Manfred Max-Neef > Quotes

“History is made by historians. No event becomes a historic event unless historians turn it into one.”
― Manfred Max-Neef

“I also know that one must do what one can do. No matter how little it is, it is nonetheless a human testimony and human testimonies, as long as they are not based on greed or personal ambition for power, can have unexpected positive effects.
...I believe in local action and in small dimensions. It is only in such environments that human creativity and meaningful identities can truly surface and flourish.”
― Manfred Max-Neef

“Discovery is not seeing what there is (that is impossible at any level), but rather allowing oneself to converge towards a continually freshly-created reality.”
― Manfred Max-Neef, From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics

“They felt that conscientization had to precede any efforts towards participation in and for development. Although this concept was pretty much in vogue at the time...I felt an intuitive dislike for it. It seemed to me that it contained an implicit assumption--sometimes even explicit--that a certain state of ignorance or unawareness prevails among the rural poor with respect to their real problems. I had never been willing to believe that this is the case.”
― Manfred Max-Neef, From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics