Quotes about accelerant (179 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“We shall not fail — if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, The House Divided speech (1858)
Context: Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, under the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all them to falter now? — now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail — if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.

Victory

“So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work. Many a year I have thought and pondered, lost myself in speculations and theories, considering man as a mass moved by a force, viewing his inexplicable movement in the light of a mechanical one, and applying the simple principles of mechanics to the analysis of the same until I arrived at these solutions, only to realize that they were taught to me in my early childhood. These three words sound the key-notes of the Christian religion. Their scientific meaning and purpose now clear to me: food to increase the mass, peace to diminish the retarding force, and work to increase the force accelerating human movement. These are the only three solutions which are possible of that great problem, and all of them have one object, one end, namely, to increase human energy. When we recognize this, we cannot help wondering how profoundly wise and scientific and how immensely practical the Christian religion is, and in what a marked contrast it stands in this respect to other religions. It is unmistakably the result of practical experiment and scientific observation which have extended through the ages, while other religions seem to be the outcome of merely abstract reasoning. Work, untiring effort, useful and accumulative, with periods of rest and recuperation aiming at higher efficiency, is its chief and ever-recurring command. Thus we are inspired both by Christianity and Science to do our utmost toward increasing the performance of mankind. This most important of human problems I shall now specifically consider.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

The Problem of Increasing Human Energy (1900)

Age , Peace , Religion , Food

“It seems to me proper to adorn the Author's thought here with its conformity to a conception of Plato's regarding the determination of the various speeds of equable motion in the celestial motions of revolution. …he said that God, after having created the movable celestial bodies, in order to assign to them those speeds with which they must be moved perpetually in equable circular motion, made them depart from rest and move through determinate spaces in that natural straight motion in which we sensibly see our moveables to be moved from the state of rest, successively accelerating. And he added that these having been made to gain that degree [of speed] which it pleased God that they should maintain forever, He turned their straight motion into circulation, the only kind [of motion] that is suitable to be conserved equably, turning always without retreat from or approach toward any pre-established goal desired by them. The conception is truly worthy of Plato, and it is to be more esteemed to the extent that its foundations, of which Plato remained silent, but which were discovered by our Author in removing their poetical mask or semblance, show it the guise of a true story.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

I. Bernard Cohen's thesis: Galileo believed only circular (not straight line) motion may be conserved (perpetual), see The New Birth of Physics (1960).
Sagredo, Day Four, Stillman Drake translation (1974) pp.283-284
Dialogues and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences (1638)

God , Nature , Success , Speed

“What was a reasonable offer? In the first place, there ought to be an amnesty. … The second point in the terms should be a grant of money to rebuild the burned homesteads and restock the devastated farms. … Nothing would do more to accelerate the return of peace and order than to give the people occupation and a chance of living. Then, it should be part of any reasonable offer to the Boers that there should be a speedy restoration of self-governing institutions.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Speech to the Women's National Liberal Association Conference, Memorial Hall, London (12 June 1901), quoted in The Times (13 June 1901), p. 12.
1900s

Money , People , Peace , Chance

“We're going forward with research on a new Orient Express that could, by the end of the decade, take off from Dulles Airport, accelerate up to 25 times the speed of sound, attaining low Earth orbit or flying to Tokyo within two hours.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

State of the Union address http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/20486a.htm, , quoted in [1986-03-05, Michael Kilian, Hypersonic flight just a hyperbolic Reagan rhapsody, The Evening Independent, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=950&dat=19860305&id=bmJQAAAAIBAJ&sjid=t1kDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4836,1112899]
1980s, Second term of office (1985–1989)

Time , Speed , Flying

“No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect. Far from reversing the slow relative decline of Britain vis-à-vis its main industrial competitors, it accelerated it. We fell further behind them, until by 1979 we were widely dismissed as 'the sick man of Europe'…To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.”

Margaret Thatcher book The Downing Street Years

The Downing Street Years (1993)

Disease , Failure , Country

“The tremendous and highly complex industrial development which went on with ever accelerated rapidity during the latter half of the nineteenth century brings us face to face, at the beginning of the twentieth, with very serious social problems. The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, First Annual Message to Congress (1901)

Law , Problem , Change , Wealth

“But what we’ve also said is in order to defeat these extremist ideologies, it can’t just be military, police and security. It has to be reaching into communities that feel marginalized and making sure that they feel that they’re heard; making sure that the young people in those communities have opportunity. […] And that’s why, when I was in Kenya, for example, and I did a town hall meeting there, I emphasized what I had said to President Kenyata -- be a partner with the civil society groups. Because too often, there’s a tendency -- because what the extremist groups want to do is they want to divide. That’s what terrorism is all about. The notion is that you scare societies, further polarizes them. The government reacts by further discriminating against a particular group. That group then feels it has no political outlet peacefully to deal with their grievances. And that then -- that suppression can oftentimes accelerate even more extremism. And that’s why reaching out to civil society groups, clergy, and listening and asking, okay, what is it that we need to do in order to make sure that young people feel that they can succeed? What is it that we need to do to make sure that they feel that they’re fully a part of this country and are full citizens, and have full rights? How do we do that? Bringing them into plan and design messages and campaigns that embrace the diversity of these countries -- those are the things that are so important to do.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Young African Leaders Initiative Presidential Summit Town Hall speech (August 2015)

People , Feeling , Communication , Parting

“Proposition I. Theorem I: When a projectile is carried in motion compounded from equable horizontal and from naturally accelerated downward [motions], it describes a semiparabolic line in its movement.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Author, Day Four, Stillman Drake translation (1974) p. 269
Dialogues and Mathematical Demonstrations Concerning Two New Sciences (1638)

Nature

“A sin that accelerates death and annihilation of man is breaking off paying visits to one's own relatives.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol.74, p. 94
Religous Wisdom

Death

“Jazz music is a form of accelerated unconcern.”

Françoise Sagan book A Certain Smile

Un certain sourire (1955, A Certain Smile, translated 1956)

Music

“Explaining economic growth - The achievement motive : how it is measured and its economics effects - Achieving societies in the modern world - Achieving societies in the past - Other psychological factors in economic development - Entrepreneurial behavior - Characteristics of entrepreneurs - The spirit of Hermes - Sources of n achievement - Accelerating economic growth.”

David C. McClelland (1917–1998) American psychological theorist

Book abstract
The Archiving Society, 1961

World , Behavior , Motivation , Past

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"Meltdown" http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm (1994)

Intelligence , Learning

“It doesn't work to build half an accelerator. The particles need to go all the way around.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

On The Shoulders of Giants - "The Future of Science" by Steven Weinberg, World Science Festival, YouTube, 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GrjjCVk6cA

Way

“This idea of purity and that you’re never compromised and you’re always politically woke — you should get over that quickly. … The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids, and share certain things with you. … I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people, and this is accelerated by social media — there is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough. If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. Did you see how woke I was, I called you out. Then I’m going to get on my TV and watch my show … That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change. If all you’re doing is casting stones, you’re probably not going to get that far.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Comments at an Obama Foundation event, Chicago (29 October 2019), as quoted in "Obama Calls Out Online Call-Out Culture: 'That’s Not Activism"", Rolling Stone (30 October 2019) https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/obama-calls-out-call-out-culture-not-activism-905600/
2019

People , Fight , Way , Sense

“The big pharma companies are still not going in. Some of the biotechs are starting to, because they're trying to really accelerate their technology... and hopefully to flip it around for something else that will make money. We need a new system in place.”

Peter Hotez (1958) American academic

House Science, Space, and Technology Committee Hearing on Coronavirus (March 5, 2020)

Money , Making love

“Why was the blind guy playing with matches, you ask? Because he's good at it. Anything to do with fire, igniting things, exploding things, things with fuses, wicks, accelerants… Iggy's your man. It's one of those good/bad things.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Maximum Ride The Angel Experiment

Guy

“I pressed down the mental accelerator. The old lemon throbbed fiercely. I got an idea.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Idea

“All right, the pendulum isn’t working. Sometimes you need an accelerant to help it.” – Death
“Like gasoline?” – Nick
“Yes, Nick. We’re going to set the book and your pendulum on fire and then use them ’cause we’re just that intelligent.” – Death”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Death , Books , Intelligence , Help

“Something changed. Somewhere along the line you stopped accelerating.”

Jay McInerney book Bright Lights, Big City

Source: Bright Lights, Big City

Change

“Inflation is a simple idea: imagine that the universe begins in a tiny patch of space dominated by the potential energy of some scalar field, a kind of super-dense dark energy. This causes that patch to expand at a terrifically accelerated rate, smoothing out the density and diluting away any unwanted relics. Eventually the scalar field decays into ordinary matter and radiation, reheating the universe into a conventional Big Bang state, after which things proceed as normal.”

Sean Carroll (1966) American theoretical cosmologist

[The Eternally Existing, Self-reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe, Preposterous Universe blog, 21 October 2011, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/10/21/the-eternally-existing-self-reproducing-frequently-puzzling-inflationary-universe/]

Imagination , Idea , Universe

“The signs on Bell’s door read “J. Bell” and “M. Bell.” I knocked and was invited in by Bell. He looked about the same as he had the last time I saw him, a couple of years ago. He has long, neatly combed red hair and a pointed beard, which give him a somewhat Shavian figura. On one wall of the office is a photograph of Bell with something that looks like a halo behind his head, and his expression in the photograph is mischievous. Theoretical physicists’ offices run the gamut from chaotic clutter to obsessive neatness; the Bells’ is somewhere in between. Bell invited me to sit down after warning me that the “visitor’s chair” tilted backward at unexpected angles. When I had mastered it, and had a chance to look around, the first thing that struck me was the absence of Mary. “Mary,” said Bell, with a note of some disbelief in his voice, “has retired.” This, it turned out, had occurred not long before my visit. “She will not look at any mathematics now. I hope she comes back,” he went on almost plaintively; “I need her. We are doing several problems together.” In recent years, the Bells have been studying new quantum mechanical effects that will become relevant for the generation of particle accelerators that will perhaps succeed the LEP. Bell began his career as a professional physicist by designing accelerators, and Mary has spent her entire career in accelerator design. A couple of years ago Bell, like the rest of the members of CERN theory division, was asked to list his physics speciality. Among the more “conventional” entries in the division such as “super strings,” “weak interactions,” “cosmology,” and the like, Bell’s read “quantum engineering.””

Jeremy Bernstein (1929) American physicist

Quantum Profiles (1991), John Stewart Bell: Quantum Engineer

Hope , Mathematics , Problem , Study

“Second are the partially-implemented or unimplemented projects that were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its ruling on the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). Such projects, such as the Coconut Scale Insect Emergency Action Plan for coconut farmers, the rehabilitation of LRT Lines 1 and 2, or the construction of fish ports, lighthouses and seawalls shall help our long-suffering masses escape from the claws of poverty and are thus deemed important.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the Supplemental Appropriations for FY 2014

Fish , Suffering , Help

“This bomber stands for the interdependent world we have made for ourselves; where the rate of change accelerates every second because every one of man's inventions acts like a trigger to cause change.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 10 - Yesterday, Tomorrow and You

World , Change

“We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources.”

Walter W. Powell (1948) American sociologist

Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman. "The knowledge economy." Annu. Rev. Sociol. 30 (2004): 199-220.

Nature , Knowledge

“Like so many empires before it, the Soviet Union eventually imploded and fragmented, falling victim not so much to a direct military defeat as to disintegration accelerated by economic and social strains.”

Zbigniew Brzeziński book The Grand Chessboard

Source: The Grand Chessboard (1997), Chapter 1, Hegemony Of A New Type, p. 9.

“Before a science can develop principles, it must possess concepts. Before a law of gravitation could be formulated, it was necessary to have the notions of “acceleration” and “weight.””

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 43.

Law , Science

“Populations with diets with little or no saturated fat have little or no heart disease. The development of heart disease begins in childhood. Not only do unhealthy childhood diets high in saturated fat and low in the protective micronutrients found in unprocessed plant foods accelerate heart disease, but they promote the aging process, and create a cellular environment favorable for the development of cancer. To add insult to injury, much of the processed foods children eat are rich in trans fat, a man-made fat that is also linked to cancer and heart disease. We could not have designed a cancer-causing environment more effectively if we scientifically planned it. We feed our children a diet high in saturated fat, add lots of processed foods with those dangerous (man-made) trans fats, and combine it with an insufficient intake of unrefined plant foods to guarantee sufficient phytochemical deprivation, and presto, we have created a nation rich in autoimmune illnesses, allergies, obesity, diabetes, and finally, heart disease and cancer.”

Joel Fuhrman (1953) Family Physician and author

Source: Disease-Proof Your Child (2005), Ch. 1, pp. 11-12

Children , Age , Disease , Food

“The Senate version of the 2015 National Budget will define savings in FULL COMPLIANCE WITH THE SUPREME COURT DECISION on the Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF) and the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP). Our committee accepted all of Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago's points and took note of her concerns. I believe Senator Santiago based her speech on the NEP version, NOT the one the Senate has amended. However, the Senate version is never going to adopt the version of the NEP as regard to their definition of savings.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Escudero, F. [Francis]. (2014, November 26). Retrieved from Official Facebook Page of Francis Escudero https://www.facebook.com/senchizescudero/posts/10152871070040610/
2014, Facebook

Decision

“The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in execution of this plan…He was one of Eichmann's best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.”

Dieter Wisliceny (1911–1948) SS-Hauptsturmführer

In a conversation with Endre Steiner in Bratislava (June 1944). Allegedly quoted in "The Myth of Hitler's Pope: How Pope Pius XII Rescued Jews from the Nazis" - Page 136 - by David G. Dalin - Political Science - 2005

Source: [Ahren, Raphael, In Netanyahu’s mufti-Holocaust allegation, echoes of his father’s maverick approach to history, https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-netanyahus-mufti-holocaust-allegation-echoes-of-his-fathers-maverick-approach-to-history/, 26 March 2020, Times of Israel, 22 October 2015]
Disputed

“The dying process begins the minute you are born, but it accelerates during dinner parties.”

Carol Grace (1924–2003) American actress

As quoted in Funny Ladies : The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001) by Bill Adler, p. 80

“We shall therefore assume the complete physical equivalence of a gravitational field and a corresponding acceleration of the reference system.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Statement of the equivalence principle in Yearbook of Radioactivity and Electronics (1907)
1900s

“Far from preventing gambler's ruin, martingale accelerates it.”

William Poundstone (1955) American writer

Part One, Entropy, Gamblers Ruin, p. 52
Fortune's Formula (2005)

“War is never anything less than accelerated technological change.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 102

War , Change

“If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Humanism and Flying Saucers (p. 75)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Life , Nature , Knowledge , Learning

“Don't suffer! O my body, O my vital, O my mind, O my heart, do not suffer. Do not cherish suffering. Don't act like a fool. Don't think that your suffering is going to accelerate your spiritual progress.”

Sri Chinmoy (1931–2007) Indian writer and guru

Everest Aspiration (1977)

Fools , Thinking , Suffering , Heart

“I believe in future generations; I believe in education, in the elimination of all that is worthless in our culture. We must leave only the good things. I don't need to explain this in detail. Every Brazilian knows which way of thinking and which negative attitudes comprise the root of the behavior that prevents our progress, with order, in a more accelerated rhythm.”

Marcos Pontes book Missão Cumprida

Missão Cumprida (2011), chapter 114

Education , Way , Behavior , Thinking

“We are already into the crisis. It will accelerate in the next five years. There will come a time in the next 10 years when it will be irrelevant which party comes to power. The word democracy will be irrelevant when people rush to grab whatever available resources are left.”

Maneka Gandhi (1956) Indian politician and activist

On global warming, as quoted in "Maneka Gandhi on India and global warming" http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/may/14guest1.htm, Rediff (14 May 2007)
2001-2010

People , Democracy , Time

“War has become the environment of our time if only because it is an accelerated form of innovation and education.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 381

War , Education , Time

“… the principle of the limiting character of the velocity of light. This statement… is not an arbitrary assumption but a physical law based on experience. In making this statement, physics does not commit the fallacy of regarding absence of knowledge as evidence for knowledge to the contrary. It is not absence of knowledge of faster signals, but positive experience which has taught us that the velocity of light cannot be exceeded. For all physical processes the velocity of light has the property of an infinite velocity. In order to accelerate a body to the velocity of light, an infinite amount of energy would be required, and it is therefore physically impossible for any object to obtain this speed. This result was confirmed by measurements performed on electrons. The kinetic energy of a mass point grows more rapidly than the square of its velocity, and would become infinite for the speed of light.”

Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953) American philosopher

The Philosophy of Space and Time (1928, tr. 1957)

Law , Knowledge , Light , Speed

“The history of technology will record that for the first time a machine of human construction, a five-and-a-half-ton missile, covered a distance of a hundred and twenty miles with a lateral deflection of only two and a half miles from the target. Your names, my friends and colleagues, are associated with this achievement. We did it with automatic control. From the artilleryman's point of view, the creation of the rocket as a weapon solves the problem of the weight of heavy guns. We are the first to have given a rocket built on the principles of aircraft construction a speed of thirty-three hundred miles per hour by means of rocket propulsion. Acceleration throughout the period of propulsion was no more than five times that of gravity, perfectly normal for maneuvering of aircraft. We have thus proved that it is quite possible to build piloted missiles or aircraft to fly at supersonic speed, given the right form and suitable propulsion. Our automatically controlled and stabilized rocket has reached heights never touched by any man-made machine. Since the tilt was not carried to completion our rocket today reached a height of nearly sixty miles. We have thus broken the world altitude record of twenty-five miles previously held by the shell fired from the now almost legendary Paris Gun.
The following points may be deemed of decisive significance in the history of technology: we have invaded space with our rocket and for the first time--mark this well--have used space as a bridge between two points on the earth; we have proved rocket propulsion practicable for space travel. To land, sea, and air may now be added infinite empty space as an area of future intercontinental traffic, thereby acquiring political importance. This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel....
So long as the war lasts, our most urgent task can only be the rapid perfection of the rocket as a weapon. The development of possibilities we cannot yet envisage will be a peacetime task. Then the first thing will be to find a safe means of landing after the journey through space…”

Walter Dornberger (1895–1980) German general

[Dornberger, Walter, Walter Dornberger, V2--Der Schuss ins Weltall, 1952 -- US translation V-2 Viking Press:New York, 1954, Bechtle Verlag, Esslingan, p17,236]

War , World , Travel , History

“All meaning alters with acceleration, because all patterns of personal and political interdependence change with any acceleration of information.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 178-179

Change , Personality

“I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress — not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Day of Affirmation Address (1966)

World , Justice , Hope , Communication

“A recovery after a depression is as inevitable as that day follows night. It can not be permanently suppressed. Its vitality is so powerful that it will break down the barriers set up by the most arbitrary dictator. Hence there is developing a new confidence and a new faith in those principles which have formed the the foundation of economic evolution and industrial progress during the last several decades — principles which we have been proud to call "American principles," and for which we have been reared with a wholesome respect. There are still lacking the assurances of a broad and definitely defined opportunity and the elimination of certain unsound economic policies, thus limiting the application of these vital principles we have always known and retarding their ability to accelerate our economic recovery.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: "The Broadened Responsibilities of Industry's Executive," 1936, p. 351; Lead paragraph.

Faith , Confidence , Night

“Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g — what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma — to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 395

Imagination , Star

“The precise reason why abstinence from animal food will be the first act … of a moral life is admirably explained in the book, The Ethics of Diet [by Howard Williams]; and not by one man only, but by all mankind in the persons of its best representatives during all the conscious life of humanity. … the moral progress of humanity — which is the foundation of every other kind of progress — is always slow; but … the sign of true, not casual, progress is its uninterruptedness and its continual acceleration. And the progress of vegetarianism is of this kind. That progress, is expressed both in the words of the writers cited in the above-mentioned book and in the actual life of mankind, which from many causes is involuntarily passing metre and more from carnivorous habits to vegetable food, and is also deliberately following the same path in a movement which shows evident strength, and which is growing larger and larger — viz., vegetarianism.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. X

Life , Books , Food , Animals

“Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 24

World , Personality , Speed

“We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

"The Singularity," The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

“If supersymmetry plays the role in physics that we suspect it does, then it is very likely to be discovered by the next generation of particle accelerators, either at Fermilab… or at CERN… Discovery of supersymmetry would be one of the real milestones in physics, made even more exciting by its close links to still more ambitious theoretical ideas. Indeed, supersymmetry is one of the basic requirements of "string theory," which is the framework in which theoretical physicists have had some success in unifying gravity with the rest of the elementary particle forces. Discovery of supersymmetry would would certainly give string theory an enormous boost.”

Edward Witten (1951) American theoretical physicist

Foreward, written June 30, 1999, to Supersymmetry: Unveiling the Ultimate Laws of Nature (2000) by Gordon Kane

Idea , Success

“Macro-economic policy had accelerated the "expulsion" of landless peasants from the countryside leading to the formation of a nomadic migrant labor force moving from one metropolitan area to another.”

Michel Chossudovsky (1946) Canadian economist

Source: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order - Second Edition - (2003), Chapter 13, Debt and "Democracy" in Brazil, p. 200

“Managers who extensively plan the future get the timing wrong. Sometimes they arrive to market too early and so must wait for the demand to catch up. Sometimes they are too late and so must accelerate to rejoin the future.”

Shona Brown (1960) businessperson

Source: Competing on the Edge, 1998, p. 135

Time , Waiting , Future

“The new industrial methods have greatly accelerated certain tendencies that had already manifested themselves in the old domestic factories and some of these deserve more than passing notice as they are affecting not only productive processes but our social organization as well. Perhaps the most important of these influences are those that tend toward
(1) Aggregation or increase in size of industrial enterprises.
(2) Specialization or the limiting of the field of activity, not only of enterprises but also of men.
(3) Standardization or the reduction of all lines of product to a limited number of types and sizes.
(4) Extreme division of labor, following aggregation, specialization, and standardization and requiring special consideration.
These tendencies are all closely interlocked with each other, and with modern productive methods. It will be clearer, however, to discuss them separately before summing up their joint action.”

Dexter S. Kimball (1865–1952) American engineer

Source: Principles of industrial organization, 1913, p. 34

Men

“About 70 years ago, only a small number of “elementary particles”, thought to be the basic building blocks of matter, were known: the proton, the electron, and the photon as the quantum of radiation. All these particles are stable (the neutron is stable only in nuclear matter, the free neutron decays by beta decay: n→p+e−+\overline{\nu}). Owing to the availability of large accelerators, this picture of a few elementary particles has profoundly changed: today, the standard reference Review of Particle Properties lists more than 100 particles. The number is still growing as the energies and luminosities of accelerators are increased.”

Walter Greiner (1935–2016) German physicist

Source: Quantum Chromatodynamics (3rd ed., 2007), Ch. 1 : The Introduction of Quarks

Change

“The history of the apple is too absurd. Whether the apple fell or not, how can any one believe that such a discovery could in that way be accelerated or retarded? Undoubtedly, the occurrence was something of this sort. There comes to Newton a stupid, importunate man, who asks him how he hit upon his great discovery. When Newton had convinced himself what a noodle he had to do with, and wanted to get rid of the man, he told him that an apple fell on his nose; and this made the matter quite clear to the man, and he went away satisfied.”

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) German mathematician and physical scientist

As quoted by Robert Chambers, "Sir Isaac Newton and the Apple," The Book of Days (1832) Vol. 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=K0UJAAAAIAAJ, p. 757.

Stupidity , Way , History

“If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.”

Alvin Toffler book Future Shock

Future Shock (1970), ch. 11 http://books.google.com/books?id=p1t2SOENHWYC&q=%22with+its+faster+pace+of+life+has+accelerated+the+family+cycle+super+industrialism+now+threatens+to+smash+it+altogether%22&pg=PA258#v=snippet

Life , Family

“The Maharaja of Mysore (then Governor of Mysore), ayachamarajendra Wodeyar, visited Berkeley for a day. I took him around. He was really impressed when he saw the accelerators in the Radiation Laboratory on the hill. He was happy to speak to me in Kannada and even more happy that I knew a little Sanskrit.”

C. N. R. Rao (1934) Indian chemist

Source: Climbing the Limitless Ladder: A Life in Chemistry (2010), p. 35

Happiness

“Three and a half million years separate the individual who left these footprints in the sands of Africa from the one who left them on the moon. A mere blink in the eye of evolution. Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever-increasing population. In spite of disasters when civilisations have over-reached themselves, that process has continued, indeed accelerated, even today. Now mankind is looking for food, not just on this planet but on others. Perhaps the time has now come to put that process into reverse. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we control the population to allow the survival of the environment.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
The Life of Mammals (2002)

Food , Intelligence , Time , Success

“Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent. (…) It’s as if we are gaining the ability to see into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the social spectrum when we are online, and in some contexts we are dropping out yellows or reds. To those tied to the visible color spectrum we are habituated to, this new sort of vision will be 'irreal.' But ultraviolet has always existed: we just couldn't see it before. (…) This will be a fracturing of the premises of privacy, and a slow rejection of the metaphors of shared space. The principles of publicy are derived from the intersection of infinite publics and our shared experience of time online, through media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The innate capability we have to shift in a heartbeat from a given public, and our corresponding persona, to another, is now being accelerated by streaming social tools. This will be the decade when publicy displaces privacy, online and off.”

Stowe Boyd (1953) information technologist

The Decade Of Publicy http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2010/1/2/the-decade-of-publicy.html, January 2, 2010.

Color , Time

“Whoever accelerates the media of earth, water and air centrifugally perishes unconditionally, for in so doing they reduce the Blood of the Earth (water) to a pathogenic state and make it the most dangerous enemy of all living and growing things.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 96, p. 4. (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

Water

“This is the only sure way I know to counter the anti-Copernican idea that the universe is accelerating in our epoch - to get rid of the problem entirely!”

John Moffat book Reinventing Gravity

Source: Reinventing Gravity (2008), Chapter 15, Dark Energy And The Accelerating Universe, p. 207

Way , Idea , Problem , Universe

“The imperative need of the hour is to visualize the grave dangers not only to our cherished political and social system, but to the very foundation of our values, if there is not greater discipline in national life…Undoubtedly, the nation has registered progress, especially during the last two or three years, but we must accelerate the pace and increase the momentum. We need vigour and the will to rekindle the moral timbre to channelize our energies for constructive purposes. We must eschew communal frenzy…”

Zail Singh (1916–1994) Indian politician and former President of India

His first speech on assuming charge as President of India, p. 170.
Presidents of India, 1950-2003

Life , Communication

“Meanwhile, the Wheel turns. The humble are exalted and the mighty are humbled. The best are inevitably defeated, and the scum always rises to the top. Here is the source of all the world’s pain, that restless turning, ever accelerating, always bringing us around again to where we were before, but older, changed, scarred, and sorrowful. Had I only known the identity of the whisperer, I would never have listened. The Wheel would not have been set in motion.”

Michael Swanwick book The Iron Dragon's Daughter

Source: The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), Chapter 13 (p. 232)

Pain , World , Change

“And why the need for a tightrope balancing act in the execution of the FY 2015 national budget, particularly with respect to the Supreme Court decision on the controversial Disbursement Acceleration Program?”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

2014, Speech: Sponsorship Speech for the FY 2015 National Budget

Decision

“The shape and direction of video art's accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence in the mid-'60s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of major funders-the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It has matured without the bevy of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and sculpture. Within video's media arts centers and funding organizations, there are many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public monies. He has been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art.”

Marita Sturken (1957) American academic

Marita Sturken. " TV as a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art http://www.vasulka.org/archive/4-30c/AfterImageMay84(1004).pdf," in: Afterimage, May 1984

Art , Support , Painting

“Fiction is unlike reality because it has an end, a conclusion, which allows the characters to stroll happily, or perhaps simply more wisely, out through the climax into the epilogue. But life is a tapestry. It has no satisfactory end. There are simply periods of acceleration and delay, victory and frustration, seasoned with periodic jolts of reality.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 44 (p. 412)

Life , Reality , Victory , Season

“No one, to my knowledge, has suggested that the image must accelerate and decelerate or that the relation among torque, angular momentum, and angular velocity has a,1 analogue in the mental rotation case. Of course it may tum our that it takes subjects longer to rotate an object that they imagine to be heavier, thus increasing the predictive value of the metaphor. But in that case it seems clearer that, even if it was predictive, the metaphor could nor be explanatory (surely, no one believes that some images are heavier than others and the heavier ones accelerate more slowly).”

Zenon Pylyshyn (1937) Canadian philosopher

Zenon W. Pylyshyn, "The rate of “mental rotation” of images: A test of a holistic analogue hypothesis." Memory & Cognition 7.1 (1979): 19-28; p. 19-20

Imagination , Knowledge

“The change in consciousness will not take place automatically, just as it doesn't take place automatically in the economy. The alterations are slow and are not harmonious; there are periods of acceleration, pauses and even retrogressions.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

Change

“A transhumanist solution is to accelerate the research and development of smart guns and non-lethal weapons.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

“Rutherford did not pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but he understood that the Gamow formula would give his accelerator a crucial advantage. Even particles accelerated at much lower energies … would be able to penetrate into nuclei. Rutherford invited Gamow to Cambridge in January 1929 … [They] became firm friends and Gamow's insight gave Rutherford the impetus to go full steam ahead with the building of his accelerator.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Understanding

“The acceleration of the number of traders buying into the market in the inflating bubble captures the oft-quoted observation that bubbles are times when the "greater fool theory" applies.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 6, Hierarchies, Complex Fractal Dimensions, And Log Periodicity, p. 185.

Fools , Quotes , Time

John C. Baez (1961) American mathematician and mathematical physicist

[2008, http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html#baez, Should I be thinking about quantum gravity? (essay at the World Question Center), edge.org]

People , Hope , Success

“Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"No Future" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 392

Death , History , Future

“John Bell devoted most of his efforts to conceptual and theoretical questions. Would he have liked that I also stress the importance of the technological revolutions that were, and will be, enabled by the conceptual revolutions? I cannot tell, but we know that he started his career in accelerator design, and that he always showed a profound respect for technological achievements. I like to think that he would have loved quantum-jumps-based atomic clocks, as well as entangled qubits.”

Alain Aspect (1947) French physicist

"Introduction: John Bell and the second quantum revolution" (2004)

Love , Question , Thinking , Effort

“Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

God , War , Secret , World

“I never heard a thrown ball make that sound before. The ball seemed to accelerate as it came close; an accelerating, impossibly fast pitch that made the noises of hornets and snakes.”

Roger Kahn (1927–2020) American baseball writer

Source: The Boys Of Summer, Chapter 1, The Trolley Car That Ran By Ebbets Field, p. 55

“The power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005)

World , Idea

“The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy.”

Niall Ferguson (1964) British historian

"TED Talks: Niall Ferguson" http://www.ted.com/speakers/niall_ferguson.html TED

“The President-elect has outlined a clear vision to transform our country’s infrastructure, accelerate economic growth and productivity, and create good paying jobs across the country. I am honored to be nominated by the President-elect to serve my beloved country as Transportation Secretary.”

Elaine Chao (1953) 18th and current United States Secretary of Transporation and 24th United States Secretary of Labor

President-Elect Donald J. Trump to Nominate Elaine Chao as Secretary of the Department of Transportation https://greatagain.gov/president-elect-trump-to-nominate-elaine-chao-as-transportation-secretary-4735342c5a0e#.y53wy7u2j (November 29, 2016)

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