“Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaust. There have always been tyrannies; but without modern means of transport and communication, Stalin and Mao could not have built their gulags.”

— John Gray , book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Why Humanity Will Never Master Technology (p. 14)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Pogroms are as old as Christendom; but without railways, the telegraph and poison gas there could have been no Holocaus…" by John Gray?

John Gray 164

British philosopher 1948

Related quotes

“Thailand has railways and the British never colonised the country,… In 1885, when the British invaded Burma, the Burmese king was already building railways and telegraphs. These are things Indians could have done themselves.”

Amitav Ghosh (1956) Indian writer

Amitav Ghosh, Interview with "The Week" http://web.archive.org/web/20030203070332/http://www.the-week.com/21sep02/life9.htm

“"Communist society"; in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Five, "A Brief Treatise on the Moral Grounds of Moral Relations", p. 95

“It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

The Case for India (1931)

“[The computer is also the direct descendant of the telegraph as it enables one… to] "transmit information without transporting material"”

J. C. R. Licklider Libraries of the future

Source: Libraries of the future, 1965, p. 6 as cited in: Rodney James Giblett (2008) Sublime communication technologies. p. 175.

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Speech, Constitutional Convention (29 June 1787), from Max Farrand's Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. I http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llfr&fileName=001/llfr001.db&recNum=494&itemLink=D?hlaw:5:./temp/~ammem_kmli::%230010495&linkText=1 (1911), p. 465
1780s
Context: In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of War, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

“I see the nations of the world arming in ways that have never before been known in the modern world. I am not speaking of new forms of poison gas, heavier or swifter bombing planes, or parachutes to land brigades of soldiers… What is revolutionary is that the minds of men, women and children are being deliberately trained, directed, distorted, by every conceivable instrument of education and propaganda, to make them tolerant of war, receptive of war, prepared for war, lovers of war. The greatest menace in the world today is not poison gas. There are gas masks against that. The menace is poisoned words, poisoned ideas.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
Source: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938)
pp. 33-34