
“Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.”
Broadcast to the nation (13 December 1973).[citation needed]
Prime Minister
“Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it.”
Introduction, p. 28
Electric Waves: Being Researches on the Propagation of Electric Action with Finite Velocity Through Space (1893)
Context: It is not particularly satisfactory to see equations set forth as direct results of observation and experiment, where we used to get long mathematical deductions as apparent proofs of them. Nevertheless, I believe that we cannot, without deceiving ourselves, extract much more from known facts than is asserted in the papers referred to. If we wish to lend more color to the theory, there is nothing to prevent us from supplementing all this and aiding our powers of imagination by concrete representations of the various conceptions as to the nature of electric polarisation, the electric current, etc.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told you—about it being electrical.”
She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change.
”No,” Rick said. “I’m glad to know. Or rather—” He became silent. “I’d prefer to know.”
Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Chapter 22 (p. 241)
Quoted in Khrushchev Remembers (1970), p. 474
Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 375
Quote of John Cage, in: 'The Future of Music: Credo' (1937); SILENCE 3-4
1930s
Question Time, Australian House of Representatives, 1992, Labor in Power (w:Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1993), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_CHXDBq9Ps
“Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain.”
Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 1, Electric Rain, Information in our lives, p. 3
Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 5