Skip to content

Quotes from Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered — E. F. Schumacher

1911–1977 United Kingdom

← All quotes by E. F. Schumacher

6 quotes

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

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

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.

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

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.

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

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.

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

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.

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

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.

Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: E. F. Schumacher (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.