Quotes about industry
page 10

“If there is any group that can be typified by their frequent objection to and rejection of education, it is religion. From the Dark Ages to the Revivals, from the Taliban in Pakistan to American Christian creationists, religious extremism has historically always been an impediment to progress on many levels, and especially when that involves teaching actual factual information instead of baseless beliefs. What happens to the kids on the street when the government no longer requires or provides free schooling in the essential fundamentals? How bad could it be? Let's look at how bad it's already been; Christian dominionists seem to have this fantasy where they want to take us back to the good old days of the Industrial Revolution, where there will be no middle class and where poor illiterate children return to work in unrestricted factories, with no vaccinations and no hope for their future. That's not the America I know.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Youtube, Other, Don't Blame the Atheists https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0Ca88xNw_w (October 21, 2012)

Children, Age, Education, School

“It is not necessary to conclude that the managerial groups have assumed complete domination over the concerns in which they are found, although this may be the fact in various instances, but only to reckon with the undoubted truth that the managerial factor in public and private enterprise has taken on a far more significant role than before.
This new role which has puzzled and alarmed the "owners" in industry and the policy-makers in government is not, however, primarily a power role, but a specialization of the evolving and complex character which we now confront in our civilization.
We may, of course, always raise the question-not in point of fact always raised-of what the relation of these managers is to the t! nds of the state or the ends of other groups and to the special techniques of the particular group and to its special social composition. In the complex power pattern of organization how are these managerial element-related to the organization of the consent of the governed, so vital a force in the life of every form of human association? In the struggle for advantage and mastery these larger factors may, indeed, pass unnoticed, but from the point of view of the student of politics and government, they are of supreme importance in judging the trends and possibilities of managerial evolution in modem society.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: Systematic Politics, 1943, p. 163-4 ; as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 15-16

Life, Truth, Question

“Because he did not care about his country, Lenin was prepared to promise everybody whatever they wanted without giving much thought to the future. The peasants wanted private land for their communes? Let them take it: eventually all the land will be confiscated and collectivized anyway. Until then, ‘looting the loot’ will win over, or at least neutralize, the peasantry. The workers demand to run the factories? Even though ‘workers’ control is a detestable syndico-anarchist slogan, there is no harm in granting their desires—for the time being. Once industries have been nationalized and subjected to general economic plan of production, ‘workers’ control’ will vanish of itself.”

Richard Pipes (1923–2018) American historian

Source: Three “Whys” of the Russian Revolution (1995), p. 44

Communication, Time, Future, Country

“Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.”

James Gleick (1954) American author, journalist, and biographer

James Gleick (2002). What just happened: a chronicle from the information frontier, p. 19 cited in: George Stepanek (2005), Software Project Secrets: Why Software Projects Fail, p. 10

Way, Parting

“The category “society” itself expressed the acute conflict between the social and political sphere—society as antagonistic to the state. Similarly, “individual,” “class,” “private,” “family” denoted spheres and forces not yet integrated with the established conditions—spheres of tension and contradiction. With the growing integration of industrial society, these categories are losing their critical connotation, and tend to become descriptive, deceptive, or operational terms. An attempt to recapture the critical intent of these categories, and to understand how the intent was cancelled by the social reality, appears from the outset to be regression from a theory joined with historical practice to abstract, speculative thought: from the critique of political economy to philosophy. This ideological character of the critique results from the fact that the analysis is forced to proceed from a position “outside” the positive as well as negative, the productive as well as destructive tendencies in society.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. xlvi

Family, Understanding, Reality, Appearance

“Industrialization relations are of the highest importance from every point of view including that of production.”

Gulzarilal Nanda (1898–1998) Prime Minister of India

In, p. 23.
Gulzarilal Nanda: A Life in the Service of the People

“Like the use of the word 'concupiscence' in an earlier age to describe sexual desire, the use of the word 'pollution' to describe essential aspects of the productive activities of an industrial society represents an attempt to defame an entirely proper human capacity by means of using an evil sounding name for it.”

George Reisman (1937) American economist

Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996)

Age, Evil

“I do have some early role models. I recall wanting to be a real-life version of the fictional "Sandor Arbitration Intelligence at the Zoo" (from Vernor Vinge's novel A Fire Upon the Deep) who in the story is known for consistently writing the clearest and most insightful posts on the Net. And then there was Hal Finney who probably came closest to an actual real-life version of Sandor at the Zoo, and Tim May who besides inspiring me with his vision of cryptoanarchy was also a role model for doing early retirement from the tech industry and working on his own interests/causes.”

Wei Dai Cryptocurrency pioneer and computer scientist

In response http://lesswrong.com/lw/jgz/aalwa_ask_any_lesswronger_anything/ap84 to the question "Do you have any role models?", March 2014

Life, Intelligence

“Poppycock religion is America's new faith. It is easy. It is quick. It allows a person to feel spiritual, seem intellectual, have a faith to follow, and have something interesting to talk about over coffee. Poppycock is the quick-fix diet of the spiritual industry. It sells. It rarely threatens or confronts the seeker, allowing each to forge his own individual "religion." The poppycock believer changes the rules as he goes. If he misses a basket, he will say that a missd basket is still worth two points. The poppycock believer does not serve his god, rather his god serves him. He has everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

Donald Miller (1971) American writer

Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance (2000, Harvest House Publishers)

God, Faith, Religion, Feeling

“The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.”

Czeslaw Milosz book The Captive Mind

The Captive Mind (1953)

Life, Way, Country

“The old form of trade union, which was born in the nineteenth century and aimed primarily at negotiating wages for a specific trase is no longer sufficient. First of all, as we have been argueing, the old trade unions are not able to represent the unemployed, the poor, or even the mobile and flexible post-Fordist workers with short term contracts, all of whom participate actively in social production and increase social wealth. Second, the old unions are divided according to the various products and tasks defined in the heyday of industrial production - a miners' union, a pipefitters' union, a machinists' union and so forth. Today, insofar as the conditions and the relations of labor are becoming common, these traditional divisions (or even newly defined divisions) no longer make sense and serve only as an obstacle. Finally the old unions have become purely economic, not political, organization.”

Antonio Negri book Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

136
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Sense, Wealth

“In the middle of the last century there was comparatively little movement of workmen from place to place; but Adam Smith's fierce attack on the law of settlement shows that migration was on the increase. The world was, in fact, on the eve of an industrial revolution; and it is interesting to remember that the two men who did most to bring it about, Adam Smith and James Watt, met, as I have mentioned, in Glasgow, when one was dreaming of the book, and the other of the invention, which were to introduce a new industrial age.”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 189

Men, Books, Age, World

“We use trains and planes, but they are not our trains or planes. The (Westerners) manufacture them and export them to us…. We own them, but we don't manufacture them. We don't even produce a single nail in any of these cars…. Islam teaches us to do things professionally. Doing things professionally is a religious duty…. The Prophet said that Allah ordered to excel in everyhting…. Even when killing, you must do well…. We import everything from needles to missiles. This is our nation. We still haven't manufactured an engine in our Arab countries. We assemble parts, but have no manufacturing industries.”

Yusuf Qaradawi (1926) Egyptian imam

Sheik Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi: The Islamic Nation's Problem is That Muslims Do Not Work. The Zionist Gang Has Turned the Desert into an Oasis http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/645.htm 4/15/2005. Knowledge and industry

Cars, Parting, Training, Country

“My whole life so far, my whole experience has been that our failure has been not to love enough. This conviction brought me to a rejection of the radical movement after my early membership in the Socialist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the Communist affiliates I worked with.”

Dorothy Day (1897–1980) Social activist

On Pilgrimage (1948), p. 126

Love, Life, World, Failure

“Japan must import all of its major minerals, from oil to aluminum. Without those imports-particularly oil-Japan stops being an industrial power in a matter of months.”

George Friedman (1949) American businessman and political scientist

Source: The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009), p. 67

“Firuz Shah Tughlaq organised an industry out of catching slaves. Shams-i-Siraj Afif writes in his Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi: “The Sultan commanded his great fief-holders and officers to capture slaves whenever they were at war (that is, suppressing Hindu rebellions), and to pick out and send the best for the service of the court. The chiefs and officers naturally exerted themselves in procuring more and more slaves and a great number of them were thus collected. When they were found to be in excess, the Sultan sent them to important cities… It has been estimated that in the city and in the various fiefs, there were 1,80,000 slaves… The Sultan created a separate department with a number of officers for administering the affairs of these slaves.”. Firuz Shah beat all previous records in his treatment of the Hindus… He records another instance in which Hindus who had built new temples were butchered before the gate of his palace, and their books, images, and vessels of Worship were publicly burnt. According to him “this was a warning to all men that no zimmi could follow such wicked practices in a Musulman country”. Afif reports yet another case in which a Brahmin of Delhi was accused of “publicly performing idol-worship in his house and perverting Mohammedan women leading them to become infidels”. The Brahmin “was tied hand and foot and cast into a burning pile of faggots.””

Firuz Shah Tughlaq (1309–1388) Tughluq sultan

The historian who witnessed this scene himself expresses his satisfaction by saying, “Behold the Sultan’s strict adherence to law and rectitude, how he would not deviate in the least from its decrees.”
Quoted from Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. ISBN 9788185990231

Women, Men, War, Books

“Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.
We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life — a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples.”

Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) American aviator, author, inventor, explorer, and social activist

Aviation, Geography, and Race (1939)

Life, Men, People, Peace

“The grandfather of concepts for predicting the probable course of industry evolution is the familiar product life cycle.”

Michael E. Porter (1947) American engineer and economist

Source: Competitive strategy, 1980, p. 157

“Not surprisingly, extensive effort in Britain and America goes into finding tax shelter. the system is "efficient" for the shelter industry, not for the economy.”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 5, Taxes, p. 188

Effort

“There is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

Short Fiction, Catch that Zeppelin! (1975)

“Figure II, which is one of the most interesting and valuable charts made by the writer in his work for the larger industrials. While it is reduced here to the simplest possible expression, it at the same time contains all of the elements which govern the laying out of an organization of any magnitude. This is the Chart of Prime and Working Authorities, showing exactly where each authority is related to the others and how far each authority may extend in the business.
The writer has retained in this chart the administrative, commercial and manufacturing sections in the Authorities for Position as exhibited in Figure I, and Industrial has separated these different sections into purpose of showing how the authorities governing different departments are related to the industrial body as a whole.”

Clinton Edgar Woods (1863) American engineer

Source: Organizing a factory (1905), p. 25-26

Business, Time

“The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.”

John L. Lewis (1880–1969) American labor leader

Labor and the Nation speech (September 3, 1937)

Waiting, Despair

“Now, just think about this for a moment: For generations, in many parts of this country, it was illegal for black people to get an education. Slaves caught reading or writing could be beaten to within an inch of their lives. Anyone — black or white — who dared to teach them could be fined or thrown into jail. And yet, just two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, this school was founded not just to educate African Americans, but to teach them how to educate others. It was in many ways an act of defiance, an eloquent rebuttal to the idea that black people couldn’t or shouldn’t be educated. And since then, generations of students from all backgrounds have come to this school to be challenged, inspired and empowered. And they have gone on to become leaders here in Maryland and across this country, running businesses, educating young people, leading the high-tech industries that will power our economy for decades to come.”

Michelle Obama (1964) lawyer, writer, wife of Barack Obama and former First Lady of the United States

Remarks at Bowie State University ceremony (17 May 2013) http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/05/17/remarks-first-lady-bowie-state-university-commencement-ceremony 2010s

People, Education, School, Way

“The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return.”

Henry George book Progress and Poverty

Book VIII, Ch. 3
Progress and Poverty (1879)

Intelligence, Communication, Nature

“The partial absorption of art by domestic industry and by domestic female crafts, that is to say, the fusion of artistic activity with other activities, is a retrogression from the standpoint of the division of labour and professional differentiation.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

The Social History of Art, Volume I. From Prehistoric Times to the Middle Ages, 1999, Chapter I. Prehistoric Times

Art

“While conditions in the United States because of the World War are serious, they are so much better than in the years following the close of the Civil War, that we who have had the double experience can be greatly encouraged. Then one-half of our country was devastated, its industries destroyed or paralyzed; now we are united and stronger in every way. Then we had a paper currency and a dangerous inflation, now we are on a gold standard and with an excellent banking and credit system. The development of our resources and wonderful inventions and discoveries since the Civil War place us in the foremost position to enter upon world commerce when all other nations have come as they must to co-operation and co-ordination upon lines for the preservation of peace and the promotion of international prosperity.”

Chauncey Depew (1834–1928) American politician

My Memories of Eighty Years (1922), p. 352

War, World, Peace, Way

“Once some engineers from the veneer trust laboratory came to me for consultation with a quite skilful presentation of their problems. Diﬀerent productivity is obtained for veneer-cutting machines for diﬀerent types of materials; linked to this the output of production of this group of machines depended, it would seem, on the chance factor of which group of raw materials to which machine was assigned. How could this fact be used rationally?
This question interested me, but nevertheless appeared to be quite particular and elementary, so I did not begin to study it by giving up everything else. I put this question for discussion at a meeting of the mathematics department, where there were such great specialists as Gyunter, Smirnov himself, Kuz’min, and Tartakovskii. Everyone listened but no one proposed a solution; they had already turned to someone earlier in individual order, apparently to Kuz’min. However, this question nevertheless kept me in suspense. This was the year of my marriage, so I was also distracted by this. In the summer or after the vacation concrete, to some extent similar, economic, engineering, and managerial situations started to come into my head, that also required the solving of a maximization problem in the presence of a series of linear constraints.
In the simplest case of one or two variables such problems are easily solved—by going through all the possible extreme points and choosing the best. But, let us say in the veneer trust problem for ﬁve machines and eight types of materials such a search would already have required solving about a billion systems of linear equations and it was evident that this was not a realistic method. I constructed particular devices and was probably the ﬁrst to report on this problem in 1938 at the October scientiﬁc session of the Herzen Institute, where in the main a number of problems were posed with some ideas for their solution.
The universality of this class of problems, in conjunction with their difficulty, made me study them seriously and bring in my mathematical knowledge, in particular, some ideas from functional analysis.
What became clear was both the solubility of these problems and the fact that they were widespread, so representatives of industry were invited to a discussion of my report at the university.”

Leonid Kantorovich (1912–1986) Russian mathematician

L.V. Kantorovich (1996) Descriptive Theory of Sets and Functions. p. 39; As cited in: K. Aardal, ‎George L. Nemhauser, ‎R. Weismantel (2005) Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, p. 15-26

Marriage, Search, Mathematics, Idea

“The transformation of the advanced countries to their present stage has been brought about by the acceptance of a scientiﬁc and rational view of life and nature. The scientiﬁc view has already permeated in a large measure the administrative organizations of the advanced countries. The scientiﬁc revolution, the social revolution and the industrial revolution are three aspects of the modernization of every society; these three aspects may be distinguished but cannot be separated. The rate of economic growth in every country is determined both directly and indirectly by the rate of progress of science and technology; directly through the utilization of the results of research and development, and indirectly through institutional changes brought about by the increasing inﬂuence of the scientiﬁc out-look and tradition.”

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) Indian scientist

Quote, Professor P.C. Mahalanobis and the Development of Population Statistics in lndia

Life, Nature, Science, Change

“We have had enough perpetually hearing MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE MACHINE. In the repetition of the word MACHINE, we read the modern artist's ambivalent relationship to mechanical reproduction: on the one hand, the rigorous linear order and uniform application of ink presented by the thrice-repeated type written line celebrates sterility; and on the other hand the content of the sentence itself bemoans the transformation of the industrial paradigm into an aesthetic cliché.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

statement of Lissitzky, 1924; as quoted by Paul Galvez, in 'Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Monkey-Hand October', Vol. 93, (Summer, 2000), published by The MIT Press, pp. 109-137
1915 - 1925

Reading

“South San Francisco The Industrial City is ugly as sin but somebody lives there: Allison, in fact.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Adverbs (2006), Wrongly

“In our cultural glorification of dairy, we often forget that many of these products are directly contributing to our current public health epidemic. Even more troubling, due to the dairy industry’s deep pockets and political connections, federal authorities are giving these foods a stamp of approval, rather than raising a nutritional red flag.”

Andy Bellatti (1982) Argentine journalist

Quoted in Michele Simon, "Whitewashed: How Industry and Government Promote Dairy Junk Foods" https://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-simon/dairy-junk-foods_b_5485922.html, HuffPost (18 June 2014).

Health, Food, Forgetting

“The intermedia network has made all of us artists by proxy. A decade of television-watching is equal to a comprehensive course in dramatic acting, writing, and filming… the mystique is gone - we could almost do it ourselves. Unfortunately too many of us do just that: hence the glut of sub-mediocre talent in the entertainment industry.”

Gene Youngblood book Expanded Cinema

Source: Expanded Cinema, 1970, p. 58

“While numerous studies have dealt with the nature of organization-environment relations, the first major attempt to identify the types of organizational structure and managerial practice that are appropriate for different environmental conditions was conducted by Burns and Stalker, who studied twenty manufacturing firms in England and Scotland. Of these, fifteen were in the electronics industry, four were in research and development, and one was a major manufacturer. The particular environmental conditions examined were the rates of change in the scientific technology and the relevant product markets of the firms being studied.”

Arthur G. Bedeian (1946) American business theorist

1984; 190
Organizations: Theory and Analysis, 1984

Nature, Study, Change

“The recently passed law to "end welfare as we know it" came about because a lethargic public has been aroused at last, not by the failure of the welfare system but by its success. The public indignation, however, would have been of no effect had we not elected a Republican Congress. No Democratic Congress would ever have passed such a law. Just as welfare reform may help end the poverty industry, the California Civil Rights Initiative on the November ballot may lead to the demise of another 1960s product, the racism and sexism industry. The 1964 Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based upon race, sex, color, religion or ethnic origin. The act was based on the premise that the only race to which a person must belong is the human race. With respect to God-given natural rights, "all men are created equal."”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

1990s, The Party of Lincoln vs. The Party of Bureaucrats (1996)

Men, God, Religion, Law

“Management of an industrial company must be giving targets to the engineers constantly; that may be the most important job management has in dealing with its engineers.”

Akio Morita (1921–1999) Japanese businessman

Source: Made in Japan (1986), p. 168.

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

Joseph Conrad book The Mirror of the Sea

Hope Point to Tilbury / Gravesend
The Mirror of the Sea (1906), On the River Thames, Ch. 16

Men, Beauty, Hope, Nature

“We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no reason other than because it's the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors toward animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we have been fed absurdities. It is absurd that we eat pigs and love dogs and don't even know why. Many of us spend long minutes in the aisle of the drugstore mulling over what toothpaste to buy. Yet most of us don't spend any time at all thinking about what species of animal we eat and why. Our choices as consumers drive an industry that kills ten billion animals per year in the United States alone. If we choose to support this industry and the best reason we can come up with is because it's the way things are, clearly something is amiss. What could cause an entire society of people to check their thinking caps at the door—and to not even realize they're doing so? Though this question is quite complex, the answer is quite simple:.”

Melanie Joy book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows

Source: Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2010), pp. 27-28

Love, People, Dogs, Way

“What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 39-40

Secret, Imagination, Question, Success

“Civilization no longer represents the conscience of the individuals who must find therein their work. The facts and forces which now organize industry and so-called justice, violate the best instincts of mankind.”

George D. Herron (1862–1925) American clergyman, writer and activist

Source: Between Caesar and Jesus (1899), p. 19

Justice

“In 1974 the Federal Trade Commission finally began to catch up with the dairy industry. Specifically, the FTC issued a "proposed complaint" against the California Milk Producers Advisory Board and Cunningham and Walsh, its advertising agency. In the complaint they charged that the dairymen's campaign to stimulate milk sales constituted false, misleading, and deceptive advertising. The dairy industry was shocked. After all, what had they done other than to proclaim that "Everybody Needs Milk?" The public has heard that line for years. This time the FTC wasn't buying the slogan. They couldn't. Too much scientific evidence had been accumulated which indicated that people didn't need milk and, in fact, that it could be harmful to your health.”

Frank Oski (1932–1996) American pediatrician

Source: Don't Drink Your Milk! (1983), pp. 65-66

People, Health, Time, Falseness

“It is held that one fulfils his whole duty when he is industrious in his business or vocation, observing also the decencies of domestic, civil, and religious life. But activity of this kind stirs only the surface of our being, leaving what is most divine to starve; and when it is made the one important thing, men lose sense for what is high and holy, and become commonplace, mechanical, and hard. Science is valuable for them as a means to comfort and wealth; morality, as an aid to success; religion, as an agent of social order. In their eyes those who devote themselves to ideal aims and ends are as foolish as the alchemists, since the only real world is that of business and politics, or of business simply, since politics is business.”

John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) Catholic bishop

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 14

Life, Men, World, Religion

“It is the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism, but one should not suggest that the whole of British industry consists of practices of this kind.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in the House of Commons (15 May 1973) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1973/may/15/cbi-and-tuc-talks Prime Minister

“The sun is still the number 1 factor in our energy balance. No matter how much people argue about CO2, they can't successfully explain the pre industrial revolution 900-1300AD Medieval Warming Period or the cold 1645-1715 AD Maunder Sunspot Minimum that coincided with European crop failure, famine and disease while linking it with our modern day issues with CO2 to climate change. Yet sunspots and solar cycles can and do explain both.”

Anthony Watts (1958) American television meteorologist

Anthropogenic Warming? http://web.archive.org/web/20070304183056/http://www.norcalblogs.com/post_scripts/archives/2006/10/anthropogenic_w_1.html#comments, norcalblogs.com, 22 October, 2006. 2006

People, Disease, Failure, Change

“This is a comparative study of six organizations operating in the same industrial environment. The subsystems (sales, research, and production) in each organization were differentiated from each other in terms of subsystem formal structures, the member's goal orientation, member's time orientations and member's interpersonal orientations. This differentiation was related to the requirements of the particular subenvironment with which each subsystem dealt. A relationship was found between the extent to which the states of differentiation and integration in each organization met the requirements of the environment and the relative economic performance of the organizations.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: "Differentiation and integration in complex organizations," 1967, p. 1

Study, Time

“Without an industrial economy, the modern army, as in America, could not exist; it is an army of machines. Professional economists usually consider military institutions as parasitic upon the means of production. Now, however, such institutions have come to shape much of the economic life of the United States.”

C. Wright Mills book The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

Life

“During those five years (of retirement), I traveled a lot and in some of the cities I visited, there was a kind of immediate recognition, whether it was Egypt or the Middle-East, or Russia or Africa. This kind of surprised me. It wasn't so much a reflection on me. It was a reflection on the Hindi film industry. People didn't know me by name, they knew me by my film name. They sang my songs when they saw me on the street, and came up to me and called me Vijay, for instance. I felt that if there is so much recognition of this medium and this industry in totally non-traditional regions of the world, why is it that something is not being done to market this or to promote it at a much larger scale? This is when I thought of the idea of forming a corporation much like international corporations worldwide to get a kind of professionalism and a kind of corporate attitude to the entertainment industry in this country and to be able to exploit it in all parts of the world. That was the attraction. That really brought me back again. Also, during my 30-year career, one of the accusations that used to come my way was that you've never invested back into the film industry. You've invested in pharmaceuticals, in this and that. But you've never invested your money back into the industry. But here, I felt, was one activity that was very genuine. I really was putting money back to raise the standard of working in the industry”

Amitabh Bachchan (1942) Indian actor

On his motivation behind starting ABCL
Quotable quotes by Amitabh Bachchan.

Money, People, World, Way

“There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 14 : Peculiar Conduct of a Personage

Truth, Wealth

“There remains the ordinary Communist solution. This has taken various forms; the simplest being a voluntary association of individuals based on the principle of common property, and in which every person works for the community according to fixed rules. There are many successful instances of this, on a small scale, in the United States, but we cannot suppose such a solution to be possible for society as a whole. It has only been tried with picked materials, whereas our object is rather to improve the great mass of the population. The Communism of recent European theorists, of whom the best known is Lassalle, presents a somewhat different aspect. It aims at the appropriation of all instruments of production by the State, which is to take charge of the whole national industry and direct it. But the practical difficulty of such a scheme is obviously overwhelming. The objections to a Communistic solution do not apply to Socialism in a more modified shape. Historically speaking, Socialism has already shown itself in England in the extension of State interference. It has produced the Factory Laws, and it is now beginning to advance further and interfere directly in the division of produce between the workmen and their employers”

Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883) British economic historian

Source: Lectures on The Industrial Revolution in England (1884), p. 150

Law, Communication, Success, Personality

“The consolidation of financial and industrial power in the hands of a small section of the people leads inevitably to more and more intense congestion of money.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Property (1935)

Money, People

“Modern warfare is ghastly beyond exaggeration and civil war among industrial populations is the most diabolical form of conflict.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Individualism and Socialism (1933)

War

“In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) 32nd President of the United States

Franklin Roosevelt's Statement on the National Industrial Recovery Act (16 June 1933) http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html 1930s Source: [Tritch, Teresa, F.D.R. Makes the Case for the Minimum Wage, http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/07/f-d-r-makes-the-case-for-the-minimum-wage/, March 7, 2014, New York Times, March 7, 2014]

Men, Business, Dependency, Country

“Men are not really born either hopelessly idle, or preternaturally industrious. They may move in one direction or the other as will or circumstances dictate, but it is open to any man to work.”

Max Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879–1964) Anglo-Canadian business tycoon, politician, and writer

Success, 1921.

Men

“I am sure that entering the exchange rate mechanism was absolutely right and is still right. I regret that we did not do so five years earlier, but that is history. Economic monetary union must come as soon as possible, and with it the single currency. Industry wants the single currency, and we must pay attention to the requests and demands of industry.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech in the House of Commons (26 June 1991) http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1991/jun/26/European-Community Post-Prime Ministerial

History

“If you obtain provision for yourself of spiritual abundance, don’t throw the surplus at people’s heads; feed it back into your own industry as capital for the production of more abundance.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 37

People

“Of course, Charlie and I can identify only a few Inevitables, even after a lifetime of looking for them. Leadership alone provides no certainties: Witness the shocks some years back at General Motors, IBM and Sears, all of which had enjoyed long periods of seeming invincibility. Though some industries or lines of business exhibit characteristics that endow leaders with virtually insurmountable advantages, and that tend to establish Survival of the Fattest as almost a natural law, most do not. Thus, for every Inevitable, there are dozens of Impostors, companies now riding high but vulnerable to competitive attacks.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1996 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1996.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Law, Business, Nature

“He had once, for example, put down a spokesman for the pesticide industry with a remark that people still quoted at parties: “And I presume on the eighth day God called you and said, ‘I changed my mind about insects!’ “”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

September “MINE ENEMIES ARE DELIVERED INTO MY HAND”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

God, People, Quotes, Change

“I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

Interview with Dave Weich http://www.powells.com/authors/bourdain.html

Pain, Animals

“The time has come to speak out. Britain is now locked in a vicious spiralling interest rates…The net result of completing the vicious circle is that prices have increased, the rate of inflation has gone up, the money supply has increased, unemployment has gone up, the rate of bankruptcies has increased, the industrial base has been further eroded, the Government's borrowing requirement has increased and as a result there is more pressure to raise interest rates yet again, to be followed inevitably by the same vicious circle. It is this that must be broken.”

Edward Heath (1916–2005) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1970–1974)

Speech to the Federation of Conservative Students in Manchester (6 October 1981), quoted in The Times (7 October 1981), p. 6.
Post-Prime Ministerial

Money, Time

“I said it is good for centrifuges to operate, but it is also important that the country operates as well and the wheels of industry are turning.”

Hassan Rouhani (1948) 7th President of Islamic Republic of Iran

Presidential campaign, 2013

Country

“The effective organization of industrial resources… alters in important respects in conformity with changes in extrinsic factors.”

Tom Burns (1913–2001) British sociologist

Source: The Management of Innovation, 1961, p. 96, as cited in: Richard Whittington (2014), Corporate Strategies in Recession and Recovery, p. 40

Change

“There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm sixty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution, and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together, and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

as quoted in American Journal of Physics, 44(2), p176, 1976-02
unsorted
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Men, Science, Change

“I'd like to dedicate this award to all the women before me that never had the chances that I've had, the survivors, the pioneers and the outcasts. My blood, my tradition. And I'd like to thank all the people in this industry who've respected my choices and have not been afraid of the power and dignity that that entitled me to.”

Jodie Foster (1962) American actor, film director and producer

Oscar Acceptance Speech, 1992 Academy Awards, Best Actress in a Leading Role, The Silence of the Lambs.

Women, People, Chance

“There can be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something quite other than this internal organization. Rusche and Kirchheimer are right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body, has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type. Moreover, this ‘contempt’ for the body is certainly related to a general attitude to death; and, in such an attitude, one can detect not only the values proper to Christianity, but a demographical, in a sense biological, situation: the ravages of disease and hunger, the periodic massacres of the epidemics, the formidable child mortality rate, the precariousness of the bio-economic balances – all this made death familiar and gave rise to rituals intended to integrate it, to make it acceptable and to give a meaning to its permanent aggression. But in analysing why the public executions survived for so long, one must also refer to the historical conjuncture; it must not be forgotten that the ordinance of 1670 that regulated criminal justice almost up to the Revolution had even increased in certain respects the rigour of the old edicts; Pussort, who, among the commissioners entrusted with the task of drawing up the documents, represented the intentions of the king, was responsible for this, despite the views of such magistrates as Lamoignon; the number of uprisings at the very height of the classical age, the rumbling close at hand of civil war, the king’s desire to assert his power at the expense of the parlements go a long way to explain the survival of so severe a penal system.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 51

Death, Hunger, War, Age

“Loss of market begets unemployment. Emphasis has been on short-term profit, to the undernourishment of plans that might generate new product and service that would keep the company alive and provide jobs and more jobs. It is no longer socially acceptable performance to lose market and to dump hourly workers on to the heap of unemployed.
The basic sickness of American industry and resulting unemployment is failure of top management to manage. Loss of market, and unemployment, are not foreordained. They are not inevitable. They are not acceptable. The day is past when people in management need not know anything about management by which I mean to include problems of production, supervision, training.”

W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993) American professor, author, and consultant

Source: Quality, Productivity and Competitive Position, (1982), p. i; Preface

People, Failure, Problem, Loss

“There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and pernicious influence of wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and a means by which small capitalists become united in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry and dry all streams.”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

Speech in the Senate (12 March 1838)

Hostility, Personality, Cry, Madness

“Cybernetics is a young discipline which, like applied mathematics, cuts across the entrenched departments of natural science; the sky, the earth, the animals and the plants. Its interdisciplinary character emerges when it considers economy not as an economist, biology not as a biologist, engines not as an engineer. In each case its theme remains the same, namely, how systems regulate themselves, reproduce themselves, evolve and learn. Its high spot is the question of how they organize themselves.
A cybernetic laboratory has a varied worksheet - concept formation in organized groups, teaching machines, brain models, and chemical computers for use in a cybernetic factory. As pure scientists we are concerned with brain-like artifacts, with evolution, growth and development; with the process of thinking and getting to know about the world. Wearing the hat of applied science, we aim to create what Boulanger,' in his presidential address to the International Association of Cybernetics, called the instruments of a new industrial revolution - control mechanisms that lay their own plans.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 11. Partly cited in: A.M.E. Salazar, A. Espinosa, J. Walker (2011) A Complexity Approach to Sustainability: Theory and Application. p. 11.

World, Mathematics, Question, Nature

“I was too curvy and too busty and a little too short. And I was a little bit self-conscious about it. But I was by no means heavy, I just — well, you have hips and boobs, and that's it. Haute couture, you don't really see girls with big boobs. And I always wanted first to be a model. So I had to say, "OK, you're going to find other things to do in this industry, or it's maybe not my industry."”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Discussing being rejected at the beginning of her modeling career, as quoted in Allure Magazine, May 2012

Girl

“Having been connected with industry during my entire life, it seems eminently proper that I should turn back, in part, the proceeds of that activity with the hope of promoting a broader as well as a better understanding of the economic principles and national policies which have characterized American enterprise down through the years.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Alfred P. Sloan (1936); Cited in: " OBITUARY : Alfred P. Sloan Jr. Dead at 90; G.M. Leader and Philanthropist http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0523.html," the New York Times, February 18, 1966. This article comments: Toward the end of the year [1936] Mr. Sloan made a substantial foray into philanthropy by endowing the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation with $10-million.

Life, Hope, Understanding, Parting

“Wealthy investors should realize that they are the cash cows of the investment industry, and that most of the exclusive investment vehicles available to them - separate accounts, hedge funds, limited partnerships, and the like - are designed to bleed them with commissions, transactional costs, and other fees.”

William J. Bernstein (1948) economist

Source: The Four Pillars of Investing (2002), Chapter 8, Behavioral Therapy, p. 187.

Partnership

“The most effectual encouragement to population is, the activity of industry, and the consequent multiplication of the national products.”

Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) French economist and businessman

Source: A Treatise On Political Economy (Fourth Edition) (1832), Book II, On Distribution, Chapter XI, Section I, p. 375 (See also: Thomas Malthus)

“The core of the belief in progress is that human values and goals converge in parallel with our increasing knowledge. The twentieth century shows the contrary. Human beings use the power of scientific knowledge to assert and defend the values and goals they already have. New technologies can be used to alleviate suffering and enhance freedom. They can, and will, also be used to wage war and strengthen tyranny. Science made possible the technologies that powered the industrial revolution. In the twentieth century, these technologies were used to implement state terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale. Ethics and politics do not advance in line with the growth of knowledge — not even in the long run.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

"Joseph Conrad, Our Contemporary," from Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004)

War, Knowledge, Freedom, Suffering

“The period of 15 years from the last time we were in Scarborough, in 1960, to the middle of the 1970s, will embrace a period of technical change, particularly in industrial methods, greater than the whole of the industrial revolution of the last 250 years.”

Harold Wilson (1916–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Leader of the Opposition

Change, Time

“The partisan situation in the Italian theater, particularly central Italy, has deteriorated to such an extent that it constitutes a serious danger to troops, supply lines, war industry and economic potential. The fight against the partisans must be carried out with all means at our disposal and with utmost severity. I will protect any commander who exceeds our usual restraint in the choice of methods in executing one's orders is better than failure or neglect to act.”

Albert Kesselring (1885–1960) German Luftwaffe Generalfeldmarschall during World War II

June 17, 1944. Quoted in "Mussolini: The Last 600 Days of Il Duce" - Page 131 - by Ray Moseley - History - 2004.

War, Failure, Fight

“When women and men have approximately equal life expectancies, it seems to be because women die not only in childbirth (fewer than thought) but about equal from… diseases; poor sanitation and water; inadequate healthcare; and diseases of malnutrition. In industrialized societies, early deaths are caused more by diseases triggered by stress, which breaks down the immune system. It is since stress has become the key factor that men have died so much sooner than women.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part II: The Glass Cellars of the disposable sex, p. 182.

Life, Death, Women, Men

“The division of opinion turns on the definition of property and the scope of contract. Physical things of themselves are powerless. Even liberty to choose between opportunities is passive and ineffective. But power to withhold opportunities is economic power, and associated power is government. When therefore liberty of contract is merged with property, it adds the liberty of persons to the exclusive holding of things. And this liberty operates in the several directions of liberty to combine their property into an industrial government and to act as a unit, not only in proportioning their resources economically but also in choosing opportunities, in commanding obedience, in persuading or coercing, and in planning for the expectations of an indefinite future.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

Source: Legal foundations of capitalism. 1924, p. 320

Future, Personality

“Do you know anyone who's never watched TV, never seen a movie, never read a book? Of course not. So let me ask you one more question. Do you know someone, maybe even in your own family, who's never played a video game? I bet you do. How can this be? If we want to consider ourselves a true mass medium, if we want to grow as an industry, this has to change.”

Reggie Fils-Aimé (1961) American businessman

On market expansion Source: E3 2006 Press Conference, YouTube http://youtube.com/watch?v=O2kt3h8b6yE

Books, Family, Game, Question

“The nuclear power industry, for example, lacks a strong union, has random public victims with delayed effects, has no safety board that is independent of licensing and regulatory functions, and does not see an immediate effect on its profits if safety flags (though a far more severe incentive exists to avoid a catastrophic accident which could shut down the industry)”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 127

Strong

“The rise of industrial capitalism thus rested on the maintenance of slavery in another part of the world, even though that slavery was no longer dependent on the continuation of the slave trade.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 11, The Movement of Commodities, p. 316.

World, Parting, Dependency

“How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Source: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Ch. 9

Life, Women, Beauty, Support

“By August, 1913, all links in the chain of moving assembly lines were complete except the last and most spectacular one - the one we had first experimented with one Sunday morning just five years before. Again a towrope was hitched to a chassis, this time pulled by a capstan. Each part was attached to the moving chassis in order, from axles at the beginning to bodies at the end of the line. Some parts took longer to attach than others; so, to keep an even pull on the towrope, there must be differently spaced intervals between delivery of the parts along the line. This called for patient timing and rearrangement until the flow of parts and the speed and intervals along the assembly line meshed into a perfectly synchronized operation throughout all stages of production. Before the end of the year a power-driven assembly line was in operation, and New Year's saw three more installed. Ford mass production and a new era in industrial history had begun.”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 130-131 ; As cited in: EyeWitness to History (2005)

History, Time, Parting, Speed

“In its new aspect the corporation is a means whereby the wealth of innumerable individuals has been concentrated into huge aggregates and whereby control over this wealth has been surrendered to a unified direction. The power attendant upon such concentration has brought forth princes of industry, whose position in the community is yet to be defined. The surrender of control over their wealth by investors has effectively broken the old property relationships and has raise the problem of defining these relationship anew. The direction of industry by persons other than those who have ventured their wealth has raised the question of the motive force back of such direction and the effective distribution of the returns from business enterprise.”

Adolf A. Berle (1895–1971) American diplomat

Source: The Modern Corporation and Private Property. 1932/1967, p. 2 (1967, p. 4)

Communication, Motivation, Question, Business

“Some see danger in bigness. They fear the concentration of economic power that it brings with it. That is in a degree true. It simply means, however, that industrial management must expand its horizons of responsibility. It must recognize that it can no longer confine its activities to the mere production of goods and services. It must consider the impact of its operation on the economy as a whole in relation to the social and economic welfare of the entire community. For years I have preached this philosophy. Those charged with great industrial responsibility must become industrial statesmen.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: "The Broadened Responsibilities of Industry's Executive," 1936, p. 358; Also in Sloan & Sparkes (1941, 145); Partly cited in: Roland Marchand (1997, p. 83)

Fear, Communication

“You must have no dependence on your own genius. If you have great talents, industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 2; vol. 1, pp. 43-44.
Discourses on Art

Dependency

“Prior work has shown an association between diversification strategy and profitability. This paper replicates that association using more recent and complete data and goes on to investigate the sources of the association. Theoretical arguments are advanced which predict the association which will remain once the effects of varying industry profitability are removed. Empirical tests verify this prediction and permit the discrimination between the effects of industry and diversification strategy on profitability.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: "Diversity and Profitability", 1982, p. 359; Abstract

“WEINER: Look, the point is very simple, there are inequities in the present way we distribute insurance. There are winners and there are losers. The winners are the insurance industry. […] There is not bipartisanship on this particular issue. The people who sit on this side, at the risk of offending anyone, generally support the idea of standing up for the American people in their battle against big insurance. And the people generally speaking who sit on this side of the chamber and specifically speaking as well in a lot of cases, simply won’t permit that to happen and haven’t for a generation. Well, that is going to end now. […] Enough of the phonyness. We are gonna solve this problem because for years our Republican friends have been unable to and unwilling to. Deal with it!”

Anthony Weiner (1964) American politician

applause Exchange http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOQ2GEGm3v0 on the floor of the House of Representatives on health care reform (February 24, 2010)

People, Way, Idea, Support

“Both in England and on the Continent a graduated property tax (l'impôt progressif) has been advocated, on the avowed ground that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth. I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent.To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbours. It is not the fortunes which are earned, but those which are unearned, that it is for the public good to place under limitation.”

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) British philosopher and political economist

Principles of Political Economy http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlP64.html (1848), Book V, Chapter II

People, Penalty, Wealth

“On one level, then, Cadbury can be seen as a classic example of Victorian industrial paternalism, albeit carried to greater lengths than in most other companies of the day. On another level, however, the Cadbury system resulted in a very strong, highly flexible organisation which, thanks to the strong levels of employee commitment and participation, could draw on a large bank of experience and intelligence to solve problems and undertake what amounted to continuous improvement. The employee participation system in particular meant that Cadbury was constantly upgrading its processes and products. Herbert Casson regarded Cadbury in the 1920s as one of the best-run companies in Britain, if not the world, and summed up the key to its success very succinctly: ‘At Cadbury, everybody thinks.”

Morgen Witzel (1960) Canadian historian, business theorist

Source: Fifty key figures in management, 2004, p. 39; Quote on the Cadbury company at the time Edward Cadbury was managing director.

World, Intelligence, Problem, Thinking

“This new generation of networked people understand they are living through a third industrial revolution, but they are coming to realize why it has stalled: with the credit system broken, capitalism cannot sustain the scale of automation that is possible, and the destruction of jobs implied by the new technologies.”

Paul Mason (journalist) book PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future

PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future (2015)

People, Understanding

“Part of the downfall came early and on theoretical grounds, with the realization that real-world information lags for aggregate variables like the price level and money supply were much too short to rationalize the persistent multiyear deviations from equilibrium that seemed to characterize business cycles in most industrialized countries. The second dubious assumption, continuous market clearing, was viewed more critically once it was recognized that it was not an inextricable concomitant of rational expectations, especially when Stanley Fischer (1977) and Edmund Phelps and John Taylor (1977) showed that rational expectations could be embedded in a model containing real-world institutional features like multiperiod wage and price contracts to generate nonmarket-clearing behavior. Once Fischer and Phelps-Taylor had shown that rational expectations by itself was a necessary but not a sufficient condition to validate new-classical policy conclusions, the race was on to develop the new-Keynesian theory based on rational expectations and one or another institutional impediment to continuous market clearing.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

"Fresh Water, Salt Water, and other Macroeconomic Elixirs", 1989

Money, World, Behavior, Business

“No doubt the Mexican Indian is well suited to his environment, and his traditional habits are well suited to him. This does not mean, however, that either has any important contribution to make to the United States which would be realized by a northward mass migration of agricultural and industrial serfs. On the contrary, the Mexican immigration to the United States, which is made up overwhelmingly of the poorer Indian element, has brought nothing but disadvantages.”

Madison Grant (1865–1937) American lawyer, eugenicist, and conservationist

The Conquest of a Continent (1933)

“ENGLAND has invited the civilized world to meet in its great commercial centre; asking it, in friendly rivalry, to display for the common advantage of all, those objects which each country derives from the gifts of nature, and on which it confers additional utility by processes of industrial art.
This invitation, universally accepted, will bring from every quarter a multitude of people greater than has yet assembled in any western city: these welcome visitors will enjoy more time and opportunity for observation than has ever been afforded on any previous occasion. The statesman and the philosopher, the manufacturer and the merchant, and all enlightened observers of human nature, may avail themselves of the opportunity afforded by their visit to this Diorama of the Peaceful Arts, for taking a more correct view of the industry, the science, the institutions, and the government of this country. One object of these pages is, to suggest to such inquirers the agency of those deeper seated and less obvious causes which can be detected only by lengthened observation, and to supply them with a key to explain many of the otherwise incomprehensible characteristics of England.”

Charles Babbage (1791–1871) mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable c…

Source: The Exposition of 1851: Views Of The Industry, The Science, and the Government Of England, 1851, p. v-vi: Preface

People, World, Peace, Art

“Every employee in an undertaking, then, takes a larger or smaller share in the work of administration, and has, therefore, to use and display his administrative faculties. This is why we often see men, who are specially gifted, gradually rise from the lowest to the highest level of the industrial hierarchy, although they have only had an elementary education. But young men, who begin practical work as engineers soon after leaving industrial schools, are in a particularly good position both for learning administration and for showing their ability in this direction, for in administration, as in all other branches of industrial activity, a man’s work is judged by its results.”

Henri Fayol (1841–1925) Developer of Fayolism

Source: Henri Fayol addressed his colleagues in the mineral industry, 1900, p. 908

Men, Education, School, Learning

“States should significantly reduce military spending and develop conversion strategies to reorient resources towards social services, the creation of employment in peaceful industries, and greater support to the post-2015 development agenda.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order exploring the adverse impacts of military expenditures on the realization of a democratic and equitable international order http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/IntOrder/Pages/Reports.aspx. 2015, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

Peace, Support

“The population of Majorca has always been noted for its absolute indifference to politics. In the days of the Carlistes and the Cristinos, George Sand tells us how they welcomed with equal unconcern the refugees of either side. According to the head of the Phalange, you could not have found a hundred Communists in the whole island. Where could the Party have got them from? It is a country of small market-gardening, of olives, oranges and almonds, without industry, without factories. I declare on oath that during the months preceding the civil war there was no attempt of any kind made against persons or belongings. 'There was killing in Spain,' you say. 'A hundred and thirty-five political assassinations between March and July 1936.”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

But in Majorca there were no crimes to avenge, so it could only have been a preventative action, the systematic extermination of suspects.
Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.86 [Carlistes and Cristinos - followers of Don Carlos - reactionary, and Maria Cristina - liberal - in the Spanish War of Succession in the 1830s].

War, Personality, Country, Indifference

“On the question of the tariff, it may come as news to Professor DiLorenzo that the protective tariffs were first instituted by Jefferson and Madison, not by the Hamiltonian party. Hamilton tried to get the tariffs, but he was not successful. And the reason why, the protective tariffs first entered our system in the wake of Jefferson’s embargo, which put the New England shipping interests out of business. And so the first protective tariffs were put in, I think, under Madison’s administration, and supported by John C. Calhoun, who agreed that at that time it was owed to the New England people to give their infant industries protection because they had been put out of business by the embargo, and later by the War of 1812, conducted under Madison’s administration.”

Harry V. Jaffa (1918–2015) American historian and collegiate professor

2000s, The Real Abraham Lincoln: A Debate (2002), Rebuttal

War, People, Question, Business

“Present party designations have become empty of all contents…Vastly extended State expenditure, vastly increased demands from the taxpayer who has to provide the money, social reform regardless of expense, cash exacted from the taxpayer already at his wits' end—when were the problems of plus and minus more desperate? How are we to measure the use and abuse of industrial organization? Powerful orators find "Liberty" the true keyword, but the I remember hearing from a learned student that of "liberty" he knew well over two hundred definitions. Can we be sure that the "haves" and the "have-nots" will agree in their selection of the right one? We can only trust to the growth of responsibility; we may look to circumstances and events to teach their lesson.”

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838–1923) British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor

Letter to Sir Francis Webster, president of the Montrose Burghs Liberal Association, quoted in 'Lord Morley On Modern Politics', The Times (11 May 1923), p. 12.

Money, Problem, Learning