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

— E. F. Schumacher Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973)

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Wisdom

More quotes by E. F. Schumacher

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.

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)

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

Small is Beautiful (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)

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If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

'The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.'

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

It takes extraordinary wisdom and self-control to accept that many things have a logic we do not understand that is smarter than our own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.

George Chapman All Fools (1605)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: E. F. Schumacher (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.