E. F. Schumacher Quotes

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.

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

Anyone who thinks consumption can expand forever on a finite planet is either insane or an economist.

I’m not at all contemptuous of comforts, but they have their place and it is not first.

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.

An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.

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

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

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

Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.

…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of attack or conquest conducted by the human personality; only when the striving for ‘power’ has entirely ceased and been replaced by a certain transcendental longing, often called the love of God, may they, or may they not be ‘added unto you.

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