96 Quotes by E. F. Schumacher

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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