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. SchumacherI'm not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.
E. F. SchumacherTo 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. SchumacherAny 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. SchumacherThe 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...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of attack or conquest conducted by the human personality; only when the striving for 'power' has entirely ceased and been replaced by a certain transcendental longing, often called the love of God, may they, or may they not be 'added unto you.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