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Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher
(16 Aug 1911 - 4 Sep 1977)
German-British statistician and economist who moved to England in 1937, and became a citizen (1946). He is best-known for his influential book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973), in which he identified the cultural and environmental costs of large-scale capitalism. From 1950, for two decades, Schumacher served as an advisor to Britain’s nationalized coal industry.
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Science Quotes by Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher (4 quotes)
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.
— Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher
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Even bigger machines, entailing even bigger concentrations of economic power and exerting ever greater violence against the environment, do not represent progress: they are a denial of wisdom. Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology towards the organic, the gentle, the non-violent, the elegant and beautiful.
— Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher
In Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973).
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. To go
— Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher
Small is Beautiful (1973).
The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.
— Ernst Friedrich (Fritz) Schumacher
Small is Beautiful (1973).
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
