E. F. Schumacher

Quotes

• “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.”
• “The cultivation and expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom. It is also the antithesis of freedom and peace. Every increase of 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.”
• “Scientific and technological “solutions” which poison the environment or degrade the social structure and man himself are of no benefit, no matter how brilliantly conceived or how great their superficial attraction.”
• “The disease having been caused by allowing cleverness to displace wisdom, no amount of clever research is likely to produce a cure.”
• “It is doubly chimerical to build peace on economic foundations which, in turn, rest on the systematic cultivation of greed and envy, the very forces which drive men into conflict.”
• “The modern economist … is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.”

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Key facts

Born

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher , ( 1911-08-16 ) 16 August 1911, Bonn , German Empire

Died

4 September 1977 (1977-09-04) (aged 66), Switzerland

Alma mater

University of Bonn , University of Berlin , New College, Oxford , Columbia University

Institutions

University of Oxford , Columbia University

Notable ideas

Appropriate technology , Buddhist economics

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

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