E. F. Schumacher
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"Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher" was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, serving as Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board for two decades. His ideas became popularised in much of the English-speaking world during the 1970s. He is best known for his critique of Western economies and his proposals for human-scale, decentralised and appropriate technology/appropriate technologies.

According to The Times Literary Supplement, his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: a study of economics as if people mattered is among the 100 most influential books published since World War II. It was soon translated into many languages, bringing him international fame. Schumacher's basic Economic development/development theories have been summed up in the catch-phrases Intermediate Size and Intermediate Technology. In 1977 he published A Guide for the Perplexed as a critique of materialist scientism and as an exploration of the nature and organisation of knowledge.

Together with long-time friends and associates like Mansur Hoda/Professor Mansur Hoda, Schumacher founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) in 1966.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.

Many people love in themselves what they hate in others.

Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of 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.