Daily Inspiration Quote by E. F. Schumacher

Schumacher’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: technology doesn’t arrive as progress, it arrives as amplification. The printing press is his stand-in for the whole modern project of scaling up information, persuasion, and desire. Calling it both “greatest blessing” and “greatest curse” isn’t fence-sitting; it’s a moral diagnosis. Tools that multiply speech also multiply noise, propaganda, and the illusion that quantity equals truth. The kicker is the weary aside, “sometimes one forgets which it is,” a confession that the costs are not accidental side effects but part of the package.

As an economist best known for Small Is Beautiful, Schumacher is hostile to the reflex that treats expansion as inherently good. The printing press represents the moment ideas became mass-produced, detached from face-to-face accountability, and optimized for reach rather than wisdom. That’s the subtext: modern societies mistake dissemination for understanding, and the market rewards what travels fastest, not what is most nourishing. In that light, the “curse” isn’t literacy; it’s the industrialization of attention.

Context matters. Writing in a century shaped by total war, advertising, ideological media, and bureaucratic planning, Schumacher had seen how “information” can be weaponized at scale. Yet he’s not romanticizing premodern ignorance. The “blessing” is real: democratized knowledge, dissent, scientific exchange. His intent is to keep the ledger visible. The line works because it refuses the comforting myth of neutral technology and forces a harder question: when we celebrate a communications revolution, are we celebrating human flourishing or just the efficiency of influence?