Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
Search Quotes Search Sages Search Chapters

E. F. Schumacher

1911 – 1977 CE

The “People's Economist”

While working in Burma during the mid ‘50s, Schumacher developed a set of principles he called “buddhist economics” — emphasizing the idea that people need good work for proper human development. Traveling through many Third World countries, he helped governments create self-reliant economies based on local resources and needs. A pioneer and instigator in creating a philosophy of “appropriate technology,” and known as the “People's Economist,” his economic theory based on wisdom instead of only materialism, became one of the most serious alternatives to the dominant economic theories based on Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes.

Eras

Sources

Good Work

Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Unlisted Sources

Quotes by E. F. Schumacher (27 quotes)

“…the present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may feel, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

Comments: Click to comment

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

Comments: Click to comment

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 57. Wu Wei

Themes: Simplicity

Comments: Click to comment

“But what is wisdom? Where can it be found? Here we come to the crux of the matter: it can be read about in numerous publications but it can be found only inside oneself.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 59. The Gardening of Spirit

Themes: Wisdom

Comments: Click to comment

“Even today, we are generally told that gigantic organizations are inescapably necessary; but when we look closely we can notice that as soon as great size has been created there is often a strenuous attempt to attain smallness within bigness.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 80. A Golden Age

Themes: Less is More

Comments: Click to comment

“How can we disarm greed and envy? Perhaps by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 75. Greed

Themes: Greed

Comments: Click to comment

“If, however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are bad masters.”

Chapters: 9. Know When to Stop

Comments: Click to comment

“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.”

Chapters: 68. Joining Heaven & Earth

Comments: Click to comment

“Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the available 'spiritual space' is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower – by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalized in the economic calculus.”

Chapters: 74. The Great Executioner

Themes: Meaningfulness

Comments: Click to comment

“No one is really working for peace unless he is working primarily for the restoration of wisdom… From an economic point of view, the central concept of wisdom is permanence. We must study an economics of permanence.”

Chapters: 78. Water

Comments: Click to comment

“Now that man has acquired the physical means of self-obliteration, the question of peace obviously looms larger than ever before in human history. And how could peace be built without some assurance of permanence with regard to our economic life?”

Chapters: 69. No Enemy

Themes: Peace

Comments: Click to comment

“That soul-destroying, meaningless, mechanical, monotonous, moronic work is an insult to human nature which must necessarily and inevitably produce either escapism or aggression, and that no amount of ‘bread and circuses’ can compensate for the damage done – these are facts which are neither denied nor acknowledged but are met with an unbreakable conspiracy of silence – because to deny them would be too obviously absurd and to acknowledge them would condemn the central preoccupation of modern society as a crime against humanity.”

Chapters: 72. Helpful Fear

Comments: Click to comment

“The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase in needs tends to increase one's dependence on outside forces over which one cannot have control, and therefore increases existential fear. Only by a reduction of needs can one promote a genuine reduction in those tensions which are the ultimate causes of strife and war.”

Chapters: 44. Fame and Fortune

Comments: Click to comment

“The neglect, indeed the rejection, of wisdom has gone so far that most of our intellectuals have not even the faintest idea what the term could mean. As a result, they always tend to try and cure a disease by intensifying its causes. The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.”

Chapters: 77. Stringing a Bow

Themes: Karma Wisdom

Comments: Click to comment

“The ownership and the consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 58. Goals Without Means

Themes: Economics

Comments: Click to comment

“We may say, therefore, that modern has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative, useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he does not enjoy at all…we might do well to take stock and reconsider our goals.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Chapters: 72. Helpful Fear

Themes: Creativity

Comments: Click to comment

“Science can do everything except lead us out of the dark wood of a meaningless, purposeless, 'accidental' existence.”

from Good Work

Themes: Science

Comments: Click to comment

“The purpose of education should be to lead people out of the dark wood of meaninglessness, purposelessness, drift, and indulgence, up a mountain where there can be gained the truth that makes you free.”

from Good Work

Themes: Education

Comments: Click to comment

“adapt the work to the needs of the worker rather than demand that the worker adapt himself to the needs of the work”

from Good Work

Comments: Click to comment

“Meaningless work is an abomination... reject meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking work [where you are] made the servant of a machine or a system.”

from Good Work

Comments: Click to comment

“Socialists should insist on using the nationalized industries not simply to out-capitalize the capitalists—an attempt in which they may or may not succeed—but to evolve a more democratic and dignified system... If they can do this, they have the future in their hands.”

from Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered

Themes: Socialism

Comments: Click to comment

“The affluent societies of today make such exorbitant demands on the world’s resources, create ecological dangers of such intensity, and produce such a high level of neurosis among their populations, that they cannot possibly serve as a model”

Comments: Click to comment

“Those who truly think for themselves are like monarchs, they recognize no one above them and no more accept authorities than a monarch does orders. They don’t acknowledge the validity of anything they have not themselves confirmed.”

Comments: Click to comment

“The amount of genuine leisure in a society is generally in inverse proportion to the amount of labor-saving machinery it employs.”

from Good Work

Themes: Culture

Comments: Click to comment

Unless there are conscious efforts to the contrary, wants will always rise faster than the ability to meet them.”

from Good Work

Themes: Desire Hope

Comments: Click to comment

“The real task of education is not education for work, but education for leisure... education for the sake of leading us out of the dark wood of egoentricity, pettiness, and worldly ignorance”

from Good Work

Themes: Education

Comments: Click to comment

“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.”

from Good Work

Comments: Click to comment

Quotes about E. F. Schumacher (0 quotes)

Comments (0)