Top 70 E.F. Schumacher Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— E.F. Schumacher

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

— E.F. Schumacher

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

— E.F. Schumacher

4. “We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don’t do the right thing, we’ll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.”

— E.F. Schumacher

5. “Development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organization, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped, potential.”

— E.F. Schumacher

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

— E.F. Schumacher

7. “Our task is to look at the world, and see it whole.”

— E.F. Schumacher

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

— E.F. Schumacher

9. “Work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”

— E.F. Schumacher

10. “I cannot predict the wind but I can have my sail ready.”

— E.F. Schumacher

11. “Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.”

— E.F. Schumacher

12. “The real problems of our planet are not economic or technical, they are philosophical. The philosophy of unbridled materialism is being challenged by events.”

— E.F. Schumacher

13. “The modern world tends to be skeptical about everything that makes demands on man’s higher faculties. But it is not at all skeptical about skepticism, which demands hardly anything.”

— E.F. Schumacher

14. “Our intentions tend to be much more real to us than our actions, and this can lead to a great deal of misunderstanding with other people, to whom our actions tend to be much more real than our intentions.”

— E.F. Schumacher

15. “Our task – and the task of all education – is to understand the present world, the world in which we live and make our choices.”

— E.F. Schumacher

16. “You can either read something many times in order to be assured that you got it all, or else you can define your purpose and use techniques which will assure that you have met it and gotten what you need.”

— E.F. Schumacher

17. “The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.”

— E.F. Schumacher

18. “Eagles come in all shapes and sizes, but you will recognize them chiefly by their attitudes.”

— E.F. Schumacher

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

— E.F. Schumacher

20. “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.”

— E.F. Schumacher

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

— E.F. Schumacher

22. “Anything that we can destroy but are unable to make is, in a sense sacred, and all our ‘explanations’ of it do not really explain anything.”

— E.F. Schumacher

23. “Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.”

— E.F. Schumacher

24. “It is amazing how much theory we can do without when work actually begins.”

— E.F. Schumacher

25. “The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to a gift of material things.”

— E.F. Schumacher

26. “The purpose of work is to give people a chance to utilize and develop their faculties; to enable them to overcome their ego-centeredness by joining others in a common task; and to bring for the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.”

— E.F. Schumacher

27. “I have no doubt that it is possible to give a new direction to technological development, a direction that shall lead it back to the real needs of man, and that also means: to the actual size of man. Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful.”

— E.F. Schumacher

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

— E.F. Schumacher

29. “The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off.”

— E.F. Schumacher

30. “Every increase of needs tends to increase one’s independence on outside forces over which one cannont have control and therefore increases existential fear.”

— E.F. Schumacher

31. “True art is the intermediary between man’s ordinary nature and his higher potentialities.”

— E.F. Schumacher

32. “We think work with the brain is more worthy than work with the hands. Nobody who thinks with his hands could ever fall for this.”

— E.F. Schumacher

33. “Why precisely do we want to change land ownership? The answer seems to me to be quite clear: to inhibit land speculation, to inhibit the private exploitation of the scarcity-value of land, to inhibit as we might say the cornering of land.”

— E.F. Schumacher

34. “If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.”

— E.F. Schumacher

35. “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.”

— E.F. Schumacher

36. “The substance of man cannot be measured by Gross National Product.”

— E.F. Schumacher

37. “The most striking about modern industry is that it requires so much and accomplishes so little. Modern industry seems to be inefficient to a degree that surpasses one’s ordinary powers of imagination. Its inefficiency therefore remains unnoticed.”

— E.F. Schumacher

38. “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.”

— E.F. Schumacher

39. “Many people love in themselves what they hate in others.”

— E.F. Schumacher

40. “To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.”

— E.F. Schumacher

41. “Never let an inventor run a company. You can never get him to stop tinkering and bring something to market.”

— E.F. Schumacher

42. “Not mass production but production by the masses.”

— E.F. Schumacher

43. “Economic development is something much wider and deeper than economics, let alone econometrics. Its roots lie outside the economic sphere, in education, organisation, discipline and, beyond that, in political independence and a national consciousness of self-reliance.”

— E.F. Schumacher

44. “The fundamental task is to achieve smallness within large organisation.”

— E.F. Schumacher

45. “I certainly never feel discouraged. I can’t myself raise the winds that might blow us or this ship into a better world. But I can at least put up the sail so that when the winds comes, I can catch it.”

— E.F. Schumacher

46. “Nobody really likes large-scale organizations; nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes orders...”

— E.F. Schumacher

47. “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.”

— E.F. Schumacher

48. “If greed were not the master of modern man, how could it be that the frenzy of economic activity does not abate as higher standards of living are attained, and that it is precisely the richest societies which pursue their economic advantage with the greatest ruthlessness?”

— E.F. Schumacher

49. “Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.”

— E.F. Schumacher

50. “The heart of the matter, as I see it, is the stark fact that world poverty is primarily a problem of two million villages, and thus a problem of two thousand million villagers.”

— E.F. Schumacher