in others

If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters.

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.

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.

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.

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

No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.