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Industrialization Quotes

Browse 92 quotes about Industrialization.

Industrialization Quotes

“Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.”

“Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives. The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.”

“The incommensurability between the modern economic system and the people who staff it explains why modern workers have so often been depicted as 'cogs' in the larger 'machinery' of industrial civilization; for while the practical rationalization of enterprise does require workers to be consistent, predictable, precise, uniform, and even to a certain extent creative, it does not really require them to be persons, that is, to live examined lives, to grow, to develop character, to search for truth, to know themselves, etc.”

“think how nine-tenths, aye, I do not know but ninety-nine hundredths of all our vital powers are spent in a mere effort to get a living; or to heap together that which we cannot by any possibility take away. Take the life of the average workingman. Is that the life for which the human brain was intended and the human heart was made? Look at the factories scattered through our country. They are little better than penitentiaries.”

“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”

“The Western industrial complex would not change even if millions of people perished in Africa or India or some other faraway place. The population of the earth increases by millions every month, and such losses would be seen as a little drop in the ocean. But if something serious were to occur in the West, then that would turn upside down the currently held vision of Western people with regard to the impact of modern technology on nature. It would be something that would wake them up and perhaps help to stop this really suicidal course that modern civilization is currently pursuing and that the rest of the world is trying to follow.”

“Many millions of pregnancies—many if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child—were each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.”

“To be cut off, to be left solitary; to have a world alien, not your world; all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are! It is the frightfullest enchantment; too truly a work of the Evil One. To have neither superior, nor inferior, nor equal, united manlike to you. Without father, without child, without brother. Man knows no sadder destiny.”

“Once industrialisation ocurred, non-communicable (chronic) diseases (NCDs; e.g., cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cardio-vascular, and non-infectious respiratory diseases) started to rise and replace infections. Tobacco use, physical inactivity, unhealthy diets and the harmful use of alcohol are key risk factors for NCDs.”

“It’s plain enough. But he’ll never be convinced. I’ve had long experience of this. They’ll explain to you that national independence is much more important than individual rights. In Finland, when I was defending the forests, the Russian officials kept explaining to me patiently that pulp for making paper is after all more important than the trees. They understood only when there were almost no forests left. And the whalers kept explaining to me that whale oil was needed on the market and was much more important than whales. It goes on and on.”

“With superior sentience, come superior screw-ups. And this holds particularly true for industrialization. Even if we put aside carbon emission, in the year 2020 alone humankind has produced over 2 billion tonnes of trash, which is expected to rise over 70% by the year 2050. Thus, in the name of progress we the gadget-mad gargoyles keep acting as the true eco-terrorists of the glorious dumping ground, called the planet earth. 2% of all our waste is e-waste. And the alarming bit here is that, that 2% e-waste comprises over 70% of our overall toxic waste. So, what can you do, you ask? Simple - reject less, repair more. Try to make things last as long as possible, or pass them on to those who have need for them. Don't let things go to waste, just because you can afford new ones. For example, my kid cousin's laptop has been acting up for some time now. But instead of buying them a new pc, I ordered the replacement for the faulty part and repaired the laptop myself. This way, we not only reduce our e-waste footprint on the planet, but in the process, we teach kids to value things. The point is, whether you do it yourself or get it done by a professional, by practicing repair, you are actively participating in the making of a greener, cleaner and healthier world. It's not enough to be just a consumer, you gotta be a conscious consumer, otherwise there is no difference between a consumer and a slave. That is why, right-to-repair is not only a human rights issue, it is also an environmental issue. Repairing and recycling are the bedrock of sustainability. So I say again - reject less, repair more.”

“It was the end of the era of the amateur, a time when everyone had to be a bit of everything. You helped your neighbors build their homes, fight their fires, raise and butcher and preserve their own food. You knew how to repair a weapon, pull a tooth, hammer a horseshoe, and deliver a child. But industrialization fostered specialization—and it was fantastic. Trained pros were better than self-taught amateurs, and their expertise allowed them to demand and develop better tools for their crafts—tools that only they knew how to operate. Over time, a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched.”

“You know why? Because I thought you were different from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something different on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. In fact, I wanted to escape from everything you’re learning from us so quickly, from all the things people like you, Monsieur le depute, are daily injecting into the black man’s soul. Soon there’ll be no Africa left: people like you, Monsieur le depute, for all their talk of national independence, will deliver Africa to the West forever. You’ll, accomplish that final conquest for us. Of course, to achieve that, people like you will have to exercise a tyranny and a cruelty compared to which colonialism will soon appear as child’s play — and in the name of Marx and Stalin, you'll accomplish that conquest for us. For it is our fetishes, our pagan gods, our prejudices, our racism, our nationalism, our poisons that you dream of injecting into the African blood. . . . We’ve never yet dared to do it, but under the name of progress and nationalism, you’ll do the job for us. You’re our most rewarding fifth column. Naturally, we don’t understand this: we’re too stupid. We’re trying to fight you, to destroy you, to prevent you from delivering Africa to us forever.”

“What was atrocious was the fact that, like every other building in the new towns, they were dumped almost at random; the leakage of escaping gas scented the so-called gas-house districts, and not surprisingly these districts frequently became among the most degraded sections of the city. Towering above the town, polluting its air, the gas tanks symbolized the dominance of 'practical' interests over life-needs.”

“Humanitarian Industrialization Fourth industrial revolution my eye! We haven't yet recovered from the disparities produced by the first, second and third industrial revolutions. Morons keep peddling cold and pompous dreams devoid of humanity, and morons keep consuming them like good little backboneless vermin. Grow a backbone already! We always look at the glorious aspects of industrialization and overlook all those countless lives that are ruined by it. But it's okay! As long as we are not struck by a catastrophe ourselves, our sleep of moronity never breaks - so long as our comfort is unchallenged, and enhanced rather, it's okay if millions keep falling through the cracks. So long as you can afford a smartphone that runs smooth like butter, it doesn't matter if it is produced by modern day slave labors who can't even afford the basic essentials of living. With all the revenue the tech companies earn by charging you a thousand dollar for a hundred dollar smartphone, they can't even pay decent wages to the people working their butt off to manufacture their assets - because apparently, it is more important for the people at the top to afford private jets and trips to space, than the factory workers to afford healthcare, housing and a couple of square meals a day. And this you call industrialization - well done - you just figured out the secret to glory without being bothered by something so boring as basic humanity. I say to you here and now, listen well - stop abusing revolutionary scientific discoveries in the making of a cold, mechanistic, disparity infested world - use science and technology to wipe out the disparities, not cause them. Break free from your modern savagery of inhuman industrialization, and focus your mind on humanitarian industrialization.”

“Almost overnight, Soviet peasants needed to become factory workers and miners. Industrialization was to be financed by domestic means, given the absence of any meaningful foreign investments in the country; this meant that the peasantry that did not join the industrial workforce had to foot much of the bill. Herding them into collective farms seemed a promising way to force them to pay this bill. Stalin would state, not long after he unleashed the full brunt of his modernization program, that the Soviet Union was at least half a century behind the industrialized world, and needed to catch up with it within a decade. Every sacrifice toward this goal was justified. This, then, was the broader context in which Soviet daily life played itself out between 1928 and 1933.”

“There are hundreds of miracles within a single machine. Americans calmly explain these with mathematical formulas. Our difficulty is to learn, theirs to appreciate. We Latins, even the most intelligent of us, still count on our fingers and toes. But once we do learn, we shall surpass the Americano, because we understand the spiritual significance of a machine. We see the beauty of combining gas, grease and steel into a powerful, exact movement. We appreciate the material destiny of the universe.”

“Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.”

“Driving along the highway from the airport, they had passed mile upon mile of grain elevators, marking the most productive land in Mexico, but when they reached the place where Google Maps said the river should be, there was nothing but a dusty, toxic-looking trickle. The river — that great, fertile river that the first Spaniards had compared to the Nile — had been dammed long ago, diverted by a huge aqueduct to the factories in Hermosillo and Ciudad Obregón, and all that remained in the traditional villages was polluted, unsafe for irrigation or to drink.”

“Our primary emphasis isn’t on physics and chemistry; it’s on the sciences of life.” “Is that a matter of principle?” “Not entirely. It’s also a matter of convenience and economic necessity. We don’t have the money for large-scale research in physics and chemistry, and we don’t really have any practical need for that kind of research—no heavy industries to be made more competitive, no armaments to be made more diabolical, not the faintest desire to land on the backside of the moon. Only the modest ambition to live as fully human beings in harmony with the rest of life on this island at this latitude on this planet. We can take the results of your researches in physics and chemistry and apply them, if we want to or can afford it, to our own purposes. Meanwhile we’ll concentrate on the research which promises to do us the greatest good—in the sciences of life and mind.”

“The Human Virus (Climate Summon) Mother Earth is a living organism, forests are the lungs of the planet, soil is the womb, oceans are blood - climate change is the planet having fever, in response to the human virus. Economy rooted in greed is not growth, religion rooted in dogma is not holy, innovation rooted in vanity is not science, abundance without wholeness ruins the society. Earth doesn't need our consent to wipe us out, any more than we asked permission from corona virus. Cosmos carries no fury like a mother done wrong - Mother brings us into the world, mother can take us out.”

“Incarnate ugliness, and yet alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the lustre of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!”

“In short, the Industrial Revolution was actually a combination of technological, economical, scientific and social transformations that rapidly and radically altered the course of history and reconfigured the face of the planet in less than ten generations -a true blink of an eye by the standards of evolutionary time.”

“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget.”

“Not long ago, if you wanted to seize political power in a country you had merely to control the army and the police. Today it is only in the most backward countries that fascist generals, in carrying out a coup d'état, still use tanks. If a country has reached a high degree of industrialization the whole scene changes.... Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.”

“Extended families have never been the norm in America; the highest figure for extended-family households ever recorded in Americanhistory is 20 percent. Contrary to the popular myth that industrialization destroyed "traditional" extended families, this high point occurred between 1850 and 1885, during the most intensive period of early industrialization. Many of these extended families, and most "producing" families of the time, depended on the labor of children; they were held together by dire necessity and sometimes by brute force.”

“The developments in the North were those loosely embraced in the term modernization and included urbanization, industrialization,and mechanization. While those changes went forward apace, the antebellum South changed comparatively little, clinging to its rural, agricultural, labor-intensive economy and its traditional folk culture.”