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
In large-scale enterprise, private ownership is a fiction for the purpose of enabling functionless owners to live parasitically on the labor of others. It is not only unjust but also an irrational element which distorts all relationships within the enterprise.
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
And yet every so often, the heart of America, shuddering with indignation, sends a nervous spasm through the gentle back of the Andes, and tumultuous shock waves assault the surface of the land. Three times the cuppola of proud Santo Domingo has collapsed from on high to the rhythm of broken bones and its worn walls have opened and fallen too. But the foundations they rest on are unmoved, the great blocks of the Temple of the Sun exhibit their gray stone indifferently; however colossal the disaster befalling its oppressor, not one of its huge rocks shifts from its place.
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
Neither of the primitive men we have spoken of, nor of those who immediately succeeded them, can we rightly predicate any knowledge of nature.
Circumstances | Day | Evolution | History | Ignorance | Important | Man | Phenomena |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The difference between the reason of a Goethe, a Kant, a Lamarck, or a Darwin, and that of the lowest savage, a Vedda, an Akka, a native Australian, or a Patagonian, is much greater than the graduated difference between the reason of the latter and the most "rational" mammals, the anthropoid apes, or even the papiomorpha, the dog, or the elephant.
Man |
After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?
Day | Evolution | Important | Man | People | Phenomena | Science | Truths |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Even an economist might well ask: what is the point of economic progress, a so-called higher standard of living, when the earth, the only earth we have, is being contaminated by substances which may cause malformations in our children or grandchildren?
Conduct | Doubt | Knowledge | Life | Life | Little | Man | Meaning | Purpose | Purpose | Will |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
The causal character of the relation which connects embryology with stem-history is due to the action of heredity and adaptation.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
In the simple question of how we treat the land, next to people our most precious resource, our entire way of live is involved, and before our policies with regard to the land will really be changed, there will have to be a great deal of philosophical, not to say religious, change. It is not a question of what we can afford but of what we choose to spend our money on. If we could return to a generous recognition of meta-economic values, our landscapes would become healthy and beautiful again and our people would regain the dignity of manÂ…
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
They tell me if you see a slave sleeping do not wake him lest he dreamed of freedom and tell them if you see a slave sleeping and told him about freedom
Man |
Ernst Haeckel, full name Ernst Heinrich Phillip August Haeckel
At the lowest stage, the rude--we may say animal--phase of prehistoric primitive man, is the "ape-man," who, in the course of the tertiary period, has only to a limited degree raised himself above his immediate pithecoid ancestors, the anthropoid apes. Next come successive stages of the lowest and simplest kind of culture, such as only the rudest of still existing primitive peoples enable us in some measure to conceive. These "savages" are succeeded by peoples of a low civilization, and from these again, by a long series of intermediate steps, we rise little by little to the more highly civilized nations. To these alone--of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian--are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of the organic world's development.
Arrogance | Earth | Illusion | Man | Mother | Organic | Position | Universe |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
We know too much about ecology today to have any excuse for the many abuses that are currently going on in the management of the land, in the management of animals, in food storage, food processing, and in heedless urbanization. If we permit them, this is not due to poverty, as if we could not afford to stop them; it is due to the fact that, as a society, we have no firm basis of belief in any meta-economic values, and when there is no such belief the economic calculus takes over.
Che Guevara, fully Ernesto “Che” Guevara
I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Nature, it has been said, abhors a vacuum, and when the available "spiritual space" is not filled by some higher motivation, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower – by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalized in the economic calculus.
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 |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
Can we establish an ideology, or whatever you like to call it, which insists that the educated have taken upon themselves an obligation and have not simply acquired a "passport to privilege"? Â…It is, you might well say, an elementary matter of justice.
Fanaticism | Means | Objectives |
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
The marketÂ… represents only the surface of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into the natural or social facts that lie behind them. In a sense, the market is the institutionalization of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself.
E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
We are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves.
Man |