83 Quotes by E.F. Schumacher

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Why precisely do we want to change land ownership? The answer seems to me to be quite clear: to inhibit land speculation, to inhibit the private exploitation of the scarcity-value of land, to inhibit as we might say the cornering of land.

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