E. F. Schumacher Quotes

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

The poor lack much, the greedy everything.

Destitution and excessive luxury develop apparently the same ideals, the same marauding attitude towards mankind, the intensity of struggle for material goods, -- surely showing how perfect is the meeting of extremes.

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.

The necessities that exist are in general created by the superfluities that are enjoyed.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

And plenty makes us poor.

People have never looked so ugly as they do today. We just consume far too much.

However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel everyone else in the accumulation of goods.

In the affluent society no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessaries.

I had a whole bag full. And I still felt like I didn't have enough! Definitely more bikinis then you have days of vacation.

My definition of poor are those who need too much. Because those who need too much are never satisfied.

...men and women are sacrificed to the idols of profit and consumption: it is the "culture of waste." If you break a computer it is a tragedy, but poverty, the needs, the dramas of so many people end up becoming the norm.

Who is the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough.

The only thing that can console one for being poor is extravagance.

Beware of luxury! Beware of acquiring the taste and need for it, under the pretext of providing for the morrow.

You can't win enough, you can't have enough money, you can't succeed enough. There is not enough.

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.

I am a weapon of massive consumption

Being rich has never stopped anyone from being greedy.

It seems that we have been born only to consume and to consume, and when we can no longer consume, we have a feeling of frustration, and we suffer from poverty, and we are auto-marginalized.

That plenty should produce either covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches.

Poverty needs much, avarice everything.

There are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.

The people who have more money and goods than any people in the history of the world spend most of their time worrying about not having enough.