E. F. Schumacher

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill, which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were transforming the face of material civilization, and of which England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer.”