E. F. Schumacher Quotes

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.

The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The most striking thing about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: 'Halt! We have enough'? There is none.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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