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Quote by J Bronowski

“Owen, of course, was overlooking the fact that his fellow manufacturers were more concerned with their machines than with their workers because the former represented a heavy capital investment whereas the oversupply of unskilled labour presented no replacement problem. Only when industry must spend money in training its personnel do they become economically as important as machines.”

Quote by J Bronowski

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J Bronowski

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“Looking round, with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested for a while, I realised that there were no small houses to be seen. Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings, but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features of our own English landscape, had disappeared. ‘Communism,’ said I to myself.”

“Yet, if they repudiated the social dogmas of their time as artificial, abstract, and far removed from real life, their own approach to building the good society could hardly be called pragmatic or empirical. Visionary utopians, the anarchists paid scant attention to the practical needs of a rapidly changing world; they generally avoided careful analysis of social and economic conditions, nor were they able or even willing to come to terms with the inescapable realities of political power. For the religious and metaphysical gospels of the past, they substituted a vague messianism which satisfied their own chiliastic expectations; in place of complex ideologies, they offered simple action-slogans, catchwords of revolutionary violence, poetic images of the coming Golden Age. By and large, they seemed content to rely on "the revolutionary instincts of the masses" to sweep away the old order and "the creative spirit of the masses" to build the new society upon its ashes. "Through a Social Revolution to the Anarchist Future!" proclaimed a group of exiles in South America; the practical details of agriculture and industry "will be worked out afterwards" by the revolutionary masses. Such an attitude, though it sprang from a healthy skepticism towards the ideological "blueprints" and "scientific laws" of their Marxist adversaries, could be of little help in setting a course of action designed to revolutionize the world.”

“We are entering a period of intense cadaverousness and our imaginations are simply not up to it. Here too we must choose and make our own personal obituaries. Is this a foretaste of the end of the century? Everything today - the launching of a newspaper, a ship, a commercially ruinous aircraft, a road network, a new missile or a cultural programme - is justified in the last instance by the fact that it creates jobs. This argument, which is itself devoid of meaning, is our alibi, our last rites, our Extreme Unction.”

“I arrived in Constantinople not a week ago with great joy in my heart because I was to meet the most pious prince, Justinian Augustus, defender of orthodoxy and of the Roman Empire. But yea, where I sought the most Christian Emperor, I have found, instead, Diocletian.”