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Mining Quotes

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Mining Quotes

“My dad played for a coal-mining team in eastern Ohio; he was a very good pitcher. If he hadn't hurt his arm, he probably would have got a shot somewhere. He hurt his arm one spring, didn't warm up good enough, couldn't throw a fastball anymore. Another coal miner taught him how to throw the knuckleball.”

“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish ora German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making "ladies" dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”

“What serialized cable dramas have given us is the opportunity to not simply tell the same story with slightly different words and different costumes, every week. people are really mining the ability of storytellers to tell a long form story that goes from A to Z, and to trust that an audience will follow that. If they miss it, over the course of the week, they can watch it online or buy the DVD. There are so many different ways of interacting with it. Storytelling in television is getting more complex and more nuanced.”

“I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse.”

“The man who works 52 weeks in the year does not do his best in any one week of the year, Daniel Guggenheim, onetime head of the greatest smelting and mining family in America, impressed upon me. Real recreation quickens aspiration. The true purpose of recreation is not merely to amuse, not merely to afford pleasure, not merely to kill time, but to increase our fitness, enhance our usefulness, spur achievement.”

“The essence of modernity is that progress no longer waits on genius; instead we have learned to put our faith in the organized efforts of ordinary men. Science is as old as the race, but the effective organization of science is new. Ancient science, like placer mining, was a pursuit of solitary prospectors. Nuggets of truth were found, but the total wealth of knowledge increased slowly. Modern man began to transform this world when he began to mine the hidden veins of knowledge systematically.”

“It is a fact that the entire Kentucky River system, which the central part of the state complacently depends upon for its future water, is deteriorating rapidly because of strip mining, because of bad farming, because of industrial and agricultural pollutants, because of urban sewage. It is deteriorating, that is to say, because almost nobody cares, or cares to know, where water comes from, so long as it keeps coming.”

“I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments-genuine savings-in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.”

“How would you describe the difference between modern war and modern industry-between say, bombing and strip mining, or between chemical warfare and chemical manufacturing? The difference seems to be only that in war the victimization of humans is directly intentional and in industry it is "accepted" as a "trade-off." Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.”

“Uranium mining in northern Canada has left over 120 million tons of radioactive waste. This amount represents enough material to cover the Trans-Canada Highway two meters deep across the country. Present production of uranium waste from Saskatchewan alone occurs at the rate of over 1 million tons annually. Since 1975, hospitalization for cancer, birth defects and circulatory illnesses in that area have increased dramatically - between 123 and 600 percent in that region.”

“We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and, by the very nature of their enterprises, leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly transformed and desecrated. What's more, in granting such mining concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, the government places no cultural or market value on the land itself.”

“Preserve the core, and let the rest flux. In their wonderful bestseller Built to Last, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras make a convincing argument that long-lived companies are able to thrive 50 years or more by retaining a very small heart of unchanging values, and then stimulating progress in everything else. At times "everything" includes changing the business the company operates in, migrating, say, from mining to insurance. Outside the core of values, nothing should be exempt from flux. Nothing.”

“Film is very much about capturing the essence of things - if you feel it, and you've got the right person shooting it, it'll come across. Theater's a different animal; it's physically different and requires a different discipline. In the theater, you're mining the same material, constantly honing the same thing, executing it and keeping it alive and fresh.”

“Going from memoir to fiction was fantastic. I had been afraid to move away from memoir; I'd written some novel drafts, but they weren't well received by my agent at the time, and it had been drilled into me that "memoir outsells fiction two to one" (not sure if that's true anymore, or if it ever was), so I felt like the only smart thing to do, professionally, was to keep mining my life for painful moments to recapitulate.”

“My father got a job at Bradford University in textiles. And he came for - I guess, you know, why do people immigrate? - like, for a better life to find, you know, a new world. And, you know, I think he always - he saw it as an opportunity. And so yeah so we came to this coal mining town in the north of England and that's where I grew up.”

“Those organisations, al-Qaeda being the first one, have all settled in areas full of mining and oil resources or in geostrategic zones. They settled in Afghanistan which underground is filled with oil and lithium. North Mali is filled with mining resources (uranium). It is essential to question the impact and role of some international players that create or let those organisations settle there.”

“If I could say something about Capricornia, and it came out in your previous report, there is no doubt that the end of the mining boom has led to an economic downturn in central Queensland, and that is why people in Capricornia, and elsewhere in central Queensland too, are so desperate for a government that will protect their jobs and create new opportunities for jobs in the future. And that is why [Malcolm] Turnbull government's message of jobs and growth and its six point economic plan is so important to them.”

“I grew up down in the hills of Virginia. I can be in Kentucky in 20 minutes, Tennessee in 20 minutes or in the state of West Virginia in 20 minutes. And it's down in the Appalachian Mountains, down there. And it's sort of a poorer country. Most of the livelihood is coal mining and logging, working in the woods and things like that. Most people has a hard life down that way.”

“I wouldn't necessarily assume that because Capricornia has traditionally been a Labor seat, that it'll go back to the Labor Party this time because the big issue in Capricornia which is based on the city of Rockhampton is the fact that the economy is - the regional economy is in a poor shape as a result, in particular of the decline of the mining industry and they are looking to the Carmichael mine, the Adani project as containing all of the prospects that they see for their future and that is why people in Rockhampton are very, very fearful of a Labor-Greens government.”

“The environmental catastrophes we're presently seeing are considered "normal" though they're horrific. Fracking has made drinking water flammable, families are dying from planned lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, mountaintop removal is killing families throughout Appalachia, and oil/mining companies continue to denigrate Native American and indigenous rights throughout the world (see North Dakota Pipeline presently). This is horrific - and yet we somehow consider it normal.”

“In the forests of central India and in many, many rural areas, a huge battle is being waged. Millions of people are being driven off their lands by mining companies, by dams, by infrastructure companies, and a huge battle is being waged. These are not people who have been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilisation and progress. They are fighting for their lands and their livelihoods, refusing to be looted so that someone somewhere far away may "progress" at their cost.”

“I should say that Canada is one of the major criminals, not just the tar sands and so on, but even mining throughout the world, a lot of it is Canadian. It's extremely destructive, so an important thing for Canadians to do is curtail the predatory and destructive behavior of their own government and corporations. A carbon tax is one way of doing it.”

“We often sometimes forget that- prior to the invention of removable pipe- there really were no English Bibles. We have treasures, we have Bibles in every size and shape and color. But there's a failure to recognize what's contained inside the cover of the Bible. We grow apathetic, and I think that the issue is reacting to the Word of God. Not just carrying, but get back into the Word of God and then get the Word of God into us. It's all about mining the scripture, memorizing the scripture, and meditating with our scripture.”

“Kosovo is an agricultural economy particularly. It also has a couple of good power stations that exported power, and the big cooperative which they had there in the mining field is no longer functioning. So there is no immediate employment available for people in the industrial sector. All that needs to be going. But you will remember that it is part of Yugoslavia, and much of its trade and its dependence was on Serbia and Montenegro.”

“With the communication internet, whole industries have been disrupted. You're in the publishing industry, you understand that. Before, we had newspapers, magazines - now you're on the web. I'm in book publishing. I don't have to tell you what's happened to us. Television has taken a hit. The music industry. But, thousands of new businesses have emerged on this new communication revolution platform. Not just Google, Facebook, and Twitter. There are thousands of operations. Businesses that are doing the platforms, the apps. They're mining the big data. They're creating the connections.”