This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Since there is now increasing evidence of environmental deterioration, particularly in living nature, the entire outlook and methodology of economics is being called into question. The study of economics is too narrow and too fragmentary to lead to valid insights, unless complemented and completed by a study of meta-economics.
Cooperation | Nature | Public | Will | Work |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The present consumer society is like a drug addict who, no matter how miserable he may fell, finds it extremely difficult to get off the hook. The problem children of the world – from this point of view and in spite of many other considerations that could be adduced – are the rich societies and not the poor.
Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger
God knows I am no friend of probability theory, I have hated it from the first moment when our dear friend Max Born gave it birth. For it could be seen how easy and simple it made everything, in principle, everything ironed and the true problems concealed. Everybody must jump on the bandwagon [Ausweg]. And actually not a year passed before it became an official credo, and it still is
Awe | Heart | Joy | Light | Man | Men | Pain | Self | Time | Woman |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
Why does the guerrilla fighter fight? We must come to the inevitable conclusion that the guerrilla fighter is a social reformer, that he takes up arms responding to the angry protest of the people against their oppressors, and that he fights in order to change the social system that keeps all his unarmed brothers in ignominy and misery.
Appearance | Government | Power | Struggle | Government |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Nobody really likes large-scale organization; nobody likes to take orders from a superior who takes orders from a superior who takes ordersÂ…Even if the rules devised by bureaucracy are outstandingly humane, nobody likes to be ruled by rules, that is to say, by people whose answer to every complaint is: "I did not make the rules: I am merely applying them."
Peace |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Social cohesion, cooperation, mutual respect, and above all, self-respect, courage in the face of adversity, and the ability to bear hardship—all this and much else disintegrates and disappears when these "psychological structures" are gravely damaged. A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness. No amount of economic growth can compensate for such losses—though this may be an idle reflection, since economic growth is normally inhibited by them.
Work |
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.... These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution!
Men |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
In many of these languages there are numerals only for one, two, and three: no Australian language counts beyond four. Very many wild tribes can count no further than ten or twenty, whereas some very clever dogs have been made to count up to forty and even beyond sixty.
Existence | Faith | Force | History | Knowledge | Necessity | Nothing | Position | Science | Work |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
It is necessary, therefore, that at least an important part of the development effort should by-pass the big cities and be directly concerned with the creation of an "agro-industrial structure" in the rural and small-town areas.
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.
Antithesis | Courage | Desire | Faith | Knowledge | Man | Men | Mind | Nature | Purpose | Purpose | Reality | Religion | Soul | Thinking | World |
Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?
Men |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Excellent! This is real life, full of antinomies and bigger than logic. Without order, planning, predictability, central control, accountancy, instructions to the underlings, obedience, discipline—without these, nothing fruitful can happen, because everything disintegrates. And yet—without the magnanimity of disorder, the happy abandon, the entrepreneurship venturing into the unknown and incalculable, without the risk and the gamble, the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread—without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace.
Ends | Guidance | Need | People | Science | Wisdom | Work | Guidance | Value |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
We should be searching for policies to reconstruct rural culture, to open the land for the gainful occupation to larger numbers of people, whether it be on a full-time or a part-time bases, and to orientate all our actions on the land towards the threefold ideal of health, beauty and permanence.
Man | Plenty | Technology | Work |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
If our intellectual leaders treat work as nothing but a necessary evil soon to be abolished as far as the majority is concerned, the urge to minimize it right away is hardly a surprising reaction, and the problem of motivation becomes insoluble.
Envy | Greed | Inevitable | Man | Nothing | Power | Problems |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds.
Discipline | Force | Freedom | Life | Life | Power | Problems |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
It might be said that energy is for the mechanical world what consciousness is for the human world. If energy fails, everything fails.
Men |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
There is nothing in the experience of the last twenty-five years to suggest that modern technology, as we know it, can really help us to alleviate world poverty, not to mention the problem of unemployment…we had better fact the question of technology - what does it do and that should it do? Can we develop a technology which really helps us to solve our problems – a technology with a human face?
People |